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Old content sits in your CMS and seems technically fine, but it’s quietly working against you. It can hurt your brand, waste money, and limit the impact of your best marketing campaigns.

Storyblok just found the real cost of unmanaged content — and why treating it as something you can simply create and forget can hurt your bottom line.

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Not to buy, to have.

If you wanted to say something useful about pipeline or positioning, you had to run the play yourself, or interview someone who did, or at least sit in the room when it went sideways. That was the price of admission.

Then ChatGPT dropped the price to zero.

Anyone with a decent prompt can now produce a competent 1,200-word post on any topic before lunch. Which means the content your team is grinding out every week — accurate, helpful, on-brand, well-formatted — is worth about what it costs to replicate. Not much.

Buyers figured this out before your marketing strategies did. They're not just reading to learn anymore. They're reading to decide who to trust.

So when a VP of Marketing calls me and says, "We're publishing constantly, but nothing's landing," I don't start with the calendar (because it's never a calendar issue).

I start with: After someone reads this, do they believe anything they didn't believe before?

Anything new? Anything… different?

Almost always, no. Because

Every company creates content. Almost no one creates believers.

Before I fix anything, I look at what they're doing today. And I almost never find a talent problem or a budget problem.

I find these same 5 red flags — and they’re more dangerous than people realize.

This is BY FAR the most common culprit.

There's been a lotta noise (or "insight," depending on how you look at it) about how buying committees are getting bigger, and sales processes are more complex. All true.

So the decision quickly becomes: we have to speak to the whole committee. And the personas pile up. One day it's the CRO. The next day it's the CFO. Then it's sales enablement.

But eleven people in the sales cycle doesn't mean eleven people in your content strategy. It means one of them has to care enough to bring the other ten.

I've worked with SaaS companies that, despite my pleading, changed their core persona three times in 5 months. Before you know it, you've got five or seven ICPs you're trying to speak to, all at once, with a marketing team so understaffed and confused that they can barely keep up with one.

They don't know who they sell to, so how can the market??

Here's a quick way to check. Pull your last twenty published pieces and write down the single job title each one was written for. Not who might find it interesting — who it was aimed at. If you end up with more than two, you don't have ICPs. You have a wishlist.

And the cost of that wishlist doesn't show up anywhere in your analytics. Writing for five people means writing at a level of generality where none of the five ever feels addressed. The CFO reads it and thinks this is fine, but this isn't for me. So does everybody else.

The other version of this: you only have one or two ICPs, but you don't really understand them. You're not clear on what their world looks like, what their real problems are, or how they're trying to solve them.

Either you're spread too thin, or you're not going deep enough.

Pick one. Maybe two. Then accept that the rest simply are not the priority this year.

When I'm doing an audit, I always ask the client to send me recent content, usually the stuff they consider top-performing. (But honestly, they probably wouldn't have hired me if it were truly performing.)

What I get back is almost always helpful. Accurate, well-organized, genuinely useful. And completely interchangeable.

That's the (harmful) belief in action: if it's helpful, it's valuable. Which was true for about a decade. Helpful used to be scarce, but not anymore.

There's an old advertising test for this: Cover the logo. If the work could belong to anyone, it belongs to no one.

Try it on your last three pieces — strip the byline and the product mentions and hand them to someone on your sales team. If they can't tell you who published it, your buyer can't either.

I got on a call this summer with the head of growth at a finance newsletter. They have 210,000 engaged subscribers, real brand-partner revenue on top of it, and genuinely useful content going out twice a week.

But their click-through on their sponsor placements swung from 0.6% to 2.8% with no pattern anyone could explain. All that audience, but they can't reliably get people to do one thing.

That's what readers look like when they aren't believers. They open, they take the information, but they owe you nothing.

You're a resource, not a relationship.

The fix isn't better information, because there's no such thing anymore. It's a perspective attached to a person. A take somebody could argue with. A story from inside the work that a model can't write because it wasn't there.

What's your take on this trend?
What's the connection you see that others don't?
What's a story from your experience that makes this relatable?

Same = forgettable.
Different = memorable.

This one's surprisingly common: most folks don't have a documented content strategy.

AKA we do content, but we don't have a plan that we’ve all agreed on.

So their topic selection gets reactive. One week, it's product-focused. That is, until the CEO pings them and says, "Hey, our competitor just did a podcast on token spend management. How come we don't talk about it?"

So now you're chasing competitors instead of setting your own direction. (And you don't even sell token spend management software!)

You know you're in trouble if I open your last four weeks of content and can't finish this sentence: this company believes ___.

If I can't, neither can your market.

And confused prospects don't spend money.

That's the part that stings, because scattered content never fails loudly. Every individual piece might perform fine. The failure shows up 6 months later when there's a Grand Canyon-sized delta between pipeline goals and actuals.

We all have busier lives and access to more content than ever. So you want guardrails.

That doesn't mean you can't newsjack or jump on trends. But you need to be playing one beat, all year long.

One drum that points to one core idea. And 90% of your content should ladder up to that.

I'm working on this exact problem right now.

Someone hired a GEO agency. They're actually making great content.

But what happens next?

They post the blog on their website. Maybe make a corporate LinkedIn post. That's it.

So now they've got all this good content sitting in a place where people aren't actively spending time. (Because no matter how lovely your updated resource center looks, no one is going to your website to get information.)

Nobody says if we build it, they'll come out loud anymore. Everybody still budgets like it's true — 90% of the money goes to production and whatever's left goes to getting anyone to see it.

I described this on a call recently as throwing a block party. You put in the pool, you repaint the deck, you get the yard exactly right. Then you don't send a single invitation and stand there wondering where everyone is.

You've got to meet people where they are. You need to appear on their LinkedIn feeds, inboxes, and webinar rotations.

Otherwise, your team is investing $10K+ per month on content silos instead of getting more ROI from your content investment.

So make the time to repurpose your greatest hits. You spent all this time developing a smart framework to solve an urgent problem. Why not turn that into 10 LinkedIn posts? Why not make it a webinar, a keynote, or a podcast tour?

“One and done” is a silent killer. Don’t let it get you.

The biggest skill gap I see is creative marketers who don't understand how their work connects to business outcomes.

Let's just take webinars as an example. I'll ask, "Why are you doing them? Why does the number of registrations need to grow 20% quarter-over-quarter?"

Do you know your attendance rate? Let's say it's 25%. Cool. What's your MQL rate? What's your conversion rate from MQL to opportunity? What's your ACV?

I've asked that question dozens of times and gotten the full chain back maybe twice. The silence that follows is the most useful thirty seconds in any audit I run.

If you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business.

And when you can't see the cascade, the only lever left is volume. So you pull it. More webinars, more content, more stuff — without knowing why or what it's driving. Volume has never once won a market.

If you're doing content that doesn't have a direct ROI, fine. But you need to tie it to what I call the "CEO slide."

Every year, the CEO gets up and says, "Here are the four or five strategic priorities this year." Perfect. Tie your content to one of those. Then share metrics that show some form of impact, like growth over time, changes in market sentiment, audience growth, and/or conversions. Something that says, "This matters."

Doing more is the most expensive way to avoid deciding what you stand for.

(Read that again)

Every team I've audited was drowning in output because deciding is uncomfortable and publishing is easy.

One ICP means telling four other groups they don't matter this year.
One drum means passing on the trend your CEO forwarded you at 11pm.

Those are conversations you have to have out loud, with people who will push back

That's all a content strategy really is — deciding how you’re going to use content to win, so nobody re-litigates them every Monday.

Have those conversations. Then publish half as much, but mean all of it.

Because nobody remembers the company that was helpful. They remember the companies they believe.

If you're publishing constantly and still can't point to one thing your market believes because of you, that's what I'd fix first.

Book a call with me and we'll figure out what you actually stand for, then build the engine that says it every week — so you can make your competitors envious and your CEO proud.

Holler at you next Saturday,
Devin

Pen by Devin Reed​
​Founder, The Reeder​

Follow me on LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram | TikTok

This is a case study in what slips through approval when nobody stops to ask "how does this land outside the room we made it in?"

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