The Content Marketing Strategy That Terrifies CFOs

Create valuable content. Give it away completely free. Don’t capture any contact information. Wait six to nine months for results.

This strategy makes most CFOs deeply uncomfortable. Taylor Thomson is a CFO who champions it.

“The more of that that marketing teams can really do, where you don’t have to enter the sales funnel, you don’t have to become one of the little leads in Salesforce that you’re just going to get a bunch of calls and emails about,” Thomson argues, “the better everybody’s going to be at their jobs.”

Thomson leads finance and revenue operations at WITHIN, a Denver agency that created The Marketing Pulse—real-time data about social media costs and performance—completely ungated. No email required. No demo request. Just useful information that helps marketing professionals do their jobs better. His approach to content strategy contradicts conventional wisdom about lead generation and immediate ROI.

This contradicts how most organizations think about content marketing. The typical playbook: create something valuable, put it behind a registration form, capture leads, hand them to sales. Marketing justifies its budget through lead volume. Sales gets contacts to pursue. Finance sees measurable activity that looks like ROI.

But Thomson argues this approach optimizes for the wrong outcomes. “People become suspicious of brands that put registration walls in front of every piece of useful content,” he explains. They remember companies that helped them without demanding anything in return. When they eventually need services, they think of organizations that previously provided value.

The challenge is maintaining this approach when pressure builds. Around month six, leadership starts asking what ROI the content is generating. Marketing needs to justify its budget. The temptation to add lead capture forms becomes overwhelming.

“That’s a hard pill to swallow,” Thomson acknowledges. “If your leadership is saying, yeah, you’re going to invest a bunch of money right now and you’re not going to see anything on it for nine months.” Taylor Thomson’s recognition in business circles stems partly from his willingness to advocate for longer-term thinking in environments demanding quarterly results.

Organizations that resist the temptation and maintain value-first positioning eventually see returns that gated content can’t match: organic sharing among professional networks, authentic recommendations when peers ask for referrals, and prospects who arrive already convinced of the company’s expertise.

Thomson practices what he preaches through his own content consumption habits. He spends 15-20 minutes each morning scanning 15 industry newsletters, extracting insights for his team. He doesn’t track whether specific articles led to specific deals. He knows the cumulative effect of being informed matters more than attributable outcomes.

The same logic applies to thought leadership. You’re not creating content to generate form fills. You’re building credibility that pays dividends over extended time horizons. This requires different success metrics than typical content marketing—share rates, repeat visitors, qualitative feedback about utility.

For content leaders tired of seeing great work hidden behind registration walls that depress usage, Thomson’s approach offers an alternative. Create genuinely useful resources. Make them freely accessible. Trust that people who find real value will remember when they need your services.

The irony: Thomson is a finance leader advocating for marketing approaches that can’t show immediate financial returns. But his position at WITHIN’s commercial organization gives him the perspective to see how ungated content creates long-term value that quarterly metrics miss. His documented insights on content strategy challenge the lead-generation orthodoxy that dominates most B2B marketing.