Emily Thompson, Marketing Manager at CoSchedule, joins the podcast to share practical strategies for building smarter, more consistent social media content.
She explains how marketers can use content pillars, batching, and realistic posting goals to stay organised and authentic, and explores the differences between B2B and B2C strategies—where creativity and trust are key to engagement and long-term success.
Emily also highlights how CoSchedule’s AI-driven workflows help teams streamline planning, automate repetitive tasks, and maintain a consistent publishing cadence across channels—all within a single, easy-to-manage platform.
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About CoSchedule
CoSchedule is the marketing industry’s leading provider of content calendar, content optimization, and marketing education products. Its dynamic family of agile marketing management products serve more than 50,000 marketers worldwide, helping them organize their work, deliver projects on time, and prove marketing team value.
Collectively, CoSchedule products empower nearly 100,000 marketers to complete more high-quality work in less time. As recognized with accolades from Inc. 5000, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, and G2Crowd, CoSchedule is one of the most valued companies its customers recommend. To learn more about CoSchedule, visit https://coschedule.com
About Emily Thompson
Emily Thompson recently joined CoSchedule as Marketing Manager, after two decades in B2B and B2C marketing content strategy. When people don’t know what that means, she describes herself as the one who helps businesses answer the questions, “What needs to be said and how do we say it?” For her, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing marketing messaging land with precision and impact. Except maybe 49er football.
Time Stamps
00:00:18 – Meet Emily Thompson from CoSchedule
00:02:31 – Overview of CoSchedule’s Product
00:06:26 – AI Integration at CoSchedule
00:08:07 – B2B vs. B2C Marketing Perspectives
00:12:04 – Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing
00:14:00 – Empowering Employees to Post on Social Media
00:16:48 – Measuring Success in Social Media
00:25:16 – Best Marketing Advice Received
00:28:03 – Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Quotes
“The number one thing I say about AI is it’s only as smart as the person who’s talking to it.” Emily Thompson, Marketing Manager at CoSchedule.
“CoSchedule just does it all in one. So it’s a great tool reduction software and really affordable option for marketers as budgets are shrinking and we need to work smarter and faster.” Emily Thompson, Marketing Manager at CoSchedule.
“At the end of the day, you’re creating trust and building relationships with your audience, whether you are B2B or B2C.” Emily Thompson, Marketing Manager at CoSchedule.
Follow Emily:
Emily Thompson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-thompson-68468084/
CoSchedule website: https://coschedule.com/
CoSchedule on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coschedule/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Emily Thompson at CoSchedule
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Emily Thompson
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. I’m Mike Maynard, and today I’m joined by Emily Thompson. Emily’s the marketing manager at CoSchedule. Welcome to the podcast, Emily.
Emily: Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here. Hello from Fargo, North Dakota, a Midwest U.S. city that probably isn’t on a lot of your listeners’ travel bucket list, but it’s a great place to live and build a career.
Mike: That sounds interesting. I’ve never been to North Dakota. My next trip to the US is actually to Boston, so perhaps a better known city. Let’s kick off and just find out a little bit about you rather than necessarily North Dakota, Emily. So I’m really interested in a little bit of your career history and what brought you to CoSchedule.
Emily: For sure. So I would describe myself as a content strategist, wherever my career roams, I will always identify as a content strategist, which is a role that really didn’t exist when I started in marketing 20 years ago. So really, I’m a writer. I love everything that has to do with helping brands know what needs to be said and how do you say it. So I’ve gotten to do that. at in-house marketing teams and at agencies, both on the B2C side and the B2B side. So I had most recently been working at an agency kind of specializing in digital marketing and email. And earlier this year, things were really starting to feel shaky with tariffs with some of our major clients. So I looked around in North Dakota for the first time And when I started talking to CoSchedule, I could see that they were ahead of me in how they were thinking about AI and how they were using AI, and in a way that almost made me feel They were so far ahead of me. And I realized it was a great career opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone and be pushed. I was so busy maintaining clients that I really did not have time to study AI like I wanted to. And so it felt like a great career advancement opportunity to join the marketing team at CoSchedule.
Mike: That sounds really cool and I mean I love the fact that you joined them because you felt that you could learn something they were ahead of you. Can you just start off maybe dig into you know exactly what CoSchedule does as the product?
Emily: For sure. So we are a software designed for marketers, predominantly a social media management tool. But what sets us apart is we also have a really large project management arm of our software. So I like to describe it to marketers as imagine your project management software merged with your social media management software, that’s co-scheduled. So Trello meets Hootsuite in one tool. When I first started, I had this jaw drop moment when I saw everything that CoSchedule did in one place because in my previous role as a social media manager, I had been managing social calendars in spreadsheets, outlining content in Microsoft Word, graphics on a Miro board, and approvals through email. before I got into my social media management software and CoSchedule just does it all in one. So it’s a great tool reduction software and really affordable option for marketers as budgets are shrinking and we need to work smarter and faster.
Mike: So, I mean, I’m sure everyone’s familiar with managing social media posts in something like Excel or a spreadsheet and, you know, tearing their hair out at that. It seems to be quite broadly applicable co-schedule. So who are your big customers?
Emily: We target marketers of all sizes. So everything from a solopreneur marketer or a friend of mine who works 20 hours a week for a nonprofit, uses CoSchedule to post a couple of social media posts a week on two channels, all the way up to major enterprises who use CoSchedule to keep their marketing departments aligned and large agencies managing multiple clients. keeping their workflow in check. It’s small enough and large enough to cater both sizes.
Mike: That sounds pretty cool that it’s applicable to so many people. I mean, I’m interested. There’s a lot of these kind of scheduling products that are available for marketers. I mean, you talked a little bit about some of the things that CoSchedule does well. Are you OK to just expand on that and tell me a little bit more about where CoSchedule absolutely excels?
Emily: Yeah, I would say it’s every social media management tool out there. And a lot of them do all of the same things will tell you that they help you create order from your social chaos, which co scheduled us as well. But really, what sets it apart is the fact that you don’t just plan your social media and co-schedule, you really can manage every campaign, your emails, because of integrations, your podcast, your website content. It really has a great calendar and workflow work task management arm that people love. They love the ability to have visual into everything they’re working on in marketing. in one place. Typically, social media is a separate tool from the tool you’re using for that. And then another feature that really sets us apart is, I would say, is our requeue function. We have the ability to instantaneously repost high-performing content where you have gaps in your calendar. That’s automatic. You don’t have to do a lot of manual work to set that up. And I really think that’s a great, cool tool for the B2B sector where posting consistently can be harder than in the B2C world.
Mike: I mean, that sounds great. I love the fact that it goes way beyond just scheduling your social media posts. You did talk earlier about AI. I mean, can you expand a little bit on why you were so impressed with the attitude to AI at CoSchedule?
Emily: Yeah, it’d be fun to hear your perspective on this in another location, but I tend to find that marketers are a little bit skeptic and slow, and companies are a little bit slow to feel comfortable with AI. Maybe using it in small ways, but not fully integrating it and not fully embracing it. And when I met with CoSchedule, I could see that it had been implemented into their product for years, well before their competitors were using it. they fully embrace it and have adopted it into their workflows and are planning for how it’s changing the industry and have already years ago shifted how they’re posting content because of AI and they just were so comfortable with AI when other companies I was talking to seemed like they were wanting me to prove that I wasn’t using it ever, which I wasn’t using it a ton when I was interviewing. But I think that’s just not a healthy perspective in today’s age to sort of stick your head in the sand and pretend that AI isn’t here and shouldn’t be a big part of your marketing process.
Mike: I think that’s really interesting. I think it’s probably true that marketers spend a lot more time talking about AI than they do using it. For sure. I mean, one of the interesting things we have as not just a B2B agency, but we’re super focused on technical niches, is that AI is actually somewhat limited in terms of content generation because clearly the training data is very limited. Quite often there is no training data because we’ve got a brand new product that doesn’t exist. Whereas I think in B2C, it might be easier to get real benefits from AI. I mean, is that something you see? Do you see a big difference between B2B and B2C?
Emily: The number one thing I say about AI is it’s only as smart as the person who’s talking to it. And so I think where I see the bigger gap is not between B2B and B2C, but between those who are prompting it properly and doing the work for the output versus lazy use of it. That’s where I see a bigger gap.
Mike: That’s interesting. I mean, it’s another case of B2B and B2C being more similar than people think. I mean, overall, when you look at B2B and B2C, particularly say in social media, I mean, do you think those two disciplines are getting closer or do you still see a big difference?
Emily: I think they are getting closer. I think they are more similar than most B2B brands are comfortable with. Here’s why I say that. Social media is at the 10,000-foot view. It’s about creating a relationship with your public. Of course, there are a whole host of goals underneath that. At the end of the day, you’re creating trust and building relationships with your audience, whether you are B2B or B2C. And you do that by showing real humans and entertaining and humor and inspiration. Because the thing about social, I always said this to my clients, is it’s so darn social. Obviously you go about that differently than you would in B2C and you write it differently per channel. But at the end of the day, I’ve seen the best results with incredibly human posting for B2B and the best brands use social to be known and trusted. And so many of my B2B clients really would look over at their competitors who were not doing this. And they were doing really very normal, boring and safe posting that you’d expect for their industries. And they regularly would back out of really creative, good posting, because they were scared to be different, even though it was working. A story that still makes me laugh. I had a client who had doubled their social media following in one year and had started serving a hundred more people. This was a B2B company. A hundred more businesses that month than they had the month before were regularly getting praised for their social media. And every month when I met with my client, I had to talk him off the ledge because he kept looking at his competitors and seeing that his posts were not generic and were not just advertising the business over and over and over. just was scared. And so I laugh about it. But truly, at the end of the day, I think you can still have fun on social while building trust and educating your audience. It’s an art form in how you go about that. And when you find the social media specialist who gets that nuance of how to have fun and be social on a B2B platform, They’re very talented, and you should work hard to retain them.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think it’s really hard to get that balance, and I see that with a lot of our clients. I’m interested. Obviously, there’s an issue around balancing the fun with the corporate image. I mean, what else do you see people really getting wrong on their social media?
Emily: I would say cumbersome planning processes that make it a behemoth to manage and then ultimately fail because they’re not sustainable is a big one. I also see people spending too much time studying what AI can tell them in seconds. For example, what time of day is optimal for posting or their analytics. I also see people prioritizing every channel equally, or I’d even say prioritizing channels that make no sense to be on, but they’re scared not to be there. I see people afraid to pivot content to what works versus what’s expected. And so I would tell every social media marketer to relentlessly pursue what’s working and get over what your competitors are doing that’s not working but is expected in the industry. And then I’d say specifically what I see B2B businesses getting wrong, especially on LinkedIn. in, which tends to be the star in the P2B sector, is not training and empowering their staff to post to their personal accounts, because people follow people more than businesses on LinkedIn. And so that’s a huge opportunity that’s often lost.
Mike: I mean, that’s really interesting. And it’s certainly a problem I know that a lot of our clients have is getting individuals to post. I mean, do you think that that’s a training issue? I mean, how do you solve that as a business?
Emily: Yeah, well, I’d say it starts with empowering them and giving them permission. Because I think a lot of employees fear if I start posting regularly thought leadership on LinkedIn, they’re going to think I’m looking for a new job. And a lot of companies might not might be afraid to let you post for fear that you’ll be poached if you get too much interaction on LinkedIn. But yeah, I think it is training. A lot of us were never taught how to post on social media. And I think a little bit of training and guidance on what makes good content goes a long way and really At the end of the day, the best place to start is to just start posting and see what gets traction and what doesn’t on LinkedIn.
Mike: I mean, this is really interesting. We’re wandering off into somewhere outside of what I thought we were going to talk about initially. But one of the things I wonder is, how data-driven should you be on social? Because it’s easy to post stuff that is very personal, generates lots of likes. But let’s be honest, particularly in a B2B context, may not generate a business benefit. So do you think you should really chase the likes and the reposts and the data? Or do you think it’s a bit more complex than that?
Emily: Social media is complex period because it’s other tools are explicitly lead generation by nature and social media is brand building and trust building. And so measurement on social is incredibly hard. Gone are the days of being able to just say our engagement went up this month and we had our interactions and comments and likes went up this much and being able to bring that to your leadership and have that have that count. And that’s what’s incredibly hard about social is that building brand is a long term goal. It’s a long term game. And it’s not always told in the analytics. And you see that because every social media strategist has their favorite measurement. And they all disagree on which one is most important. And so I think gaining influence over time would be what I would be most concerned about, especially on LinkedIn. And the numbers don’t always tell that story in the same way the numbers don’t always tell branding growth. But trust and relationships take time.
Mike: I love that. I think that’s a really good point that people should remember. I mean, let’s come back a bit more to the product co-schedule now and what it helps people doing. You know, I see a lot of people with their social media or their content schedules, you know, and they tend to fall into almost two ends of the spectrum. So one, you’ve got, you know, marketing managers that are spending more time on scheduling. They are actually on generating content. And at the other end you have like the almost random haphazard, you know, let’s just push out some posts this week and next week we’ll have a schedule and of course next week they never do. So what would be your advice or tips to somebody, say a B2B marketing manager, who wanted to have a better schedule for their social?
Emily: Yeah, the obviously the one that everyone says up front all the time is batch your content, do not set the expectation on yourself that every single day, or maybe even every single week, you’re going to sit down and find time to create inventive content, and keep a regular consistent publishing schedule unless you have mapped things out. And you the only way to be efficient in it is to work around content pillar posting ideas and schedule that out in advance and I’ll talk about that in a little bit but there are I could give a really fancy answer here. And certainly, CoSchedule has many tools to make posting easier, like our smart campaigns that automates creation and scheduling of entire social campaigns in seconds. But really, I think what most marketers struggle with in social media, in my experience, is really the fundamentals get lost in all of the innovations. And really, I think the fundamentals are Don’t set the bar at posting every single day. Set a bar that’s realistic and build. Don’t start by expecting that every single post is going to be a slam dunk. That’s just not the way social works. So just keep showing up. And as I’ve said earlier, don’t look to your competitors as the gold standard to replicate. Instead, I would simply step back from what you’ve been doing, spend a month posting almost, I would say, haphazardly. Post a whole lot of content in the spirit of testing around all sorts of different types of content. And then over the course of time, test what’s working and what’s not working and build your content pillars. around that so that say every Monday is audience frustration Monday. Maybe you thought that tips for how to use your service would perform and in reality people seem to like the memes or the funny things about frustrations in the industry. Make that a topic for four posts, four Mondays for the month, and engage them in the comments. One that I see that always seems to perform in the B2B sector is celebrating the successes of your business. I can almost guarantee that that will be a content pillar in your strategy. Or maybe you see that thought leadership really only performs when you make it about the reader or when you offer it via questions or video. post with gusto for a period of time in all of those categories, see what sticks, and then build your content strategy around those recurring themes to make it easy for yourself.
Mike: That’s such interesting advice. I mean, so many questions come up from that. I mean, the pillars I love. Do you suggest that, you know, when people do these content pillars, as you mentioned, you know, you have a theme every day of the week. So Monday, as you say, could be customer frustration, or you better to like put, you know, a bunch of posts on the same topic into the same week and then change topic next week. But what do you think is the best approach?
Emily: I’d switch it up. I think if you started to do customer frustration Monday through Friday, it wouldn’t perform as well as if it was randomly appearing throughout the month, which you know, it’s not random. It’s every Monday.
Mike: And that’s really interesting as well. I mean, because you’re kind of implying you’re going to post most days of the week then, aren’t you? If you theme on a Monday being customer frustration, presumably Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all have their own themes. Do you have a view as to how often people should post? I mean, is it a case of the more the better, or can you post too much?
Emily: You know, the research shows that it actually isn’t every day. I’ve seen with my own clients, even clients who had low budgets and only posted twice a week grew. I believe the recommendations that I’ve seen lately are three to five times a week for growth, so certainly do not feel that you have to set the bar at posting every single day, and certainly not multiple times a day. You can start small, see what’s working, and grow from there.
Mike: Well, that’s, I think, reassuring to people who are, you know, kind of intimidated by the feeling they need to get something out every day. I’d love to understand a little bit, you know, we’ve talked generally about how people can improve their social media and their content strategy. What about your strategy for co-schedule? What’s your marketing strategy?
Emily: Yeah, to describe it at the highest level, I would say our strategy is to develop content and tools that help marketers do their job better. So CoSchedule has developed a staggering amount of content around helping marketers understand marketing over the years. When I first started and I was going through the website of all of the content they’ve produced over 12 years, I actually had to breathe in, breathe out, tell myself they didn’t develop all of this content in one day. They have courses, so there’s an education arm of their business. And they’re really innovative. So, for example, in 2021, they launched a free product called Headline Studio, where marketers could evaluate their email subject lines, blog posts, headlines for what would be most effective for SEO, et cetera, open rates. And in today’s world of AI, that doesn’t sound revolutionary. But in 2021, that was incredibly new and helpful to marketers.
Mike: I actually remember that being launched and using it myself on email subject lines. So that’s really cool. I mean, I know we’re kind of running out of time. So I’m interested to know, what sort of campaigns do you look at and go, wow, that’s really good. Are there any campaigns you’ve seen recently that are really cool or have been really well executed?
Emily: You know what can’t not come to mind in the B2B space is what Shopify does on Black Friday with their live global tracker. For several years have done live time tracking of their merchants global sales on Black Friday. And they up the ante every year. So last year, I believe they even had it displaying on the sphere in Vegas, which is this just giant spherical building and the entire building has an external LED screen. I’m guessing your listeners don’t have that type of budget. So I hesitate to give that example. But I think the lesson in that in a B2B context is how can we take something that we do and make it more human and more relatable and more helpful in a different category? How can we turn it on its head in a way that’s different and so therefore makes it noticeable?
Mike: I think that’s a great example. I think one of the things I really like about it is Shopify has stuck with it for a very long period of time. So actually, people are almost expecting that campaign on Black Friday, and they want to compare the numbers to the previous year. So I think consistency has been really good there, hasn’t it? This has been really interesting, Emily. There are a couple of questions that we like to ask everyone before we let them go. So I’m going to ask those now. The first one is, what’s the best piece of marketing advice that someone’s given to you?
Emily: I laugh when you ask this question because I presume you don’t mean the day, the very first day of Twitter when my first boss pulled me into his office and said, Emily, pay attention to this. This is going to change the world. And I looked at it and said, that looks so dumb. Why would anyone want to use that? I assume that’s not the answer you’re looking for. But here’s one slight diversion from what we’ve been talking about. But this is a piece of advice I got early in my career. And I have found myself repeating it to clients over and over again. I was working at an agency. And we had just gotten an angry letter in the mail about a TV spot we had written. And how quaint does that sound to our 20, 25 years that we got a letter in the mail? And I remember my boss saying, if your marketing isn’t making someone angry, it probably wasn’t any good. Because if it wasn’t strong enough to stir someone to anger, it probably wasn’t strong enough to inspire someone to act. And I love that because, especially in social media context, the world has gotten so explosive and negative. And if you’re doing anything that stands out, you’re going to be making people mad. And that can cause us to shrink back in our confidence and change what we know is working because of the voices. And the challenge is to not stop because of that.
Mike: I love that. That’s super positive. I mean, hopefully continuing on a positive theme. The other question we like to ask everybody is, what would you say to someone who was just starting out in their career in marketing?
Emily: Yeah, I’ll give you real advice that I regularly give to people who tell me they want to do what I do someday. And it’s this. I encourage them to become a voracious reader. And I tell them, you don’t need to read about marketing. Just find a genre that you love. and read it, read it over and over again. And over time, you’ll naturally pick up on the questions that make a content strategist an asset. What types of writing are compelling? What word pairings cause you to pay attention versus tuning them out? Who taught you something and how did they do it? What entertained you? What stood apart? Apart from the editors and brilliant marketing minds that I’ve worked with in my career who have shaped my thinking, I believe being a reader has been the single most helpful thing for being a marketer. And I think there’s a new angle to that advice in today’s world, that being a reader will protect you from outsourcing your thinking to AI.
Mike: Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe a little controversial. Emily, this has been great. I so appreciate the time. If somebody is interested in CoSchedule, wants to find out more, what’s the best place for them to go?
Emily: Sure. You can check us out at coschedule.com or feel free to add me on LinkedIn as Emily Thompson.
Mike: Emily, this has been brilliant. Thanks so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Emily: Thanks for having me, Mike.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
