Hey, it's Will.

Companies are paying insane money for CEO content right now. OpenAI is offering $310K-$393K for content strategists. Coinbase is paying $253K-$300K for social marketing directors. Google's thought leadership managers command $211K-$297K.

The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider have both covered the executive ghostwriting boom. The market is industrializing fast, but most of these expensive programs are leaving massive money on the table.

In this week's newsletter, I'm breaking down the operational infrastructure that transforms executive content from a nice-to-have into a measurable revenue channel.

Welcome to Catalyst—your bi-weekly insights on emerging fintech and Web3 trends, a behind-the-scenes look at some of the top players in the space, and actionable strategies you can implement today. No fluff. No basic takes. Just clear insights on what's actually happening in fintech. 💻

Forwarded this email? Get Catalyst in your inbox each week.

Will’s Picks

A few things I’ve loved reading this week—

• The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Report

• Content Marketing Institute's 2025 B2B Research

• MIT Media Lab: Your Brain on ChatGPT

• Gotham Ghostwriters Comp Survey

• HubSpot's 2025 Marketing Statistics

The $500K Problem

The executive content market is exploding.

Virio is hiring Heads of CEO Content at $500K-$1.5M annually. PayPal's senior content designers earn $123K-$212K. Microsoft's social creative producers make $106K-$222K.

Companies are finally understanding what the data shows: 73% of decision-makers now trust an organization's thought leadership more than its marketing materials when assessing capabilities.

Executive content has evolved from a PR exercise to a core GTM function, but most companies are doing it wrong. They hire expensive ghostwriters. They create content. They hit publish. Then they wonder why it's not driving pipeline. The problem is the absence of systematic governance.

What Governance Actually Means

Governance sounds boring; compliance paperwork and legal review processes that slow everything down.

That's not what I'm talking about, though.

Governance in executive content programs is the operational infrastructure that connects creation to business outcomes. It's the system that ensures every piece of content is:

1. Strategically aligned with business objectives
2. Legally compliant before publication
3. Brand-consistent across all channels
4. Performance-tracked against real metrics
5. Revenue-attributed to specific opportunities

Without this infrastructure, you're just publishing expensive blog posts.

With it, you transform executive presence into a measurable outbound channel that directly influences deals.

The Five Components of Executive Content Governance

After building content programs for dozens of B2B companies, I've identified five components that separate programs that drive revenue from programs that just generate likes.

1. The Strategic Filter

Every content idea needs to pass through a strategic filter before production begins.

The filter asks three questions:

→ Does this reinforce our strategic positioning?
→ Does this reach our ICP?
→ Does this support an active business objective?

If the answer to any question is no, the idea gets archived.

This filter prevents the most common mistake: creating content because "it would be interesting" rather than because it serves a business purpose.

We use a simple Notion table for this. Three columns: Idea, ICP Alignment, Business Objective. Takes 5 minutes per week to maintain. Saves hundreds of hours creating content that doesn't move the needle.

2. The Compliance Engine

This is where most programs break down.

Your CEO can't just tweet whatever they want. There are legal constraints, regulatory requirements, and brand guidelines that must be followed.

Every piece of content needs:

→ Legal review for industry-specific compliance (especially in fintech, healthcare, financial services)
→ Brand review for voice and positioning consistency
→ Executive approval with clear SLAs

The key metric here is Compliance Pass Rate: What percentage of content passes legal and brand review on the first submission?

Top programs hit 90%+ pass rates. That means the content team understands the guardrails so well they rarely produce non-compliant content.

3. The Production Pipeline

Consistency matters more than perfection.

The most successful executive content programs publish on a predictable cadence. For LinkedIn, that's typically 3-5x per week. For newsletters, it's weekly or bi-weekly.

The pipeline manages this cadence through clear stages:

Stage 1: Extraction (Content strategist interviews executive or pulls from existing materials)
Stage 2: Drafting (Writer creates first draft)
Stage 3: Review (Legal, brand, executive approval)
Stage 4: Optimization (Final polish, hashtag strategy, posting schedule)
Stage 5: Distribution (Publication across all channels)

Each stage needs an owner and an SLA. For example: Executive review turnaround should be 24-48 hours max. If your CEO is the bottleneck, you need a different approval process.

The metric here is Review SLA Performance: Are you hitting your turnaround time targets?

Programs that consistently miss SLAs don't build momentum. The content feels sporadic. The audience never builds the habit of expecting new insights.

4. The Attribution System

This is where governance becomes a revenue function.

You need to track which opportunities were touched by executive content in a specific, measurable way.

The key metrics are:

→ Pipeline Assist Rate: What percentage of opportunities in your pipeline engaged with executive content?
→ Velocity Impact: Do deals that engage with executive content close faster?
→ Win Rate Lift: Do opportunities that consume executive content convert at higher rates?

We track this by tagging content with UTM parameters, using LinkedIn's visitor analytics, and integrating with CRM systems to see who's viewing what.

One client saw a 30% reduction in sales cycle length for opportunities that engaged with their founder's content. Another saw a 2.5x lift in SQL-to-close rate.

That's measurable pipeline impact.

5. The Optimization Loop

The final component is systematic improvement.

Every month, you should review:

→ Top-performing content (by engagement and by pipeline influence)
→ Content themes that resonate vs. those that don't
→ Posting time and format experiments
→ Audience growth and engagement trends

This feeds back into the strategic filter, helping you double down on what works and eliminate what doesn't.

The Business Case for Governance

"This sounds like a lot of process for something that should be creative."

You're right. It is a lot of process, but executive content programs without governance rarely last more than 6 months. The CEO gets tired of the review cycles. The content team gets frustrated with unclear expectations. The business can't justify the investment because there's no clear ROI.

Programs with strong governance become permanent parts of the GTM motion. They scale. They drive measurable results. They get bigger budgets because they can prove their impact.

I recently worked with a B2B SaaS company that was spending $300K annually on executive ghostwriting. They had great content. Zero governance.

After implementing the five components I outlined above, they:

→ Reduced sales cycle length by 25% for content-influenced deals
→ Increased pipeline assist rate from 18% to 47%
→ Cut compliance review time from 5 days to 24 hours
→ Scaled from 2 posts/week to 5 posts/week with the same team

The governance infrastructure unlocked all of that.

How to Get Started

You don't need to implement all five components at once.

Start with the strategic filter and the attribution system. Those two alone will transform how you think about executive content.

Set up a simple tracking system:

1. Create a content ideas document with three columns: Idea, ICP Alignment, Business Objective
2. Tag all executive content with UTM parameters so you can track who's viewing
3. Connect your CRM to track which opportunities engage with executive content
4. Review performance monthly and adjust your strategy

That's the minimum viable governance structure.

Once you have that foundation, layer in compliance processes, production pipelines, and optimization loops.

The goal is to create a revenue-generating machine that happens to use executive content as fuel.