Why 'we do content' is not a content strategy

Plenty of firms produce content. A newsletter here, a LinkedIn flurry there, a blog with three posts from 2024.

Activity is not strategy. Here is the difference, and why the gap between the two is so easy to miss.

Content without a spine

Random topics, written when inspiration and capacity coincide, published wherever is easiest. Each piece works alone, so none of them build on the last. The archive grows; the authority does not.

This happens for understandable reasons. Someone reads that firms ought to be visible, so the firm starts producing. The pressure is to keep something going, and the quickest way to do that is to write about whatever is close to hand this week. Nobody sets out to publish scattered work. It simply drifts that way when there is no agreed idea of what the content is meant to achieve, and no owner holding it to that idea.

What a spine looks like

A small set of positions your firm is prepared to own, repeated with variation until the market associates them with you. Topics chosen because your ideal clients search for them, and because each one climbs toward those positions rather than wandering off on its own.

The spine comes out of the strategy, not the calendar. Before anything is written we work out who the ideal client is, what you want to be known for, and the handful of arguments that carry that reputation. Only then does the question of what to publish have a sensible answer. Every piece can be traced back to a position it is meant to reinforce, which is what turns a pile of articles into a case that gets stronger the longer you make it.

The rhythm requirement

Authority is a frequency phenomenon. A firm seen weekly is remembered; a firm seen quarterly is re-discovered each time, as though for the first. Which is why rhythm cannot be left to inspiration. Inspiration takes holidays, and it gets busy with client work exactly when the pipeline needs feeding.

So where the plan calls for it, we put a delivery system behind the rhythm. Drafts get produced against the agreed positions, in your voice, on a schedule that holds whether the week is quiet or frantic. You stay in the editorial seat, and the excuse that there was no time quietly disappears. The strategy still decides what gets said. The system only makes sure it keeps getting said.

How it plays out

Picture two firms in the same field. One writes when the mood strikes, on whatever seems topical. The other publishes every fortnight on three or four themes it has decided to own. A year on, the first has a scattered archive nobody can summarise. The second has become the name that comes up when those themes are discussed, and its later pieces land harder because the earlier ones did the groundwork.