Ann Handley
Marketing teams produce more content than ever and convert less of it into trust. The volume keeps rising, the writing keeps thinning out, and customers can tell. The harder question for any commercial leader is whether the words their organisation puts into the world actually sound like a business worth buying from.
Ann Handley is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, who helps organisations turn marketing writing and content into a real commercial advantage.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Ann Handley
- She built two of the businesses that defined modern digital marketing, ClickZ and MarketingProfs, so her advice on content operations comes from running them, not theorising about them.
- Everybody Writes, now in a second edition, gives commercial teams a single shared standard for how the company writes to customers, prospects and employees.
- She has spent 15+ years shaping the agenda at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, which gives her a working view of what is actually moving the pipeline for B2B marketers right now.
- Her Total Annarchy newsletter, read fortnightly by more than 51,000 marketers, is itself the case study: subscriber-driven, voice-first, low-volume, high-trust.
- IBM named her among the seven people shaping modern marketing; that recognition reflects influence on how the discipline is practised, not just commented on.
Biography highlights
- Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs (600,000+ subscribers; annual B2B Marketing Forum).
- Co-founder of ClickZ, an early authority in digital marketing news and commentary.
- Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Everybody Writes; co-author of Content Rules; works translated into 19 languages.
- Named by IBM as one of “the 7 people shaping modern marketing,”; cited by Forbes as a top thought leader.
- Writes Total Annarchy, a fortnightly newsletter with 51,000+ subscribers.
- Contributing writer to Entrepreneur, Inc., Mashable, Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Biography
Most marketing functions have a content problem they have decided to call a strategy problem. They publish more, segment harder, automate further, and the writing still sounds like everyone else’s. Ann Handley’s working argument is that the words are the product, and that an organisation’s marketing is only as serious as the sentences it is willing to put its name to.
She has tested that argument inside the businesses she helped build. As co-founder of ClickZ and Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, she has spent two decades running marketing operations rather than narrating them, and the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum has become one of the few places where senior B2B marketers go to compare notes on what is actually working.
Her book Everybody Writes, a Wall Street Journal bestseller now in a second edition, gives commercial teams a shared operating standard for marketing writing. Content Rules, her earlier title with C.C. Chapman, did the same job for the wider content stack. Both have been translated into 19 languages and are used inside marketing organisations as training material, not coffee-table reading.
What sets her work apart at the keynote level is the refusal to treat content as a category. IBM placed her among the seven people shaping modern marketing because she keeps pulling marketing back to the part of the job that is hardest to fake: writing something a customer would actually want to read.
Key speaking topics
- Content marketing strategy
- Marketing writing as a commercial discipline
- B2B marketing and demand generation
- Brand voice and editorial standards
- Email and newsletter strategy
- Customer experience through content
- Storytelling for business
Ideal for
- CMOs and heads of marketing are rebuilding content operations for measurable commercial outcomes
- Heads of brand, communications and content responsible for editorial standards across teams
- B2B marketing leaders working on demand generation and customer engagement
- Founders and commercial leaders whose growth depends on the company sounding like itself
Audience outcomes
- A clearer working definition of what good marketing writing looks like inside their own organisation
- Specific tests for whether a piece of content earns the attention it asks for
- A view on how to run content as an operating function, not a campaign output
- Concrete examples of B2B and B2C brands using writing and editorial voice to win commercially
- A more honest read on what their current marketing sounds like to a customer
Talks
A talk on why the most effective marketing teams are slowing down deliberately to produce work customers actually want.
Key takeaways:
- Why volume-led content strategies are quietly costing pipeline
- How “slow” practices like editing, voice and craft become competitive advantages
- What a smaller, sharper content operation looks like in practice
A working session on lifting the standard of marketing writing across a commercial organisation.
Key takeaways:
- The specific writing habits that separate trusted brands from forgettable ones
- A shared editorial standard that marketing, sales and product teams can use
- Practical edits that make B2B writing measurably clearer
A direct challenge to the default assumptions running most marketing functions.
Key takeaways:
- Where current marketing playbooks have stopped earning attention
- How to test whether a tactic is working or just busy
- What to stop doing before adding anything new
A view on where content and storytelling are heading for serious commercial brands.
Key takeaways:
- The commercial case for treating story as infrastructure, not decoration
- Examples of B2B and B2C brands building durable audiences
- How content strategy connects to customer experience and revenue