Ep. 125 - Content Strategy Beyond Content Puke - Tom Telford
In this episode of Future Fuzz, host Justin Campbell talks with Tom Telford, Chief Digital Officer at Clarity Global, about bridging the often-neglected gap between reputation-building and performance marketing — what Tom calls “the missing middle.” They dig into how integrating communications, content, public affairs, and SEO leads to more unified brand storytelling, better audience engagement, and overall stronger outcomes for both brand & bottom line. The conversation also explores the evolving role of SEO (including generative engine optimization, or “GEO”), video content in B2B, and how to cut through “content puke” by focusing on high‑quality, purpose‑driven work.
Guest Bio
Tom Telford is the Chief Digital Officer at Clarity Global, a digital marketing communications agency that works across reputation, growth, performance, and public affairs. He leads efforts that bring together content, comms, performance, and reputation strategy to help brands grow and be seen, balancing the top, mid, and bottom of funnel. Tom has deep upstream experience (reputation, digital, communications) as well as downstream (performance, lead generation) and emphasizes integrated, audience‑centric work.
Takeaways
- The Missing Middle Is Critical: Many companies are strong on reputation (brand, storytelling) and performance (lead generation), but neglect the mid‑funnel, engagement, content, social, programmatic, that connects them.
- The “Red Thread” Must Be Consistent: Strategy, messaging, and objectives need to flow seamlessly across teams, reputation/comms, performance, content. Misalignment in the middle leads to mixed messages and lost opportunity.
- SEO Isn’t “Dead”, It’s Evolving: SEO remains essential. What’s changing is how we optimize. With the rise of generative models (GEO), brands need to think about prompts, authority, topical coverage, and alignment of your content and comms with search behavior and AI indexing.
- SEO as Framework vs Channel: Rather than treating SEO as a siloed channel, it should be integral to all content, comms, and strategy. SEO‑informed content (and measurement) can power brand awareness, thought leadership, domain authority, and performance.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): GEO is about optimizing for AI‑led search and content discovery: ensuring your content is visible, authoritative, and appropriately indexed in LLMs and AI overviews. It’s part of modern SEO strategy.
- Video in B2B Is Strong, but Must Be High Quality: Video generates more engagement, higher time on site, but it's also easier to rest on mediocre video. The risk is fatigue: many videos are low effort. Good video content still stands out, especially when it’s aligned with audience needs and creative execution.
- Content Volume vs Specificity vs Strategy: Brands want more content, more personalized content for different decision‑makers, but that creates operational burdens. Content strategy is essential to avoid “content puke”, overload of low value content vs focused, well‑executed material.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction: Tom Telford and Clarity Global’s mission
01:30 The “missing middle”, what it is, why it’s overlooked
03:30 Importance of internal alignment & shared objectives (“red thread”)
07:00 SEO’s role & whether “SEO is dead”
09:30 Introducing GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
16:50 SEO is more than a channel, it’s a framework integrated across content and comms
20:30 Video content in B2B: pros, cons, quality vs fatigue
23:40 Decision‑making in B2B: content before conversations
25:15 Avoiding “content puke”: focus on quality, strategy, not just volume
25:40 Wrap‑up & closing thoughts
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