Earning a voice in someone else’s industry
By the end of 2024, Harvest had spent eighteen years building an audience in professional services and very little time speaking to it. As Creative Director, I built and ran a new content marketing function to change that.
Company
Harvest
Year
2025
Location
New York, NY
Engagement
In-House
Role
Content Strategy
Editorial Direction
Editorial Design
Writing
Strategy
Finding the expertise we didn’t have
The content strategy for many B2B companies is centred around thought leadership. The Harvest team knew everything about time tracking. But we didn't know anything about running a law firm or the ins-and-outs of an architecture studio. We had no in-house experts in the fields our customers worked in. And when a company with no real standing in an industry tries to become a thought leader in that space, people can tell.
So Harvest wouldn’t manufacture experience or opinions we didn't have. Instead, we'd build our content on two things we could legitimately stand by: original data from our own customers, and the voices of people actually working in the field. Harvest's job was to ask the right questions and publish what came back rather than pretend to be the expert.
To put the strategy to work, Harvest needed a content function it didn’t yet have. I tied the plan to the company’s 2025 marketing, got buy-in from Leadership, hired a new Content Marketing Manager, and started building the processes the program would need to run consistently.
Original Research
Proof before opinion
The first piece I worked on was an industry report. We’d surveyed more than a thousand people across thirteen professional services industries and the data was sitting untouched. I turned it into The State of Professional Services, a look at how firms were handling growth, efficiency, and profitability. The report became the cornerstone of the strategy and Harvest’s first major lead-generation content piece.
The report put credible, first-hand evidence in front of our audience: real data from people working across those industries. We built it to be read rather than skimmed: editorial, carefully designed, aiming to create something a firm leader would actually finish and share with his peers.
On the numbers, it worked. Click-through ran more than three times the industry average, and people who landed on the launch post stayed over two minutes, against a blog average of under one. The paid campaign that followed the organic launch brought leads in well under our target cost.
Reading the Market
Following the audience into AI
A few months in, AI was beginning to move to the top of our audience’s mind. There was no shortage of opinions about what it would mean for professional services, but very little data about how firms were actually using it. So we did what had already worked and went to get the data.
Working with Molly Connor, our new Content Marketing Manager, we surveyed 323 professional services firms about how they were using AI in practice, what was paying off, and what wasn’t, then published AI in Professional Services: Promise & Practice.
While much of the conversation focused on hype or fear, firm leaders responding to our own survey mostly wanted to know what was actually working, so we kept the tone of the report objective and factual. One finding became the spine of both the report and its promotion: 88% of firms were using or experimenting with AI, but only 21% were seeing any profit from it.
Editorial
Letting the industry speak for itself
Alongside the data, we wanted the perspectives of people actually doing the work. Founders and operators trust their peers more than they’ll ever trust a software company, so Harvest’s role was to create a platform for those voices rather than compete with them.
We started In the Field, a series of interviews with people running firms across professional services. The goal was to publish conversations that reflected the reality of the audience’s day-to-day work and give Harvest a place in discussions that extended beyond time tracking.
The interviews grew into a webinar series. The first, Built to Change: Designing the Agency of Tomorrow, was a conversation with Carl Smith, founder of The Bureau, a community of several thousand agency owners. It drew 654 attendees, roughly double our usual audience, and many of them weren’t customers. It was a real conversation about where agencies are headed, and it reached people who’d never had reason to pay attention to Harvest before.
We took the same approach with the newsletter. Up to that point it had mostly been product updates. We focused it on interviews, research, events, and ideas from across professional services, making it less about Harvest itself and more about the industries our customers were in.
Outcome
Beyond product marketing
A year earlier, Harvest’s content was mostly practical product updates and search-driven articles. By the middle of 2025, it had expanded into original research, practitioner interviews, webinars, and reports grounded in real data.
The goal wasn’t to maximise traffic, but to build an audience that saw Harvest as more than a time-tracking company by publishing things people in professional services genuinely wanted to read. The numbers suggested that approach was working: the AI report reached a 68% completed-download rate, webinar attendance doubled, and blog traffic continued to grow.
More importantly, Harvest had become part of conversations it hadn’t previously been part of. The content gave people a reason to engage with the brand long before they were evaluating time-tracking software.
PROJECT CREDITS