Heike Young Spent 12 Years at Salesforce and Microsoft. Her Takeaway Is People Are the Content Strategy.

Something strange happens when a marketer opens a Google Doc. They walk in as normal human beings, yet somehow leave behind sentences like "in the ever-evolving digital landscape, organizations are leveraging synergistic frameworks." Nobody talks like that, and nobody wants to read it. And yet most brands keep producing it at scale and calling it strategy.

Heike Young calls it “content voice,” and believes it is driving B2B marketing into the ground.

Heike Young is a content consultant, speaker, and creator based in Los Angeles. She spent over a decade at Salesforce, where she co-authored the company's first State of Marketing report and launched its award-winning Marketing Cloudcast podcast, before moving to Microsoft to lead content, social, and integrated marketing. Since leaving corporate in fall 2025, she has built a following of over 50,000 on LinkedIn and 30,000 on TikTok, accumulating 61 million LinkedIn views in 2025 alone. She now consults brands on the thing she spent 15 years trying to do from inside: get companies to sound like people again.

"Branded content doesn't land the way people do. It probably never did. But it's especially true today, as everyone's using AI to crank out more impersonal, boring stuff that technically follows brand guidelines," she says. Companies muzzle the very voices that could make content interesting, then wonder why nobody reads what they publish.

The two-sided problem nobody talks about

Overly branded content is making everyone miserable on both sides of marketing, Young says.

For brands, it results in your audience never clearly understanding exactly what you do, and being bored by your webinars, blog posts, and events. "Consuming most branded content feels like work," she says.

This makes marketers feel held back in what they can create. But they keep churning out the same generic content because it’s the industry standard. On the weekends, they look for jobs.

This matters beyond audience understanding and internal morale. LinkedIn has been steadily deprioritizing brand pages in favor of individual creators, and the distribution gap between personal profiles and company accounts continues to widen. Brands winning on LinkedIn tend to have employees with something real to say, and the permission to say it. Employee posts consistently outperform the same content when it comes from a brand account.

Young's framework for fixing this is what she calls people-generated content, or PGC. She describes it as a deliberate broadening of the employee-generated content conversation to include three categories: employees, customers, and creators. Each represents a voice the brand does not own but can earn through genuine collaboration.

What people-generated means in practice

The employee piece is the most misunderstood. Most companies running employee advocacy programs have framed it as a distribution problem: get more employees posting, get more reach. Young says that is the entirely wrong frame. Training employees to be real creators on behalf of the brand is a different goal than using them as a broadcast channel, and the results reflect it.

"Instead of muzzling the voices of the people inside your company with social media policies, what if you let them loose and train them to be powerful creators?" she says.

The customer piece requires giving up more control than many marketing teams are comfortable with. Actual co-creation with customers means letting them say what they want to say, not editing their words to match a messaging framework. There are too many content production processes where customer voices get flattened beyond recognition into a formulaic customer story, she says. That serves no one, and audiences can feel the difference.

The creator piece is where Young believes brands most consistently fail. Hiring B2B creators and handing them brand guidelines and a script defeats the purpose. The value of a creator partnership is the creator's voice, their audience's trust in that voice, and the specificity of what they actually think. A creator who sounds like a brand press release is an expensive banner ad.

"At the same time, B2B companies are in their own little vacuum, using content voice. Media in the broader, non-B2B culture is becoming more creator-led and authentic," Young says.

She explains, "Creators are at the helm of new TV shows and their own media empires. B2B companies must decide to make a major shift." Running influencer programs like campaigns is exactly what the best voices have learned to avoid, and it's why so many brand partnerships produce content that lands with a thud.

The dashboard is the wrong place to look

Young argues that what brands are trying to build through PGC is influence, and influence does not show up on a weekly status dashboard. "Brands need to go from a culture of dashboards to a culture of driving influence. They need to see influencing people and changing minds and hearts as a primary goal of marketing," she says.

The signals she uses to evaluate progress are more interesting than any click-through rate, whether influential people asking to speak at your events, industry experts mentioning the brand unprompted and unpaid, or an LLM naming the brand when asked for the best in a category. That last signal has become a meaningful proxy. LLMs cite sources that are credible, authoritative, and widely referenced, and a brand with no human voices in the ecosystem has no raw material to draw from.

Young is direct that this kind of influence cannot be evaluated in a two-week sprint or a quarterly review. "You can't fake your way to those types of results," she adds.

How to sell it when everyone wants ROI yesterday

Young spent years navigating this inside large organizations, and her approach is worth attention for anyone trying to build long-game content programs inside companies that want results immediately. She calls her method "pockets of innovation."

The approach centers on finding a project that already has leadership buy-in, attaching to it, and using it to build proof before asking for more. Young did exactly this with the Marketing Cloudcast at Salesforce. It started as a side project with no budget and no visibility. It ended as a Content Marketing Institute Best Podcast winner.

The other tool she uses in leadership conversations is what she calls a wall of love. Rather than presenting data in isolation, she fills decks with actual human responses, social comments, DMs, and things people said at events. The comments tell you what the numbers never will.

"I always try to include as many people in my results decks as possible. Show the people behind results," she says.

The differentiator nobody can copy

Every brand has the same tools, the same models, and the same channels, so none of that is the differentiator anymore, Young says. "The differentiator is your people. Your competitors don't have your leaders, your employees, or your customers. You can harness those human beings in a completely different way," she says.

As AI-generated content accelerates across industries, corporate communications routed through the same models are converging toward the same average. A better prompt or a more sophisticated workflow will not change that. Putting real humans with real perspectives at the center of the content operation, and then getting out of their way, is the competitive move.

"The future of content is personality-led. It's human-led. And if your team is not having fun, your marketing is not going to be enjoyable for anyone," Young says.