Your content is doing too much (and yet, not enough)
Let me take you inside a conversation I have, in some form, from time to time...
- Me: Do you have a newsletter?
- Them: Yeah, we do actually.
- Me: Nice. How often does it go out?
- Them: Once a month.
- Me: That's a start. When was the last issue?
- Them: ...Probably six weeks ago? Maybe two months. I'd have to check.
I have some version of this conversation on discovery calls when I'm trying to get a feel for the lay of the land of a company's content program.
And, it's never just the newsletter. It can also be...
- The LinkedIn thought leadership initiative that's sporadic at best.
- The podcast sitting at seven episodes from 8 months ago.
- The interview series that never got off the ground.
- The blog that publishes whenever someone has bandwidth.
From the outside, it looks like a discipline or a bandwidth problem.
It's not that. Well, it's not just that...
The real problem is silo'd content efforts
Here's what I usually find when I dig in.
The content team usually has an output number to hit.
- 12 blog posts this quarter
- 8 webinars
- 3ish newsletters
- X number of weekly social posts
- An AEO initiative
- A thought leadership program for the exec team
Every one of those is a legitimate priority somebody asked for.
But each one is its own job. Its own editorial calendar. Its own meeting. Its own blank page every single week.
Blank page syndrome is ugly. It often sounds like...
- "I'm not sure what to write about in the newsletter this week..."
- "I haven't booked our next podcast guests yet..."
- "I haven't gotten any time with [exec] for the next batch of LinkedIn posts..."
Blank page syndrome combined with an output number to hit is even uglier. It not only leads to undifferentiated content (more on that later), it also prevents and suppresses other otherwise good content.
For example, when the growth team publishes a webinar that took three months to produce — with real experts, real data, genuinely useful stuff — the content team isn't in a position to do much with it.
Not because they don't care. Because it doesn't map to that growing list of priorities.
They feel like they're already behind on the things they're supposed to be doing.
Because going back and doing something with last month's webinar feels like extra credit when you're still failing the regular tests.
And then the CMO wonders why nobody did anything with the webinar...
And the content team wonders why nobody appreciates how much they're doing...
And both of them are right.
What the content looks like...
Generic. Forgettable. Undifferentiated.
The kind you could rip the logo off of, hand to a competitor, and nobody would know the difference.
Not because the content person isn't good. Because they're trying to create across too many channels with no connective tissue.
- No shared editorial narrative that narrows the focus from a strategic and thematic standpoint.
- No editorial themes that narrow the focus from a channel and topic standpoint.
- No content anchor (like a newsletter or research report or podcast or video series) that provides the raw material that can be transposed into content in the other mediums you care about.
You're starting from zero everywhere every single time you conceptualize new content.
You publish what you can, move on, and do it again next week.
That's almost impossible to keep up with and even more impossible to experience value from.
What changes when there's something connecting it all
I want to be clear: the fix isn't doing less.
The teams I've seen turn this around aren't publishing less content. They're often publishing more.
The fix is having one narrative layer that everything runs through.
- A shared editorial narrative built around the team's real expertise and point of view.
- Quarterly editorial themes everyone's working toward.
- An anchor — a webinar series, a report, a podcast — that the rest of the content can actually build from.
When that's in place, something shifts pretty fast.
The first thing I notice is that people get excited. Not "we have a new initiative" excited. Actually excited. Because they're not staring at a blank page anymore. They have a direction. They have something to work from.
I was working with one client where we spent a few sessions developing their editorial narrative together — pulling in people from across the marketing team to help shape it. By the end, people were firing off ideas. I could write about this. We could bring someone on the show to talk about that. We could tie this quarter's webinar series to this.
The second thing I notice is that teams start talking to each other who never did before.
I was on a call recently with someone from the growth team and someone from the brand team — two people who operated almost entirely in separate lanes. We'd just finished landing on a shared editorial narrative. I backed off and just watched. They started riffing. The brand team person offered to be a guest on the growth team's webinar. They were throwing out angles, building on each other's ideas.
All because they finally had something to riff around.
The math changes, too
Here's the part that surprises people.
One good anchor (a quarterly webinar, a research report, a podcast, a video series) doesn't just produce one piece of content.
It can also produce:
- 6 LinkedIn posts
- 2 or 3 deep-dive blog posts
- A newsletter issue or two
- Video clips for social.
All of it built from content and insights that already exist.
You're not starting from scratch. You already have the outline. You already have the material. You're just adapting it for each medium.
The teams that do this aren't publishing less. They're usually producing more. But it feels like less, because they're not reinventing the wheel every single week. The quality is also usually higher because the content is built on real expertise, real conversations, real insight. The kind only your team could produce.
That's the thing about trying to do too many disconnected things at once. It doesn't just make the work harder.
It makes the work worse.