By Caroline Forsey

It wasn’t too long ago that we weren’t collaborating much across Marketing.

If I published a blog post on “SEO strategy”, it became a happy coincidence if the YouTube team had covered anything similar that I could use in my post.

Teams just weren’t creating content cohesively across different verticals. Let’s be honest: We’d grown too large.

On the Blog team, this also meant we had limited non-organic channels to use to get our posts in front of the right audiences.

Today, I’m going to pull back the curtain (sorry, I just saw Wicked) on how HubSpot’s Blog team reimagined our approach to content — transforming what used to be a siloed blog strategy into a dynamic, multi-channel storytelling machine.

(Psst: Curious what else is happening in the world of blogging? Check out our brand-new 2025 State of Blogging report with data from 500+ marketers — the first time we’ve ever run such a comprehensive audit on what’s happening across the blogging landscape.)

Why We Launched Our Media Narratives Program

When we first started our Original Research program in 2017, something became immediately clear: our blog readers are absolutely obsessed with data.

Like, Taylor-Swift-friendship-bracelets-level obsessed.

In our first full year, we drove over 1.4 million views through original research. Turns out, people love data — regardless of platform.

The challenge? Quality research is pricey and time-consuming. We needed a more strategic approach to not just create research, but to distribute it effectively across multiple channels to make sure we were getting the biggest bang for our research-bucks.

For instance, you shouldn’t have to be a blog reader to access our State of Marketing data — although, selfishly, I’d love it if you were.

But if instead you’re an avid YouTuber, newsletter subscriber, or IG follower, you should still be able to access the top marketing trends on those platforms, too.

Enter: Media Narratives.

In June 2022, I piloted our first Media Narrative — a quarterly approach that would transform how we think about research, content, and cross-team collaboration.

What started as an experimental program quickly became a powerful distribution engine for our original research, blog, and brand.

What is a Media Narrative?

Media Narratives is, at its core, a collection of multimedia content centered around one data-backed theme.

Think: A YouTube video, podcast episode, blog post, and a TikTok vid, all discussing the same trending topic and driving traffic towards one final offer.

Each Media Narrative is fueled by the Blog’s original research and expert thought leadership, and always has one corresponding research-backed report.

Let’s break it down in bullet-point format. A Media Narrative consists of:

• One targeted, research-backed offer (think: State of Marketing, State of Sales, State of AI)
• 15+ in-depth blog posts discussing the subtopics of that overarching report (i.e. “top marketing challenges”, “top marketing channels”, “marketing KPIs to focus on”)
• Expert interviews
• Videos
• Podcast mentions
• Social content

… With original research …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron