The Dangers of Falling in Love with Your Own Content Ideas

Back in 2008, LifeLock CEO Todd Davis decided to prove how effective his company’s security measures were by publishing his own social security number in their marketing content.

You’ll be amazed to hear that this was not a good idea.

Davis’ ID was stolen no less than 13 times. Davis was thoroughly robbed, and then — adding insult to injury — sued for false advertising, to the tune of $12 million.

But bad marketing ideas are not always so obviously bad. Sometimes, they look smart, fresh, fun.

And part of creating original content is taking the risk that not every piece is going to land with your readers.

So, how do you find the line between being imaginative and being strategic with your content?

We asked the experts:

• Louis Grenier, founder of Stand The F*ck Out and former Content Manager at Hotjar
• Sara Lattanzio, Head of Marketing at Stryber
• Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs
• Trish Seidel, Director of Brand Content at Teal
• Ashley Cummings, founder of Searchlight Content
• Rielle Lee, Content Marketing Manager at Microsoft
• Tyler Hakes, Strategy Director and Principal at Optimist
• Rachel Bicha, Content Writer & SEO Consultant

Here’s how they do it.

Overindex on audience research

“Deciding what content to write all boils down to knowing your audience,” says Ashley Cummings. Without that deep understanding of what topics will land with your target market, you run the risk of creating beautiful content that nobody wants.

For Trish Seidel, that knowledge alone can help you avoid the trap: “I truly believe if you know your ICP, then you shouldn't need to "check" your ideas at all. If you know what they're Googling, what they're searching for, what they like on socials, then any instinct you have is probably the right one.”

That said, if you are in any doubt, then our experts recommend running content ideas and approaches past your audience before going all in. If Rielle Lee and her team are working on a new content project, and feel unsure about content-audience fit, they “conduct new research surveys, poll our socials, and ask our customer advisory board to see if the topic is something that would actually be beneficial for them and what potential format would be easiest for them to consume it.”

But make sure you ask the right questions

Of course, that doesn’t mean simply going to your audience and saying, “What do you think about this content idea?” People are polite, and will tell you what you want to hear.

As Louis Grenier points out: “There's always a balance, a tension between giving something that people want and doing something that lifts us. You don't want to go too far in any direction because (1) People don't really know what they want and (2) You don't want to lose them either.”

Instead, Rielle suggests that you identify the pain points the topic speaks to, and ask your audience about their experiences around that pain point, how important it is to their processes, how much time, effort and resources they spend on it, and where they would look for solutions normally.

For instance, let’s say you’re creating a content series about sales coaching tools. Assuming you have a large, engaged audience, you could apply Rielle’s approach by identifying the core pain points and engaging your audience with a relevant LinkedIn post to check your assumptions before you get stuck into the series.

Here’s an example post to show you what we mean:

“How much time do you waste on admin, when you’d rather be coaching your reps?

Our data showed that most sales managers are spending 16 hours a week on data entry.

That’s a crazy waste of one of the most valuable assets your company has.

I’m curious, does this come up for you? Do you feel like you’re wasting time on admin? If someone waved a magic wand and gave that time back to you, what would you do with it?”

If the post gets high traction, it suggests that you’ve identified a pain point that resonates with your audience. The comments should give you some ideas of areas you should focus the content series on, and hopefully also a sense of the scale and severity of the problem.

In essence, take a leaf out of the product developers’ playbook. To quote Daniel Kyne, founder of research tool OpinionX, “We’re not really looking to “validate an idea” at all — instead, we’re trying to discover a high-priority problem we can solve.”

No access to audience chatter? Go back to first principles

If you don’t have easy access to your audience through social media, you may have to look for proxy measures to confirm content-audience fit.

For example, Sara Stella Lattanzio heads up content at Stryber, a professional services firm with a market that isn’t very active online.

Instead of conducting online research to sense-check content ideas, she runs through a process of defining the business priorities and the goal of the content, and then confirming that the content idea fits her team’s areas of expertise. “Everyone wants to talk about AI to make noise, but do you actually sell AI? Are you really an AI expert? Well, if not, probably pick another topic, right? It doesn't matter if it's trending.”

Hold yourself accountable to your own strategy

In essence, it’s about remembering your content strategy. Tyler Hakes points out that your content strategy is there for precisely this reason — to stop you from falling in love with shiny new content objects. Too many teams, he says, either confuse strategy with planning or tactics, or are unwilling to actually stick to their own strategy, “to sacrifice ideas that may be exciting but don’t align with the overall focus of the team or the business.”

“Slack’s engineers could get really excited about making video games instead of work software. But they don’t do that because it doesn’t align with their overall business strategy. The same general logic applies to content.”

Create minimum viable content

Of course, sometimes a content idea really does fall into a grey area — it’s not clear if you’re a genius or just throwing spaghetti at the wall.

In that case, Ryan Law suggests, “Make the smallest possible version of it. See what happens. Spend more time and money if it does well. There's a limit to the usefulness of theorizing about performance.”

Rachel Bicha gave examples of this approach in action:

“Will it boost our social media engagement long term if we do a contest to send someone on a free trip to Bali? Let’s do a contest first where we give someone $100 off their next flight. Oh, that worked really well! Ok, let’s find a sponsor to partner with us for the Bali idea.

“We would often run a small content series on Instagram or our newsletter before committing to a big content project that would live on our blog or website. It was a great way to test appetite and content-audience fit before expanding the scale.”

Use creativity for formats and tactics — but stay on message

Stella points out that “being creative” doesn’t mean you need to suddenly start talking about topics or building resources that aren’t in your wheelhouse. For content to make strategic sense, it needs to reflect your unique informational advantages and your product positioning — so, even if you do jump on a trending topic, you should always “be able to tie it back to your own point of view and your own experience.”

The real opportunities for creativity, she explains, lie in the format and quality of your output — without straying off message in an attempt to be original.

Be prepared to take calculated risks

That said, Morgan Short points out that what often kills great content isn’t a lack of audience fit. It’s a lack of risk-taking: “More often than not, the problem I run into is actually yes, it has good audience fit, yes, it aligns with our strategy and feels really fresh and cool. But then it never sees the light of day.”

This usually comes down to a lack of buy-in, or a poorly defined list of stakeholders. Morgan’s advice is to "ensure that everyone who needs to sign off is identified right away at the beginning of the process, bought into the vision from the start. Obviously, there might be a little bit more upfront work to do that, but in the end, if everyone's aligned with the strategy, then your idea is going to have a better chance of seeing the light of day.”

Once you’ve got that buy-in, it may well be worth taking a chance on a more imaginative content approach, says Trish.

“There is nothing wrong with having an innovative idea, and it ‘flopping.’ The only way you will know for "sure" if something will work is by following others who have done it first, and that's not what innovating is about. Take the calculated risk, go with your full heart, and see what happens.”

There are ways to reduce the potential downside of taking a punt on a new content idea that might not land, Ryan Law says:

“Prioritize ideas that offer benefits even if they fail in their main goal — teach your team something, create a template for future work, make something useful for your sales team. The more potential upsides to a piece, the lower the risk of absolute failure.”

Be pragmatic

On the flipside, you have to be realistic about your team’s capacity and acknowledge the opportunity costs of the more experimental approach. Stella points out that fun experiments tend to suck up a lot of time, revision rounds, and budget. When forced to choose between a sexy new content idea, and something “more immediately tied to your audience,” she says her own choice is usually to “focus on the most important things.”

Rielle agrees: “A lot of it also boils down to logistics. Does it fit into an overall campaign that we're already supporting? Do we have the resources to commit to creation and distribution? What's the long-term plan for supporting this content (to make sure it isn't just a random act of marketing that eventually gets forgotten)?”

Making creativity work means balancing ambition with reality. When you pair bold ideas with strategy and a clear sense of your team’s capacity, you’re more likely to create content that hits the mark without burning out your resources.

For best results, pair creativity with strategy

At Relato, we know how easy it is to fall in love with a bold idea, and how hard it can be to let go when it’s not landing. That’s why we’ve built tools to keep content teams grounded and audience-focused.

We believe that creativity shines brightest when paired with strategy. By simplifying workflows and making quick feedback accessible, we help you stay aligned with what your audience needs — without stifling your team’s creative spark.

Because at the end of the day, impactful content isn’t about the biggest or boldest idea. It’s about the right idea, delivered at the right time, to the right people.