The CMO Who Never Wasted a Single Content Cent
Chris Gillespie | July 20, 2023
We once worked with a company where the marketers feared asking senior people to review things. The marketers would always wait until the last minute to involve them, and then those senior people would ask to change everything. As a result, this company once spent what I estimate to be 37 hours and $5,250 on a single article that turned out … fine.
It wasn’t the worst bit of writing. Just, fine. Inoffensive. Middle of the pack. A few reads. No praise. It was one of four posts that month. And it’s emblematic of why their entire content program is so ineffective. Those marketers muddle through a perpetual cycle of critique and revision that doesn’t actually improve the writing. Yet they are unlikely to change. To them, that’s just called work.
Whereas other marketers write that same article five times faster—and paradoxically, the result is better. Far better. For reasons I’ll explain, speed, cost, and quality can all coexist.
Through 200 projects, we at Fenwick have documented how different companies organize their content program. Let’s explore five things a particularly shrewd type of CMO we run into knows and does to ensure their organization never wastes a single content cent.
1. They know the content isn’t for them. It’s for readers.
Content is for readers. Is that painfully obvious? If so, it’s not how most organizations act. Their entire content production apparatus appears less like a “reader delight” machine and much more like a Rube Goldberg machine of internal check-ins, compromises, and negotiations to ensure all the people with power get their say.
Machines produce whatever they’re set up to. If you don’t change yours, you’re going to continue to get what it creates.
Now of course, content can’t be entirely for the buyer. But given the current state of most operations, you’ll probably want to overcorrect on the side of producing things outsiders find clear and useful.
2. They only create content to solve problems
In 1973, a young McKinsey consultant named Barbara Minto had an epiphany: At work, people write backwards. They use the writing to think through things, and arrive at a thesis at the end. But this makes for impenetrable reading. Good writing begins with the thesis.
To help people overcome that tendency, she created the template below. It allows anyone to start wherever they start—say, with an idea for supporting evidence—but then fill in the missing pieces to form a coherent argument.
Barbara Minto’s pyramid principle helps people overcome the urge to write backwards. Credit: Shortform
I see good marketing leaders create similar structures to fight their team’s natural tendency toward random acts of marketing. In content, most people’s natural impulse is to say, “I have this idea, let’s make an ebook.” If there’s no internal process, it goes into production. But most of these ideas are irrelevant to buyers; marketers are often too close to the company to know what readers will find useful. This leaves marketing teams writing backwards, and thinking inside out—entertaining themselves first, buyers second.
To overcome this tendency, you need a structure that forces people—like Barbara’s pyramid—to start with the problem. None of this, “I had an idea, let’s act on it” business, but rather, sitting with the demand team to understand what’s broken. Teach your content team to listen for “Our middle of funnel conversions are rotten” and “This nurture barely converts,” and then ask customers and prospects about what would change that.
Narrowing your team’s aperture to problem-solving actually makes them more creative. It allows you to host writers rooms that are purposeful and fun. Creatives enjoy this much more than guessing and then being told they’re wrong.
Plus, this gives you a rubric by which to judge that content. It helps everyone recuse themselves of personal opinions. The only question at hand is, “Will this solve the problem?” And it allows your most creative creatives to defend the integrity of their work.
If all you do is stop creating things that don’t solve a discernible purpose, you can halve your waste.
Place all ideas in a content backlog (solicit them via a form).
Rank them by whether they solve a problem—best on top.
If struggling to rank, use a four-quadrant effort/outcome matrix.
Work on those vetted ideas top-down.
Once you select something, complete a brief.
Delete things that sit in the backlog too long.
Note: You can absolutely write purely entertaining stuff like “dogs of the office” within this system. But just think it through. If entertainment is the answer, what’s the problem it solves?
Note: No, this won’t take your team more time. It will save it. Imagine all the hours spent creating things that are never published or never seen—this replaces that.
3. They constrain reviews to achieve quality, not consensus
Most people think additional reviews make writing better. But as David Ogilvy said, “Search your local parks. You’ll find no statues to committees.” Often, more people make writing worse. More input means more changes, but nothing guarantees they are good ones. Individuals not schooled in writing or design struggle to recuse themselves of personal tastes and concerns, so they just offload every conceivable thought.
Which is why when your team asks many people to review (first mistake) with the blank check “please review” (second mistake), they get a damburst of extraneous input.
It’s why senior folks insist upon inserting wish words—imagined constructions they hope others will use—and internal experts add ornate, hyperbolic jargon: “Most advanced state-of-the-art best-in-class solution.” And how could they not? You’ve offered no guidance. Now, you’re stuck with important people’s opinions who you can’t just ignore.
But if you’d have told them, “This is the document’s purpose, this is who it’s for, and these are our constraints. Do you have something constructive to contribute?” some would realize that, in this area, they don't. And for those that still think they do, you now have criteria for declining it: “Thanks for this input but this article is for new prospects, and this graph is a down funnel concept.”
But the real trick is to not invite unnecessary reviewers to begin with. Restrict reviews to just 1-3 people who are credible to speak to at least two areas in the value Venn diagram.
Now the question arises, how do you uninvite someone who used to be involved in reviews? The same way you implement this convention: explain it. Use the term “anymore”—as in, "We aren’t opening documents up for wider team review anymore, and here's why.” If necessary, find proof. Share audio notes or screen share recordings where you’ve asked current customers to read your past writing. Get those erstwhile reviewers’ agreement that what’s good for readers is good for the company. They must trust you to enforce a process that produces clarity.
Then, defend your team from waves of erroneous inclusia by teaching them to set what we at Fenwick call “containers for feedback,” which is when we tell reviewers precisely what feedback we’re looking for, and which we aren’t. (You set a “container” for them to play within.)
The result isn’t just faster or cheaper. It’s also better. Instead of a franken-document, it produces articles buyers actually want to read—from a coherent author conveying clear ideas for their benefit.
Put the goals/persona/constraints at the top of the document so no reviewer can miss them.
Always set a container: Tell reviewers what feedback you want, and what you don’t.
Make speed default: “If you don’t respond by this deadline we’ll proceed.”
Only add reviewers who can credibly increase the quality for readers.
Evict legal, PR, and product. They may provide you a one-pager of their guidance, to be applied across all content.
If you ever see four or more reviewers in a document, worry.
4. They force reviewers to front-load their input
Many executives and experts will tell you they don’t want to review the outline because they can’t envision it yet; they’d much rather comment once the ebook is done. That’s Option 1 below.
Feel free to borrow this graphic. It looks great in presentations.
Writing work is not clay. You cannot just continue adding until the figure is complete. It is a product on a conveyor belt. The further it gets along, the greater the cost to rework, because more people are involved and it requires more disassembly.
At the outline, anyone can insert, rearrange, and nix ideas at little cost. But once it’s welded into prose, it requires a team of writing mechanics to disassemble. And once it’s designed? Agony. If those changes materially affect the structure and shatter the conceptual dependencies, you either must redo it entirely or accept that it’ll feature disembodied appendages.
So, your higher ups and experts are welcome to wait to comment at the end if they are comfortable paying five times as much for content—externally or internally—and potentially burning out creatives and confusing readers.
Or, you can all agree to front-load input by adding cliffs to your conveyor belt.
Below is the schema we use at Fenwick. At each cliff, the material is locked. Everyone must say their piece beforehand. If they didn’t, and that input is significant, there are only two options:
It won't be included.
We must start over.
Starting over is often easiest—outlines are quick to edit, and it’s faster to write from scratch than painstakingly reorder prose.
The real value to this convention, however, is how it clarifies the cost of late input. Participants know the cost of waiting because they can’t have their say. It retrains your contributors to front-load input where it’s actually helpful. And I promise you, if they care about not wasting time and money, they can do it. Especially if you set a clear container.
And if a piece of feedback arises in two or more projects, it belongs in the brand or style guide.
Below, the process we follow in our Notion Kanban, which brings these constraints to hand-slapping life.
Reduce effort with style/brand/inspiration guides and templates.
Front-load feedback with Kanban cliffs.
Front-load approvals with upfront contracts, i.e. “Okay just to be clear, if we don’t get input by this date, it cannot be included. Understood?”
5. They give every content program an expiration date
Look around your industry and I bet you’ll see a company that produces hordes of “meh” content. Behind it is a team with a quota. Content quotas encourage creators to obsess over volume, and if anything else gets in the way, like quality, it’s jettisoned to keep the plane flying.
It happens like this: Every program begins bright with promise and the owners set ambitious goals for the maximum number of pieces they think they can produce. But reality sets in. Edits drag on, reviewers are late, graphics fall behind, and other duties tug. Those quotas cause fear and mania. That team has no choice but to sacrifice creative time at the altar of “more” because that’s the only way they’re being measured.
Over time, quota marketing bores them to a stupor. Their job becomes about filling buckets with words. No longer do they vet interviewees. No longer do they pleasantly vary the style and structure. Nor do they edit. Who has time? Anyone with a name and pulse gets featured on the blog, templates are reused to death, and all fun drains from the program.
And when readers see all your team has produced with all this effort and budget, they think, “meh.” It’s all been wasted.
Over time, a team structured like this can only attract new hires who either don’t understand these dynamics or who do but need a paycheck. They become the department of perpetual “meh.”
Do not suffer this. Create systems that optimize for delight. Canny CMOs goal their teams on harder-to-measure attributes like reader love. Let the demand team worry about exact webinar numbers and inspire your team to create the maximum amount of love with the least effort. That’s how you’ll reach those webinar numbers anyway, as buyers come to learn they’re actually worthwhile.
And it’s how a creative team creates a webinar convention that is so loved, multiple prospects print out the introductory mantra and frame it on their office wall. Below, Clarissa’s work.
If you are curious whether your team is locked into quota marketing, pause the program and watch for two things:
Is the team happier?
Did anyone even notice?
Give every program an expiration date, even the blog.
If a program doesn’t beat its goals by the expiration date, shutter it, reinvent it, or repurpose that time.
Goal your team on 1) user love and 2) whether other teams like demand feel supported in their goals.
You can set secondary top-of-funnel and activity goals, but use ranges.
Free your team to ask: How can we achieve more love with less effort?
It probably took you 15 minutes to read this article
This article took time out of your day and disrupted your flow. It’s going to take you another 15 to get back into deep work. If you share and discuss it, that’s another 15. What's 45 minutes of your time worth? Now imagine I’d asked you to edit this article. And if seven others with very different views were also asked to edit this article with the blank check “please review.” And imagine there was disagreement and everyone jumped on a call to discuss. Count all those hours and you can see how easily one can spend 37 hours and $5,250.
Sharp CMOs do not suffer this. They know the content isn’t for them. They constrain their teams so they’re focused on solving problems. They constrain reviewers, both in number and in substance. They force everyone to front-load their input where it’s cheapest to incorporate. And they don’t measure their content teams solely by asset quotas.
This is the difference between a department of “meh,” and never ever wasting a content cent.
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