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A pattern I constantly see inside marketing teams is the pressure to produce more content before anyone has established the strategy that gives content meaning. No narrative. No positioning. No brand story. Just a growing list of assets with no clear answer to the most basic question of why any of it is being made.
That's how you end up with content created for the sake of content. And it's why so many content programs feel scattered. Everything is built ad hoc, every channel tells a slightly different story, and nothing compounds into anything.
Most brands think they need content marketing when really they need a communication strategy.
You can't have blogs without a narrative. You can't run a launch campaign without first building trust in the market. You can't do founder-led social without a founder story.
Content doesn't create clarity. It expresses clarity. That's the distinction most teams miss, and it's where the audience's confusion starts.
And it’s not just the audience, but the roles themselves; content marketing roles today are disguised as communications roles, often responsible for shaping editorial judgment, storytelling, positioning, and messaging. These are infrastructure tasks; content marketing is just the tactical layer on top of those decisions.
When you lead with tactics, content stays fragmented. When you lead with strategy, everything shifts: content becomes directional rather than reactive, campaigns compound rather than exist in isolation, founder-led content feels intentional rather than performative, and trust builds because the story stays consistent.
You can't collapse either of these functions into the other. But you do need both working together if you want content to function as a real strategic asset, not just a deliverable.
Communications 🤝 Content marketing
In a three-phased approach, you can set the foundation for your content strategy, build an editorial engine, and successfully distribute it across channels.
Foundation first
Before anything else gets built, you need something to build on. This phase is about establishing the narrative infrastructure that gives every piece of content a job: your stories, your positioning, your key messages, and the metrics that connect it all back to business outcomes.
This includes:
Identify your brand stories. Every brand needs a Product story, a Founder story, and a Vision story. These are your source materials for your brand narrative. Buyers, press, and partners all need to understand who you are, what you do, why you exist, and how you're different.
Build narrative before you build assets. Establish your positioning, value propositions, category story, and key messages before you write a single blog post or brief a single campaign. Your narrative should address market tensions, buyer anxieties, category shifts, competitive gaps, and cultural undercurrents, while also offering a distinct POV. Think like a journalist to find the gaps in the market that only your POV can fill.
Define clear goals and metrics. Anchor your content and comms to the four R's: Reception, Reach, Reference, and Revenue. This is how brand-led work earns its seat at the table and stays connected to real business outcomes.
Build the system
Once the foundation is set, the work becomes architectural. This phase is about designing the engine that keeps your narrative consistent, connected, and responsive. Not just what you publish, but how your editorial decisions get made, where your story lives across the organization, and how you scale without losing coherence.
Design an editorial system, not just a calendar. Think like a media brand. Connect content across every brand touchpoint into one cohesive engine. The goal is a brand experience that feels continuous, not episodic.
Align communications with GTM, sales, and customer adoption. The biggest mistake companies make is siloing these functions and letting each one tell a different story. Your narrative should be the through line that supports all of them, internally and externally, for consistency and cohesion.
Operationalize narrative decisions, not just content production. Use AI to scale clarity through repeatable messaging frameworks and assisted research workflows. The goal is a seamless editorial infrastructure where your team makes strategic decisions, not just manages output.
Get visible
This is where strategy meets distribution. With a clear narrative and a functioning system behind it, visibility becomes intentional rather than accidental. This phase is about making sure your story travels across formats, platforms, and channels and feels like the same brand wherever someone finds you.
Think about how to tell your story across different media. Your narrative needs to carry across everything from long-form newsletters to short-form video to IRL activations. No matter the touchpoint, your audience should immediately recognize your brand.
Consider all avenues for search and discovery. It's not just SEO or AEO anymore. Think about how your content gets discovered across every top-of-funnel channel: TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube. Your narrative needs to travel and feel consistent wherever it's found.
Treat founders and executives as strategic media assets. Founder-led and executive-led communications aren't a nice-to-have. They're one of the most effective tools for building category leadership and authority. Invest in them through content, speaking, and press with the same rigor you'd apply to a product launch.
So do your brand a favor and take the time to build a strategy before you start creating any assets. You (and your audience) will thank you.