Stories Have Endings: A Q&A With David Moulton

The article shared below is an excerpt from the 2024 Cyber Content Annual: Everything Old is New Again. The Cyber Content Annual not only houses a variety of articles about cybersecurity content marketing, content strategy, and content in general, which we will be sharing here over the next month, but also features our Cybersecurity Content Marketing Report: The Good, the Bad, and the Wildly Dangerous.

David Moulton, Director of Content and Thought Leadership at Palo Alto Networks, has witnessed and participated in the evolution of digital marketing from every angle, including design and content strategy.

In the face of the technological evolution facing our industry, Moulton advocates for a return to the foundational principles of effective communication: good storytelling, knowing the audience, and exercising editorial control. Rather than creating content designed to maximize SEO clicks, a great content marketing strategy answers customers’ questions and offers a premium experience. The point of digital marketing, Mouton says, is not to generate more information but to tell great stories. 

David J Ebner, President of Content Workshop, sat down with Moulton to discuss the state of content marketing strategy and where it’s headed. 

David J Ebner: So, SEO. It seems outdated, right? Is it still working? 

David Moulton: After years spent in different roles in the industry, I’ve gotten my head around content marketing. But I always approach it with a heavy dose of skepticism. Does what we do really matter all that much? Are we married to the past in a way that is detrimental to our future? For the last year or so, I have been beating on the drum, saying our [cybersecurity] customers are time-starved. And they’re paid to be doubtful and suspicious. It’s one of the best skills they have. In that world, you’ve got somebody who doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with you and has a tuned radar. And you’re coming at them with corporate-approved messaging. You’re coming at them with sanded-down stories that fit into a template. And they don’t love it. 

David J Ebner: So what can we do?

David Moulton: I believe going back to foundational principles is always useful. If I’m going to build a relationship with [a client], they have to trust me, right? That’s the basis of a relationship. If you told people you’re going to show up with new blogs or content or podcasts, do that. It’s basic to establishing trust. The second principle is to provide value. If you can trust me, but I am of no value to you, then that won’t go very far. I’m trying to move towards a point where people who come and spend time with my content are getting value out of it. The next principle is to answer your customer’s question. Bring them to an end, or at least the next step you want them to take. There’s no Shel Silversteining the internet — the sidewalk doesn’t end. There is always a next step someone could take. 

So I look at those as the four things that I actually care about. Is SEO an indicator of my reach? It’s a way for people to find me. Google SEO is not my customer. It’s the conduit to my customer.

David J Ebner: There’s an ongoing conversation in the industry about deemphasizing search engine writing and instead pursuing search engine optimization. Tell the story and then go back and ensure it hits the SEO marks.

David Moulton: Bingo. SEO farm pages can bring people in, but it doesn’t guarantee that any of those people actually continue on the journey. That’s a red flag for the designer in me. Customers can’t find what they want and you spent all of your time optimizing for a robot who brought you most of the eyes, but none of the customers you care about. Instead, we launch a report, then go back in and have our SEO team [make changes to build force multiplier effects]. You didn’t change the intent and didn’t change the content. You wrote for a human. And you optimized for a robot. That’s the order of operations.  

David J Ebner: How do you understand the relationship of AI search to your “first principles” content strategy?

David Moulton: My philosophy is to stop puttering around trying to make a search engine happy; stop puttering around trying to anticipate where a gen-AI interface is going to scrape your data and turn it into a summary answer that may or may not make any sense and that may not give you any credit. Instead, build something that [the client] can’t put together on their own.  Do the hard things and write them for the audience. And don’t over-index on the House of Google. It has been stable for 20 years, but I don’t think it’ll be stable for 20 years. I think it’s unraveling really quickly. 

David J Ebner: People were worried about the Google AI surge. What was your experience? 

David Moulton:  I ignored it. Instead of worrying about what I needed to do to chase the new name for Google Search and/or the demise of the cookie, we looked at was: 

“Where have we missed a trick in the way our experience works for our reader? Where have we let it languish and get old?” At a certain point, avoiding risk is the risk. We asked: 

• What does great UX look like? 
• How do we make the user experience premium? 

Think about who’s consuming your content: a time-starved analyst who deeply needs that research to do their job and protect their organization. We found that people popped in and left. They read the article, and that was the end of their experience. But what I wanted to do was offer, “Hey. While you’re here, I’ve got this other thing that’s really awesome. Would you like to see it? “ So it’s a matter of really caring about the content and providing tremendous value. People figure that out. 

David J Ebner: Lately, we have seen a trend toward atomizing content. What’s your view?

David Moulton: There’s variation in every audience. If you think that your 50-page report is for everyone out there, you’ve lost your mind. And tomorrow, your audience will have changed; a part that wasn’t for them turns into some part that is really great for them. So I like the idea of what we call the executive advisory. The idea was we have a point of view on a topic, and you can finish reading it or watching the video before your coffee is cold. The atomization is where you look at “What are the things that are interesting?” And I think going to an open HTML format with our reports allows us to know where people linger and go. Okay, that’s a target for us to analyze. 

David J Ebner: What are your insights for the immediate future of content marketing strategy?

David Moulton: At the risk of predicting the future and being massively wrong, I’ll tell you what I think. We’ve been working on scale and volume. And we now have robots that can give us scale and volume at C+ to B- level without much effort. If you’re the person who is the recipient of all of that, editorial control becomes a luxury. We either don’t publish something because it’s not that valuable or because it’s not the kind of thing that really moves the needle forward, or we pull things down. Now when we give [the consumer of content marketing] a journey, it is tuned up. It’s a Sunday paper back when the paper was a thing, and there was an end to the paper.

David J Ebner: Just as magazines are the perfect way to digest a diverse amount of stuff around one central topic in an afternoon.

David Moulton: Time is precious, and attention is expensive. And if you’re going to give me those two resources, which are finite and related, I damn well better use them well. Let’s say we have a campaign. We want to tell you a story, and we’d like to get you from the discover into try into the buy, right? That’s the funnel in marketing. I’d like you to be able to move through that funnel in ten pieces of content. I don’t think more is better. I think that [premium content] moves you through a conversation where you get the answer that you’re looking for. You think, “God, that was easy. I want to move forward with them.” It’s an implication of what it’s like to work with our consultants. It implies that our software is efficient and easy to operate, right? Editorial: I think that’s the future. If the robots are gonna build massive sums of content for us in any form that we want at the click of a finger, then our job is to figure out what of that is worthy of publishing.

David J Ebner: In content marketing, strategy, pace, and discretion are now our job over content.

David Moulton: And it may end up being that those of us who decide to zig when everyone else is going to zag are taking a risk worth taking because we’re going to be the ones that are providing true value. Listening to our customers, understanding what they need, and having an authentic voice when we show up with a small amount of really, really powerful things to say.