Why Content strategies fail

I didn’t think I’d be able to write this article.

I mean, come on. Getting B2B content leaders to open up about how they f*cked up? And not in a small, tactical way—but about the strategy behind the tactics?

Yeah…I was pretty sure nobody would talk to me about that. And then I’d fail spectacularly in my attempt to write an article about failure. How meta.

Luckily for me, content people are awesome. So I somehow managed to talk some real heavy hitters of the content world into ‘fessing up about the times when it all went wrong.

Read on to learn from:

• Ryan Baum, 2 x Content Lead turned Content Consultant
• Tommy Walker, Founder of the Content Studio, first marketing hire at Shopify Plus
• Mary Scott Manning, Senior Content Manager at Domo
• Halah Flynn, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Lattice
• Katie Norris, former Content Lead at Adyen, now B2B Content Creator
• Penny Warnock, Content Marketer at Contentoo
• Ben Goodey, SEO Consultant & Founder of Spicy Margarita SEO

…and many more. They shared how they failed, why they failed—and, most importantly, what we can all learn from their hard-won experience.

Not to ask an obvious question but—what is content strategy?

Before we can get into how content strategy fails, we’d probably better agree on our definition of a content strategy. As Fio Dossetto, the Content Lead at Float, points out, strategy is one of those “black hole words” that “can mean everything, and therefore ultimately end up meaning nothing at all.”

As a freelance writer, I know this intimately. Ask prospective clients about their content strategy, and many will talk about tactics, content calendars, or a wishlist of outcomes. Small wonder that Tommy Walker’s State of Discontent survey found over 40% of content marketers struggling with a “lack of strategy”—we don’t even all agree about what a strategy is.

Here’s my best attempt at a working definition:

A content strategy is a guiding framework that defines why we are creating content, who it’s for, what content we create, how we distribute it, and what outcomes we are pursuing.

To paraphrase Dimitri Glazkov’s excellent article, “What Does It Mean to Be Strategic?”, our strategy is the connection between our intention (why we’re creating content in the first place) and our outcomes (what our content did.)

Coming up with a content strategy means:

• Defining where we’re trying to get to (our intention)
• Diagnosing how we can get there from here (our hypothesis)
• Using that diagnosis to create a documented plan that outlines what we’re working on, why, and how you’ll measure your results (the strategy)
• Implementing actions to drive towards that plan (the tactics)
• Evaluating the outcomes of those actions to see if they did produce the results we wanted

A good content strategy, then, is simply a plan that delivers the outcomes that match our intentions.

And, while we’re here—what is a failed content strategy?

I don’t really love the term failure. Marketing, at its core, is about experimentation. You come up with a hypothesis about which actions will drive the results you want. You test the hypothesis, and you see how it goes. Then you learn.

As Mary Scott Manning puts it, failure is a “tool”, not a “verdict.” Strategies fall short all the time—but if you use the failure as a way to learn what to do differently, then it becomes useful learning.

Tommy Walker explains, “There are two levels of [failure]. One, things didn’t go the way that you wanted them to. But then the second part, the actual failure, is when you don’t do a post-mortem to reevaluate what it was that went wrong.”

In content, the only true failure is a failure to learn from your mistakes.

So, if strategic failure is inherently an opportunity for learning, then why is it so hard to talk about?

The stakes are high.

As Tommy Walker puts it, “A strategy is about how your brain pieces together the puzzle. And if it turns out that you spent all this time putting the puzzle together wrong, there’s a huge ego hit to that. And the more people that are involved, the more of an idiot you feel.”

Content people don’t feel very safe at the moment.

Failure is necessary. But admitting to failure requires psychological safety. And, as Walker’s recent “State of (Dis)content” survey clearly shows, content people are feeling pretty insecure right about now:

• More than 25% of content marketers report that their leadership is indifferent to, skeptical of, or dismissive about content.
• 56% report a lack of resources.
• 25% are worried about layoffs and budget cuts.

And, as Walker points out, “If your buy-in is so low in the first place, then, at the first hint of [a strategy] not working, then you've got a whole group of people being like, “Told you so.”

That makes it particularly impressive that some of these content experts were prepared to share their own hard-won lessons, so the rest of us can avoid the same pitfalls. Here’s what they told me.

The reasons content strategies fail, according to the experts—and how to avoid them

Quick preamble: frankly, most content strategies fail because of the context in which content happens. They fail because content teams are pulled in a million directions at once, and don’t have time to execute on the strategy.

They fail because content is measured on leads, but then judged on revenue. They fail because content lacks budget and buy-in. They fail because leadership is playing politics, or is just plain ignorant about how content works.

And that’s all true—but it isn’t very helpful.

Avoiding content strategy failure starts by taking ownership of what you can control—whether that’s building processes to avoid “too many cooks,” proactively securing leadership buy-in, or making a business case for audience research. If there’s one thing that all my sources told me, it’s that we have more power than we think.

OK, enough blurb—let’s get to the confessional. Why do content strategies fail—and what do the experts suggest that we do about it?

Forgetting the audience

Even Tommy Walker fell into the trap of neglecting audience research when he launched his own course. His recent seminar didn’t initially get the signups he was hoping for. He puts this failure down to a lack of market research. While he’d done extensive audience research for his brand as a whole, he didn’t revisit that research before launching the new product.

Tommy Walker on LinkedIn

Image source

Walker certainly isn’t alone in forgetting about the audience. Again, the recent State of Discontent survey saw over 40% of content professionals confessing that they weren’t doing nearly enough audience research.

Image source

Learning: Treat audience research as standard.

We know the best content comes from a deep understanding of our audience. And yet many of us aren’t carving out time to do it. Walker posits three theories as to why:

• We’re too swamped.
• We aren’t allowed.
• We don’t know how.

All of that may be true, and solving those challenges is probably beyond the scope of this article. But a simple place to start might simply be to build talking to customers into the day-to-day of content creation and ideation, suggests Fio Dossetto:

“In sports, you have to stretch, you have to warm up, or you’re going to hurt yourself. Why don’t you, as a marketer, have to spend time answering customer calls or interviewing customers as a thing that allows you not to hurt yourself later?”

Falling in love with an idea

As content creators, we know all about killing our darlings, as the saying goes. But as strategists, we need to have the same level of discipline.

As a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Lattice, Halah Flynn works on one of the most successful content programs out there. But that doesn’t mean that every content strategy works, every time.

“We ran a sports-focused campaign to draw parallels between high-performing sports teams and HR's pressure to drive high performance in the workplace. The idea was that partnering with sports teams would give us some high-level recognition at exciting events like professional sports games. But in practice, it was a lot harder to connect those dots for HR teams working outside the sports industry,” explains Flynn.

“The content itself turned out great (dynamic, bold, meaningful stories), and our partnerships with the teams remain strong, but it hasn't been as effective as we'd hoped with the audience we were trying to reach.”

Learning: Prioritize content-audience fit.

For Flynn, the biggest takeaway was “the importance of listening to the audience instead of chasing something exciting.” Lattice’s strong suit as a content team comes down to a deep understanding of their audience.

Andy Przystanski, also a Senior Content Manager at Lattice, once told me that his team are “avid lurkers of Lattice's online Slack community, Resources for Humans, and always have a pulse on what People teams are grappling with week to week. If you have an equivalent community you can tap into, take full advantage of that.”

While the sports-focused content concept they came up with was fun, moving away from that deep audience connection meant that it didn’t hit their desired outcomes.

That said, while this particular experiment didn’t turn out the way the team hoped, I suspect that having a content function with the budget and buy-in to experiment with bold new strategies is correlative with Lattice’s impressive organic traffic numbers.

Assuming what worked for one audience will work for another

Mary Scott Manning once took a content strategy that had been “ a runaway success story” when she’d applied it at a similar company, and brought it over to a new organization. The content they created “was beautiful—and it bombed. The returns we got just didn’t end up justifying the large investment made.”

Yeah, ouch.

Learning: Content is more context-dependent than you might think.

Manning’s mistake was to make the reasonable assumption that a strategy that worked for one audience would work for another, similar audience. But, she says, “Content doesn’t succeed based on its format alone, and a great content format can’t necessarily be copy/pasted from one client to another, even if they’re in similar industries.”

Her original strategy was successful because it was built on a solid foundation, “a combination of brand, community, and mission—not just format.” Choosing a format is a tactic, not a strategy—and without the basis of a solid strategy, even the most gorgeous content is likely to flop.

Chasing the wrong goal (or an impossible goal)

Choose an unrealistic, unhelpful, or unaligned goal, and you’ll run into avoidable failure over and over again.

Some different scenarios here:

The goal was unrealistic.

“The most common example” of content failure, says Ryan Baum, is a strategy that “drives results in the right direction, but not enough to pass the agreed-upon goal.” That might be because, while the strategy was good, you fell apart on implementation. Or, as Baum points out, your goal may have been “simply made up, as it often is in SaaS companies.”

Of his own failures, Baum says, “I have been measured against (and denied promotions due to) made-up numbers, more than once. It is completely demoralizing from day one of the new quarter—if you're a manager, don't do this sh*t to your reports.”

The goal didn’t align with the business outcome you needed.

In an article on SEO mistakes, Ryan Law recalls absolutely smashing his traffic goals—and then realizing that this wasn’t necessarily good news:

“My biggest SEO fail was building our tiny (four-person) company blog to 1M monthly pageviews with tons of irrelevant skyscraper content, auto-generating PDF versions of every article, collecting thousands of emails and absolutely drowning our solo sales guy in terrible, terrible leads without a hope of ever converting. Learned the hard way that high traffic does not a business make.”

The strategy delivered a great result—just not the goal you wanted.

“Depending on how attribution is worked out internally, you could blow your goal out of the water—driving customers for another team's channel,” says Ryan Baum.

“This is a net positive for the business, but it doesn't show up on your dashboard or #wins channel shoutouts. Companies handle this in different ways, and it's a major reason for misaligned incentives through attribution, which causes strategic issues and tends to be a culture killer.”

Learning: Set realistic goals that align with business outcomes.

Jimmy Daly, CEO of Superpath, advises against setting unrealistic “stretch goals” that “kill morale and send a team scrambling to hit a goal that should never have been set in the first place.” In his article “Is your content strategy working?” Daly suggests breaking ambitious content goals down with shorter-term milestones and looking for positive trends, rather than a 100% hit rate.

“Every content strategy needs to leave some room for content that just doesn’t work,” he explains. “Shoot for 80% of new content to “work”—and shoot for content that can serve double-duty (i.e. rank for a keyword and be included in a lifecycle email).”

And, crucially, set goals that align with the amount of time you have available. “You need to know how much time you have. You can’t build a strong organic presence in two months, but you likely could in 12 months.” In other words, your organic content strategy hasn’t “failed” if you haven’t built a strong presence in 6 months—assuming that you’re seeing an upward trend in key markers like MoM organic growth.

📖 Want more tips on setting meaningful content goals? Check our guide to measuring the ROI of content.

Failing to define ownership

I think anyone working in content is familiar with the experience of ‘death by too many cooks.’ You might have a great strategy, but you’ll never know. Because, when you’re trying to implement that strategy, you keep getting dragged back to the drawing board.

“There’s nothing worse than being on what you think is a final version and suddenly a comment appears in the doc from a totally new person saying: ‘Why are we writing this piece?’” says Katie Norris, former content lead at Adyen turned content consultant.

Learning: Establish stakeholders in advance—and defend your boundaries

At Adyen, after one too many stakeholder implosions, they established a “pretty tight process,” explains Norris:

“For any given content program, there was a marketing stakeholder who acted as an interface between the content team and the product team (plus any other stakeholder that might loom). It was their responsibility to ensure everyone was onboard and felt included at the right moments.”

A more formal alternative is the RACI matrix—a framework that specifies who is Responsible for the content (usually the creator), who is Accountable (aka the decider), who needs to be Consulted (other teams, such as product or legal) and who needs to be Informed. Setting this up in advance makes a clear statement about where the ownership of the content—and the responsibility for its success or failure—really lies.

Dabbling

Penny Warnock, a content marketer at Contentoo, recalls “testing out a new channel, but not creating a dedicated plan/strategy for it. This was due to time and capacity constraints, but meant we never got the traction that I know we could have if we had dedicated more time and attention.”

Warnock certainly isn’t the only content marketer who underestimated the lift of implementing strategy on a new channel. In particular, many content marketers overlook the need for someone with channel-specific knowledge involved in developing the strategy in the first place, says Tommy Walker:

“A lot of companies will do this. They'll spend money to get a couple of YouTube videos out the door, and they think it's just the quality of the YouTube video that's going to carry it, without having an actual YouTube-specific strategist in place.”

Learning: Hire channel-specific specialists—and commit

No marketer is an expert in every channel and format. While some knowledge can be carried easily from one channel to another, many channels require their own specific strategy. And you don’t know what you don’t know.

The takeaway is pretty clear. As the great B2B content thought leader, Yoda, once said, when it comes to trying out a new marketing channel: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

The only real content strategy failure is not failing

“Larger organizations are so risk averse that they're often not putting themselves in a position to fail,” says Tommy Walker. The result? “Nope, we’re just going to do SEO content. I don’t care if it sounds like everybody else, we’re just going to do it.”

While a failed strategy is painful, not failing is worse. Not failing means not learning. It means hiding behind paint-by-numbers, boring, AI-can-do-it-for-us blog posts. It means reporting on pageviews and other meaningless traffic markers, rather than reporting on true engagement. It means never experimenting.

It’s false safety. Artificial success.

Instead, my sources all agreed, we should be aiming to fail often. Tommy Walker described the approach to content strategy that they took at Shopify: “You see a little bit of traction? Cool. You don’t see traction? Tweak, adjust. If it still doesn’t work, move on. Have your benchmarks for what you’re going to consider success at the level that you’re at. And then, if you hit those benchmarks, move your goalpost a little bit.”

And, because I can’t possibly write an article about failure without them, I leave you with the immortal words of Samuel Beckett:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”