The Human Signal: How Taryn Hart Is Winning at B2B Content by Betting on Real Stories
The Content Marketing Manager at Kudos® on rising above the AI noise, building audience intelligence from the inside out, and why your customers' stories are the key to brand connection.
If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn lately, you've probably had this experience: you scroll for thirty seconds, and everything starts to blur together.
The headlines, hooks, frameworks and ever-loved listicles… even the "authentic" thought leadership posts. A lot of it now carries the sentiment of “same, same”—technically competent, suspiciously balanced, oddly devoid of a discernible human being behind it.
Taryn Hart has noticed. And she's decided to do something about it.
As Content Marketing Manager at Kudos—a Calgary-based employee recognition and rewards platform—Taryn has spent the last four and a half years figuring out how to make content in a space that (on the surface) might not seem like the most thrilling beat: B2B SaaS.
But in Taryn's hands, Kudos is capturing hearts and minds.
Over the past year, Taryn’s team drove an impressive 223% increase in newsletter subscribers and a 143% increase in form submissions across the Kudos site. And she did it by doing the unglamorous yet highly rewarding work of taking the time to truly get to know her audience.
Then, she reframed her take on storytelling from what stories can we tell about the brand? → where are our customers experiencing moments of joy or wonder thanks to the promise we sell?
This is what sets apart true “storytelling”—the new hype B2B buzzword that brands still seldom understand. Here’s her approach.
"There's still a human on the other side of B2B"
When you’re on a resource-strapped B2B marketing team, you’re often juggling 100 things at once and still left holding the bag when revenue numbers run short. It’s an environment that makes it tempting (and often necessary) to take shortcuts. But if there’s one area we absolutely cannot skimp out on as content marketers, it’s genuine audience intelligence. And this requires gaining real proximity to what your buyers are thinking and feeling in a given moment.
For Taryn, the wake-up call came when she realized that “knowing” her audience in theory wasn't the same as knowing them in practice. Her audience is HR professionals—people leaders, culture builders, the humans responsible for other humans inside organizations. But Taryn isn't an HR person, and she's never lived that experience from the inside. And for a while, she was writing content that reflected that gap without knowing it.
"When I started in this role, I was talking so much about employee recognition and applying it like: here's your challenge, and here's how a recognition solution can help with that. But HR deals with a very large bucket of people-related things, not just recognition and rewards."
Tapping into customer intelligence, the smart (and free!) way
Taryn’s turning point in better understanding her customers sprung from a simple conversation with her client success team. She asked a simple question: do you have any data from client onboarding about what problems people come in with? The answer was an easy yes—and better yet, it was all sitting in a spreadsheet.
"I remember getting that spreadsheet and thinking, here is my answer to everything."
From there, she layered in six months of sales call transcripts, fed the whole thing into ChatGPT, and asked it to surface the top themes in customer pain points. She then ran a content audit to identify where those themes were coming up in her existing content plan and precisely where the gaps were.
What content already existed?
What was missing?
What needed to be reframed?
The whole process sounds straightforward in retrospect. But it required something most marketing teams don't do consistently: talking to the people in the business who spend every day talking to customers.
"Lean on [your sales and customer success teams] as much as you can," she said. "Especially the people who are working hands-on and talking directly to your audience. It sounds so simple, but keeping the communication and transparency as strong as you can within an organization is extremely valuable."
The output of this audience analysis became the backbone of Taryn’s entire content strategy for the year, and this is the lens she ran through everything—blogs, guides, webinars, newsletter content, socials, and beyond.
What great storytelling looks like in B2B
The best B2B story Taryn has come across lately involves rubber ducks. Yep, it seems completely unrelated to HR tech… and she'll tell you that's exactly the point.
The Calgary Public Library—one of Kudos' clients—has a somewhat quirky tradition. They scatter rubber ducks around the office, arrange them in elaborate little scenes, photograph them, and post the pictures into their Kudos platform as a way of celebrating and connecting with each other. It’s the silly and warm inside lore that actually makes the Calgary Public Library’s culture unique and special.
And to Taryn, it's everything B2B storytelling should be.
"It helps you see how these organizations are building communities within their organizations and how Kudos is playing a huge role in that."
This is the mindset shift she keeps coming back to: the job of a content marketer isn't to tell stories about the product itself. It's to find the ‘aha’ moments already happening inside your customers' organizations—in Kudos’ case, the ones sparking joy, building connection, and lighting people up at work—and putting those stories on a pedestal.
Reframe as: your customer is the hero, your brand is the trusty sidekick.
The trick is knowing where to look. For Taryn, that means staying in close contact with the teams who talk to customers every day and talking to the customers herself. The rubber duck story surfaced because she was curious enough to go digging.
And here's what she's learned: the whimsy that makes for a great story and the data that back up your brand are not opposites. Once you find the moment that makes someone feel something, the business case tends to follow. In this customer story, the rubber duck is the hook, but Taryn can then layer in data around an increase in logins, recognition messages being shared, and employees engaging with the platform—all measurable outcomes. The human story isn’t a detour away from the rational argument for her brand but rather a vehicle that gets you there.
Which is why, in a world increasingly flooded with AI-generated content, she thinks this kind of storytelling is the only real differentiator left.
She also sees a bigger structural shift happening because of AI that has real implications for how content marketers think about their job. If your audience can get a comprehensive education on any topic in thirty seconds through an AI tool, the era of the brand-as-educator is essentially over. Content exists, but its job has changed.
"Assume that anybody who has landed on your site or social media is already quite educated. It's almost this reverse thing where our audience might become the expert,” she says.
“You still have to fuel the SEO with bottom-of-funnel content on your website, but they're not spending hours scrolling through, reading different articles. All of that has already been fed to them through an AI tool. When you take all of that content out of the picture—what's left? It's the human stories, the case studies, and the client data. And that stuff, to me, is liquid gold."
What’s driving growth at Kudos?
That 223% newsletter growth we talked about earlier? That came from an intentional decision to treat the newsletter like its own brand.
Taryn scrapped the generic Kudos marketing newsletter and rebuilt it as Culture Compass—a resource designed specifically for HR professionals with a promise to deliver curated insights on navigating workplace culture, recognition, and HR trends.
"People want to read something that they know is going to be specifically curated for them," she says. This is a problem we see with plenty of B2B newsletters: they regurgitate marketing content rather than providing genuine value to their reader.
Once the content was locked in, she made the newsletter findable everywhere it needed to be—blog footer, website pop-ups, social, and a mirrored LinkedIn newsletter under the same Culture Compass brand. She also brought in RGE Studio (formerly BeeFree), an email design tool that integrates with HubSpot, which gave the newsletter the visual quality to match the editorial investment.
The 143% form submission growth followed a similar logic: better content, smarter architecture. She rewrote a flagship guide—an employee engagement strategy resource—so that it mapped cleanly to five content pillars. Each pillar spawned its own blog, its own social content, and its own newsletter section, all of which funneled back to the gated full guide. It’s what we in marketing know and love as the “hub and spoke” model.
That, plus seeking out strategic content partnerships with communities her audience were highly engaged in proved measurable results.
"I took that approach and put that layer on top of all of the content that we did. It worked, and I'll do it again."
A final message for business leaders: invest or bust
Taryn's advice to CEOs and founders considering (or doubting) an investment in content marketing is clear as crystal.
"In a world where AI has just skyrocketed, you have no choice but to produce great content. Because if you’re not, not only are your competitors going to be doing it—some other AI tool is going to be doing it too."
And the game isn’t just about content volume, or SEO rankings, or funnel mechanics anymore, but about what happens when your next potential client asks an AI tool to help it find a solution.
"When someone is asking AI about a service you offer, you don’t want it to say: An employee recognition and rewards solution will help. You want it to say: Kudos is the best in the game to do this for you. I don't think there's any other way outside of great content marketing to do that."
And the brands that keep building—thoughtfully, humanly, with their customers in the hero seat—they’ll be the first to the finish line.
Taryn Hart is Content Marketing Manager at Kudos. This is part of From the Desk Of—Outspoke's ongoing series featuring senior B2B marketing leaders. If you're interested in being interviewed for this series, reach out to hello@outspoke.ca.