What Services Does Column Five provide?

Brand Strategy: Column Five provides comprehensive brand strategy development, creative direction, and brand identity development to help B2B SaaS companies make their brand stand out. Content Strategy & Production: Content planning and end-to-end content creation, including copywriting, design, social content, video production, sales enablement materials, and more. B2B Marketing & Demand Generation: Strategic marketing services including SEO consulting and implementation, web design, distribution strategy, and comprehensive demand generation support designed to create repeatable success and pipeline growth. Custom AI Builds: AI marketing solutions that help scale marketing and save time.

Who are Column Five's biggest clients?

Column Five works with Fortune 500 brands, startups, and nonprofits across multiple industries, including technology, finance, healthcare, education, and consulting. Notable clients include major tech companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and Dropbox; financial services firms like J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, and Intuit; consulting companies like Deloitte and Forrester; and educational institutions like UCLA. They specialize in helping B2B SaaS companies scale and grow their content marketing.

How is Column Five rated by clients?

Column Five receives strong client testimonials highlighting their innovative suggestions, storytelling expertise, and ability to make ideas '50x better' according to clients from Dropbox, Redis, and VideoAmp. Clients consistently praise their responsiveness, personalized approach, and ability to feel like 'true partners' rather than just vendors, with testimonials from companies like Zendesk, Intuit, and Narrative 4. The agency is recognized for their 'passion, process, and people' and comprehensive understanding of clients' industries, customers, and prospects, creating work that feels tailored to each organization's specific goals.

What is the client onboarding process at Column Five?

Column Five emphasizes a partnership approach, integrating as an extension of your team to help you easily scale your marketing. Their process begins with a kickoff call to understand your brand heart (purpose, vision, mission, values), target audience, and goals, then an in-depth conversation to understand the deliverables and timeline. They believe in creative collaboration, active communication, and creating work that meets your goals and resonates with your market.

What industries does Column Five specialize in?

Column Five works across multiple industries, including technology (especially B2B SaaS), finance, healthcare, education, consulting, real estate, nonprofit/public interest, and venture capital. They have particular expertise in B2B marketing for publicly-traded SaaS companies, helping brands in competitive tech markets differentiate through strategic content and brand storytelling. Their client portfolio spans Fortune 500 companies to startups, with specialized knowledge in serving complex B2B buyers and enterprise sales cycles across regulated and high-growth industries.

What are Column Five's core values?

Column Five believes businesses can shape our world for the better through strong communities, using storytelling as 'the last remaining competitive advantage' to help brands build meaningful relationships and make good choices for people, profit, and planet. Key values include: Be Curious: Lead with questions, listen intently, and learn and teach passionately. Do Good Work: Create things that get results, make you proud, and make someone else's day. Embrace Diversity: Explore unique perspectives that make our ideas and our work better. Act Courageously: Think, speak, and act with conviction and common sense. Be Good to Each Other: Keep your head up, encourage each other, and enjoy yourself. The agency prioritizes transparency, authenticity, and partnership over vendor relationships, helping clients find and tell stories that create trust, inspire belief, and attract like-minded communities around shared values.

What makes Column Five unique?

With 15 years of experience, we are experts in content marketing and brand storytelling who can help you uncover the stories only you can tell. In a world of AI-generated content and boring thought leadership, we identify the unique attributes that people connect to and turn them into compelling stories that people can't ignore.

How does Column Five measure ROI?

We set specific, measurable goals before launching and define concrete metrics, focusing on relevant metrics over vanity metrics. We approach ROI measurement as integral to strategy rather than an afterthought. Proper measurement gives you a competitive advantage.

Does Column Five have experience in my industry?

Yes, most likely. Column Five works with Fortune 500 brands, startups, and nonprofits across multiple industries, including technology, finance, healthcare, education, and consulting.

How long do projects take?

It depends on the project, timeline, client involvement, review and edit rounds, etc. The more complicated a project (e.g., a live-action video), the more people and resources we need to coordinate. We pride ourselves on delivering quality content, so we don't overcommit or cut corners to get it done. In general, our turnaround time is for each content type is: Brand Development: 4-12 weeks, Content Strategy: 5-6 weeks, Infographic: 4 weeks, Motion graphic: 4-8 weeks, Interactive: 5-10 weeks, E-book: 4-6 weeks, Live-action video: 6-12 weeks.

What does the client onboarding process look like?

Column Five emphasizes a partnership approach, integrating as an extension of your team to help you easily scale your marketing. Their process begins with a kickoff call to understand your brand heart (purpose, vision, mission, values), target audience, and goals, then an in-depth conversation to understand the deliverables and timeline. They believe in creative collaboration, active communication, and creating work that meets your goals and resonates with your market.

Who will I be working with at Column Five?

Our creative teams usually involve a producer, designer(s), art director, and account director. But, depending on the project, the team may be more involved. You might work with a mix of: Producer: Part project manager/part creative, producers are your point of contact. They keep the team on track, facilitate production, and often contribute to creative content. Designer(s): As the visual brains, designers lend their expertise in visual communication to make sure the idea is strong and executed effectively. Art Director: The AD oversees the creative execution, ensuring everything is of quality and on-brand. Account Director: Our Account Directors are the primary caretakers of our client relationships, ensuring engagements are running smoothly and all parties are satisfied. Editorial: This includes expert writers who will execute creative content. Developers: These are the pros who bring interactives and animation to life. Our team is distributed, but we're a well-oiled machine, so we keep things going even if we're working across timezones.

What does working with C5 cost?

We offer a variety of custom packages for your needs, ranging from $5,000-$20,000 minimums and more, depending on project requirements.

What are testimonials from Column Five's clients?

I can't sing higher praises about any agency I've worked with at IC or anywhere previously. They are the gold standard for being an extension of our team. — Amanda Smith, Instacart. Column Five is a collection of some of the smartest, most talented people that I've ever worked with. They have a unique superpower for taking your ideas and making them 50x better. Don't have any ideas? Don't worry. They do and they're better than yours anyway. —Keith Messick, Senior Vice President of Marketing. Working with C5 has been great. Not only are they lovely to work with, they are also quick. The fast response and project turnaround time makes them a true production partner for our design team. —Joyce Roan, Zendesk.

What are Column Five's notable case studies?

Go-to-Market Recruiting Strategy Increases Dropbox's Brand Perception 19%. A paid media strategy increases Teach For America's paid media goals 124%. A content strategy VideoAmp increases MQLs 850% in One Month.

Turn your brand story into a scalable content engine

Column Five is a B2B content marketing agency helping SaaS and AI companies find the story only they can tell — and build the content system that scales it without brand drift.

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In the Age of AI, the

Best Story Wins

Buyers aren’t coming to your website the way they used to. They’re asking AI, and getting a synthesis of everything the web says about you—shaping perception before you ever get a chance.

How AI understands your brand is now a proxy for how humans encounter you, too. Years of positioning experiments and fragmented messaging have left most brands with a scattered footprint.

The result is the Clarity Gap. When your story is unclear, AI captures the confusion, and so do humans. You’re either invisible, or you’re being summarized in ways you didn’t intend.

Closing the gap takes more than better content. It takes a system that codifies the story only you can tell and scales it everywhere without brand drift.

What We Do

We Build Brands Through Content

See Full Services

Story

We help you forge a unique perspective, then build recognition and trust by telling that story consistently across every touchpoint.

Strategy

We find the gap between your intended narrative and how the market actually sees you, then build an AI-enabled roadmap designed to close it.

System

We build the content system that codifies your brand and scales it consistently, connecting your visual and verbal foundation to AI-augmented production, governance, and operating rhythm.

Scale

We operate the system on your behalf, or work alongside your team to keep it tuned, so output compounds in quality and consistency, month after month.

Why Column Five

Brand clarity + systems thinking

We sharpen your POV, build the system that scales it, and operate it without drift.

Senior creatives who think, not just execute

Our team has spent fifteen years building brands for the most ambitious B2B SaaS and AI companies. That depth means we have the hard-won taste to know what great looks like.

Day one momentum

We've built our methodology to compress discovery, encode your brand quickly, and drive impact in week one, without sacrificing strategic depth

A system that gets sharper over time

Our work is a content system that compounds. Every piece of content makes the next one easier, on-brand, and more aligned with how you want to be known.

Work That Works

Some of our favorite work, for some of our favorite clients.

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Hubspot Ventures

A Venture Capital Rebrand to Establish Credibility among Martech Startups

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Instacart Commercial Campaign

A Multi-Channel Campaign at Scale: 115+ Consumer Assets in Two Weeks

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Fieldguide

An ABM Case Study in Launching Agentic AI for Audit and Advisory

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J.P. Morgan Payments

How an Account-Based Marketing Campaign Drove Growth for J.P. Morgan Payments

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Dropbox

A Brand Perception Case Study: How Dropbox Lifted Perception 19%

View more work

What Our Clients Say

“I can’t sing higher praises about any agency I’ve worked with at Instacart or anywhere previously. They are the gold standard for being an extension of our team.”

Amanda Smith

Amanda Smith, B2B Marketing Manager, Instacart

“Column Five is a collection of some of the smartest, most talented people that I’ve ever worked with. They have a unique superpower for taking your ideas and making them 50x better.”

Keith Messick

CMO, Vercel

“Working with C5 has been great. Not only are they lovely to work with but they are also quick. Their fast response and project turnaround time make them a true production partner for our design team.”

Joyce Roan

Brand Program Manager, Zendesk

“Column Five is responsive to our needs, and their attention and work feel very personalized to our organization and goals. They feel like a true partner in the work.”

Felice Belle

Director of Marketing and Communications, Narrative 4

“Column Five is a group of incredibly creative professionals with a wealth of knowledge and expertise, and I’ve been impressed by how comprehensively they have learned our industry, customers, and prospects.”

Mackenzie Pedroza

Senior Marketing Manager, Content Marketing, Intuit

FAQ

What makes Column Five different from other B2B content agencies?

Most agencies will produce content for you. Some will help you find your story. None do both while building the system that scales the story without brand drift. We sharpen your POV, encode it into a content system, and operate it on your behalf or alongside your team. The result is a brand that compounds in clarity and consistency over time, instead of fragmenting under pressure.

How much does it cost to work with Column Five?

Engagements range from a free Brand Visibility Scan to full content system implementations. Most clients start with a Foundation Sprint ($25K, 4 weeks) to sharpen narrative and assess readiness, then move into Content System Implementation ($60K–$150K, 8–16 weeks) and ongoing operation ($15K–$45K/month).

How is Column Five different from AEO agencies, design subscriptions, or in-house AI implementations?

AEO agencies optimize content for AI discovery without first asking whether your story is worth scaling. Design subscriptions produce assets without understanding your brand. In-house AI implementations are how 95% of these initiatives fail — most teams underestimate what governance, integration, and methodology actually require. We sit upstream of the tools and the tactics, building the system that makes everything else work.

What types of companies does Column Five work with?

We work with B2B SaaS and AI companies. Typically they are well-funded Series A through IPO and strong marketing leadership. Our clients include Instacart, Databricks, Vercel, HubSpot, and Uber, and span martech, fintech, cybersecurity, and AI infrastructure.

Can we start with a small project before committing to a retainer?

Yes. The Brand Visibility Scan is free and automated: a five-minute diagnostic of how AI and humans currently encounter your brand. From there, the Foundation Sprint ($25K, 4 weeks) is the typical entry point for clients ready to do real work. Most clients move from Foundation Sprint into Content System Implementation, but you can stop after the sprint if it’s not the right fit.

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