From Insight to Impact: Smarter Research for Personalization That Resonates

If you want to create content that truly resonates, start by listening. Your audience is already telling you what they care about—you just need to ask the right questions and use their answers to fuel smarter, more personalized marketing. That's a quote from Rachael Bassey and a sneak peek at today's episode.

Hi there, I'm Kerry Curran—B2B revenue-growth executive advisor, industry analyst, and host of Revenue Boost, a marketing podcast. Every episode, I sit down with top experts to bring you actionable strategies that drive real results. If you're serious about growth, hit subscribe and stay ahead of the competition.

In From Insight to Impact: Smarter Research for Personalization That Resonates, I sit down with Rachael Bassey. She's the research partner to SaaS companies and the founder of ContentCollab.co. We explore how small marketing teams can personalize content at scale through smarter, more targeted audience research. We dig into practical ways to uncover buyer pain points, engage prospects through collaboration, and create content that stands out—especially in a sea of generic AI overviews.

If you're looking for a way to connect your content strategy to pipeline impact, you don't want to miss this conversation. Be sure to stay tuned to the end, where Rachael shares how to turn contributors into loyal brand advocates and why that's the smartest way to grow both your content and your customer base. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review so you don't miss future episodes packed with actionable advice. Let's go!

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.72)
So welcome Rachael, please introduce yourself and share your background and expertise.

Rachael Bassey (00:07.279)
Hey everyone, I'm Rachael Bassey. People call me Ray—Ray of Sunshine, more like it. I work as a research partner for SaaS companies. My specialization or expertise is helping companies create original research reports. I'll dive into what these reports are and my process later, but in a nutshell, that’s it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:41.966)
Excellent. Well, thank you. I'm very excited to have you join us today because content is so critically important—especially original content and research specific to the audience. So talk to us a bit about what you're seeing and hearing as you're talking to your prospects or clients. What are the needs in the marketplace these days when it comes to getting smarter, better content?

Rachael Bassey (01:10.529)
Okay, before I get into that—thank you so much, Kerry, for having me. Really, thank you.

 

So two things:

 

One—AI. You have small companies that are like, “Why bother hiring a writer when I can just go to ChatGPT and say, ‘Help me with my content plan, content calendar, and 50 articles for my blog’ and get it done?”

 

But then, a lot of people can easily spot articles written by ChatGPT, and people are tired of the robotic voice—even though I use a lot of it. People want to hear things that actually sound human.

People are also hungry for data—things they can benchmark their performance against.
Then on the other hand, budgets are being cut everywhere—left, right, and center.

 

So CEOs and founders are asking, “Why should I invest more in marketing? How do we tie marketing to revenue?”
There’s a debate around, “Is the whole marketing funnel even relevant anymore?”

You just have different arguments around whether it’s important to invest in marketing or if we should even bother right now. That’s pretty much what I’m seeing in the space.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:01.484)
Yeah, definitely. And it's so true—I can't have a conversation about marketing without AI being front and center. There's a lot of value there, but to your point, if you're putting all your creativity into the AI model, you're not going to get the quality you need.

Adding to that, AI also impacts search results. If you're just producing generic content, your rankings will suffer. You have to get smarter about content structure so your expertise can rank better.

So much opportunity here. Talk to me about how you're solving this—how are you helping your clients?

Rachael Bassey (04:03.102)
Great. Okay, so I’ll just do a bit of a rundown.
I worked with a company called Databox back in 2019. I’m no longer with them, but we started what I like to call collaborative marketing before it was even a thing. Back then, people didn’t really care about talking to real people or experts and collaborating with them to create content.

Now you go o