You don't have a content strategy (you just have a content person...)

Early in my consulting work, I'd occasionally get pulled into a client engagement with a quiet secondary assignment.

The marketing leader: "Hey, while you're in there, we'd love your read on our content person. We're not sure they're the right fit. Take some time with them. Let us know what you think."

I'd ask some clarifying questions and say, "of course."

And if I'm being honest, I'd go into those first conversations with the content person already leaning toward confirmation.

Let me find out what's wrong with this person.

After this happened a few times, a pattern emerged. Just not the one I was expecting.

The content person was only occasionally the problem

What I kept finding instead: someone doing their best with almost nothing to work with.

• No editorial direction
• No cross-functional buy-in
• No clarity on what the content was actually supposed to accomplish or for whom.

They'd tell me things like:

• "I don't really know what our story is, so I default to what we've always done."
• "Leadership will come in with an idea they saw a competitor doing and that becomes the priority for the next few weeks."
• "I feel like I'm underperforming, but I don't know what performing would even look like."

They'd share these things with me in a way they clearly hadn't been comfortable sharing internally.

The content person wasn't failing. They were improvising.

Live look at any content "person" operating without a strategy.

What the marketing leader thinks they're hiring

Let's back up to where I see the problem originating.

When marketing leaders are looking to hire a content person, they're usually trying to solve two things at once:

1. The strategic problem:
   1. "Our content is forgettable."
   2. "We're not getting the most of all the stuff we're creating, like webinars, etc."
   3. "Our teams aren't collaborating."
   4. "The voice of the customer and/or internal expertise isn't represented."
2. The execution problem:
   1. "We need a content marketer to deliver, i.e. write, create, etc."

One hire. Two strategic problems.

I get it — it's an appealing idea. Bring in someone who can make the content feel more alive and serve as the connective tissue between growth, brand, demand gen, and leadership.

The problem is that those aren't content execution problems. They're strategy problems. And strategy isn't something a content person can invent on their own. It has to exist above them first.

When it doesn't, they do what any reasonable person would do: they fill slots. They check boxes. They blog.

What the output actually looks like

You can usually spot a content program without a strategy pretty quickly.

The blog reads like it could belong to any company in the space. Pull the logo off and hand it to a competitor and nobody would notice.

Nothing is sparking conversations. The content isn't showing up in sales calls, on social, in customer conversations.

And internally? Other teams don't feel represented.

• The growth team spent three months producing a webinar series with real, meaty insights...and then it just... died.
• The brand team has a podcast going. The content team has no idea it exists.
• Everyone's doing their own thing in their own lane.
• There's ZERO connective tissue.

The marketing leader senses something is off. They can feel the disconnect. They just can't name it.

So they look at the content person.

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The thing nobody names

Content strategy and content execution are two completely different jobs.

When you hire a content person without a strategy already in place, you're essentially asking them to be an individual contributor and a department head simultaneously.

You're asking them to be responsible for doing the work and for building the program that governs the work.

It's not realistic. And it's not how any other function inside a company operates.

• You don't hire a sales rep and expect them to build the CRM, define the ICP, and write the playbook.
• You don't hire an engineer and expect them to set the product roadmap.

At some point, someone with authority and context has to make the strategic decisions that let the individual contributor actually do their job.

Content is the exception for some reason. And then everyone's surprised when the content feels generic and undifferentiated.

What changes when you build the program first

Here's what I've seen happen when a team actually puts a content strategy in place around the content person they already have.

That same person (the one leadership was quietly thinking about replacing) becomes the hero.

When there's a shared editorial narrative built around the team's real experiences and expertise, the content stops feeling generic. There's something defensible to build around that nobody else can say.

When there's a quarterly theme everyone's working toward, the content person stops guessing. Other teams stop operating in their own lanes. There's a reason to talk to each other.

When teams plan their work far enough in advance that content can actually see it, nothing gets wasted. Work that used to disappear gets surfaced, repurposed, extended.

When there's an editorial roadmap tying it all together, the content person isn't just executing. They're the connective tissue. Other teams feel represented. Leadership sees their thinking reflected back.

The content person didn't change. The conditions around them did.

A content person without a program is just someone doing their best in the dark.

Most of the time, that's not a hiring problem. It's a strategy problem.

And strategy isn't their job to invent.