My wife has quite the endearing nickname for me, and no, it’s not honey or squishy bear or anything cute like the nicknames normal couples might have for each other.
She calls me “the shover.”
It has nothing to do with my athletic ability and everything to do with the way I handle mess and clutter. When things pile up on the kitchen counter—mail, keys, sippy cups, whatever made its way in from the car—my instinct is to find the nearest cabinet, closet, or dump zone, and make it disappear. The counter looks great, and the kitchen feels calm. Nobody would walk in and think anything was wrong.
Just…don’t open the cabinets.
I don’t like to admit to doing it. On some level, deep down, I know I’m not solving a clutter problem. I’m solving a visibility problem, which is a different thing entirely. The goal, a genuinely clean and organized home, never really entered into it. I was just doing what felt like the right move in the moment, defaulting to the appearance of progress without asking whether any real progress was happening.
In my experience, many business content strategies fall into the same trap.
Companies publish blog posts, send newsletters, stay active on LinkedIn, and the surface looks clean. The calendar is full. Output is happening. But if you ask what any of it is actually supposed to do for the business, people start humming the Jeopardy theme song and twiddling their thumbs. And it’s not because folks aren’t working hard, but because the foundational question never got asked. What does our content need to accomplish? What job is it doing?
Those aren’t the same as “what should we publish next,” or in my case, “what cabinet still has room?”
Your Content Should Drive a Specific Action
Joe Spisak, founder and CEO of Fulfill.com, has a specific question related to his content that he asks every time. “If this piece works perfectly, what does the reader do next?” he said. “Not feel. Not think. Do.” He knows from experience what happens when nobody asks. Fulfill.com’s first six months of content produced exactly zero qualified leads. “We were publishing ’10 Tips for Better Warehousing’ garbage because everyone said we needed SEO content. The real problem? We never asked what job the content needed to do.”
Runbo Li, co-founder and CEO of Magic Hour, draws the same line a different way. “If you can’t answer that in one sentence, you don’t have a content strategy,” he said. “You have a content habit.”
That’s an important distinction because habits feel productive. Content goes out, the calendar fills up, the team is busy — and none of that is the same thing as a strategy connected to a business outcome. When Adam Cerra, founder of CloserOnDemand, asks clients what they need their content to accomplish, he hears a version of the same answer repeatedly. “They’ll say ‘build brand awareness’ or ‘drive traffic,’” he said. “But those aren’t jobs. They’re hopes.”
Figure it out: Before the next piece gets assigned, write down the one action a reader should take after consuming it. Not a general direction — a specific behavior. If that answer isn’t clear before writing starts, it won’t become clear after publishing.
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Your Content Should Connect to a Measurable Business Outcome
The natural response when content isn’t working is to produce more of it. More posts, more formats, more platforms. It feels like the right move because effort is visible and progress is not.
Christopher Coussons, director of Visionary Marketing, has a name for what that looks like from the inside. “I call this the activity trap,” he said. “The team feels productive because content is going out, but nobody can draw a line from that content to revenue, leads, or even organic search growth.” He watched it play out with a B2B SaaS client publishing 16 blog posts a month for over a year. Traffic was decent — about 23,000 monthly organic visits. When his team audited what that traffic actually did, roughly 94% bounced without taking any action. The content was ranking for informational keywords that would never attract buyers. “The content’s ‘job’ had never been defined beyond ‘get traffic.’”
Shane Larrabee, president and founder of FatLab Web Support, sees the same pattern compound itself over time. “When traffic doesn’t materialize, and engagement stays flat, they don’t stop to ask what went wrong,” he said. “They blame themselves for not posting enough and double down.” His clients have published 50 blog posts in a year and been unable to point to a single one that generated a lead or answered a question their customers were actually asking.
The proof accumulates quietly. Alisa Markovic, senior content writer at Freemius, recently completed an audit of their entire content library and flagged 92 articles for removal — not because they were badly written, but because they weren’t doing any identifiable job. “Topics accumulated, pieces got published, and nobody stopped to ask whether any of it was actually serving the business or the reader today,” she said.
Kriszta Grenyo, chief operating officer at Suff Digital, puts it plainly: “The clearest sign that a content program is in trouble is when the team is consistently creating content but can’t explain how it connects to a business outcome.”
Figure it out: Pull up your last ten pieces of content and ask what business outcome each one was supposed to move. If the answer requires guessing, that’s the finding. An audit doesn’t need to be complicated — it just needs to be honest about what the content was actually built to do versus what it was assumed to do by being published.
Your Content Should Reduce Friction, Not Just Build Visibility
When businesses do try to name what their content is supposed to accomplish, they usually land on awareness. It’s a reasonable-sounding answer that is almost always wrong — or at least incomplete in ways that quietly sink the whole strategy.
Damien Zouaoui, co-founder of Oakwell Beer Spa, learned this firsthand. Early on, his team leaned into highly aesthetic, vibe-forward content because they assumed their job was to look premium. “What we learned is that the most common mistake is treating content as ‘awareness’ when the real job is ‘risk reduction,’” he said. “Most first-time guests aren’t asking, ‘Is this brand cool?’ They’re asking, ‘What exactly happens, will I feel comfortable, is it worth it, and is this easy to book?’”
The content intended to build the brand was skipping the questions that determined whether someone booked. “When content skips the unglamorous clarity — who it’s for, what to expect, what to bring, how long it takes, what’s included — it fails at the job.”
Joyshree Banerjee, chief of staff and content engineering lead at VisibilityStack.ai, frames the confusion as a structural one. “Most businesses make content their Swiss Army knife, expecting it to do everything,” she said. “They want authority, leads, and brand awareness all at once. This creates an identity crisis where content accomplishes nothing well.”
She worked with a B2B SaaS company producing technical whitepapers and jargon-heavy blog posts to build authority — except authority wasn’t their problem. They needed leads. “Their content job wasn’t to impress other engineers but to educate potential buyers who didn’t understand the product’s value.”
Mark Bietz, CMO of Halloween Costumes, watched the same misread play out when his team assumed a traffic problem was actually an awareness problem. “However, the real issue was not reach but hesitation among visitors who were close to acting,” he said. The shift was away from broad content designed to attract attention and toward content that explained expectations, timing, and decision factors. “The key lesson is to understand where decisions slow down and create content that helps people take the next step.”
Figure it out: Map the questions your buyers are asking right before they act — or right before they don’t. Those are the points where content either earns its place or gets skipped over. Awareness content can fill a calendar. Friction-reducing content moves a decision.
Your Content Should Change What Your Buyer Believes
Behind every stalled decision is something the buyer hasn’t resolved yet — a doubt, a misconception, an unanswered question they may not even know how to articulate. This is where most content strategies have their biggest blind spot.
Joshua Wahls, founder of Insurance By Heroes, ran into it in his own business. “I was producing content constantly — articles, social posts, emails — and none of it was moving the needle,” he said. The format wasn’t the problem, and neither was the frequency. “Life insurance is something people know they need and keep putting off. My content wasn’t failing because of format or frequency. It was failing because it wasn’t addressing the real reason people don’t act, which is that they think the process is complicated and confusing.” The first question he now asks before touching a content strategy cuts straight to it: “What does someone need to believe before they’ll buy from you?”
Amit Agrawal, founder and COO of Developers.dev, approaches it from the same direction. “Content is a scalpel,” he said. “If you don’t know the exact hesitation or bottleneck a piece of content is intended to relieve for your buyer, you are not developing a strategy; you are creating an unnecessary amount of noise.” He draws a distinction that most content teams don’t make: the difference between helpful content and strategic content. “A post may provide value, but if it doesn’t assist a buyer in making their final decision, it is a wasted piece of content.”
Vaibhav Kakkar, CEO of Digital Web Solutions, frames what’s happening on the buyer’s side when content gets this right. “The real goal of content is to close a belief gap for the buyer,” he said. “Many buyers hesitate because they do not trust the timeline or do not see the value of change. When we miss that gap, we create content that looks good but does not drive results.”
Figure it out: Talk to your sales team or go through your support tickets. The hesitations that come up repeatedly aren’t just customer service problems — they’re your content brief. Each recurring doubt is a belief your content hasn’t addressed yet, and probably should have before a buyer ever reached a sales conversation.
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Your Content Should Start With a Diagnostic, Not a Calendar
Defining content’s job isn’t a creative exercise — it’s a diagnostic one. The right questions don’t produce a content calendar. They produce a content purpose, and everything else follows from there.
Damien Zouaoui starts with one he’s found that quickly cuts through vague answers. “What customer behavior are we trying to change, and how will we know it changed?” he said. “If you can’t name the behavior — book, return, upgrade, refer, show up on slower days, buy a gift card — and the success signal, you don’t have a content strategy yet. You have content output.”
Louis Ducruet, founder and CEO of Eprezto, pushes on funnel specificity: which step does this content support, and what behavior should it change? “If someone cannot answer that clearly, the strategy is already misaligned,” he said. His own team stopped writing for topics and started writing for the questions customers had right before they either completed a purchase or abandoned it — pulling those directly from chat transcripts, funnel drop-off points, and support conversations.
Alisa Markovic keeps a diagnostic question she returns to before any piece goes into production: “If this piece works perfectly, what changes? Does someone sign up? Does a customer stop churning? Does a founder share it with their network because it articulated something they couldn’t?”
From that, she writes the answer down in a single sentence before anything else happens. “This piece is for [specific person] who needs to [specific outcome].” The example she gave: This is for a bootstrapped founder who is about to launch their first paid plan and needs to know how to price it. “That sentence is the brief,” she said. “Topic, format, channel — all of it follows from there.”
Figure it out: Before anything gets written, answer three questions: Who specifically is this for? What do they need to do, believe, or understand after reading it? And how will you know if it worked? If those answers require more than a sentence each, the brief needs more work before the content does.
Your Content Needs To Earn Its Place in the Business
The before-and-after stories from practitioners who’ve made this shift tend to follow a similar arc: less output, sharper focus, and results that the previous strategy — despite generating more content — never came close to producing.
Coussons cut his SaaS client’s output from 16 posts a month to five, each mapped to a specific stage of the buying cycle with a clear next action. “Within four months, organic traffic dropped to about 15,000 — but demo requests from organic went from 11 per month to 34.” The traffic number got worse. The content finally started doing its job.
Ducruet’s team at Eprezto made a similar pivot, shifting from broad informational insurance articles to step-by-step guides built around the exact question someone had right before they either converted or left. “Rankings improved because the content matched real intent, and business results followed because the strategy was finally aligned with what customers actually needed.” His summary of the difference: “Content without a defined job is just publishing. Content with a clear job is leverage.”
When Spisak rebuilt Fulfill.com’s content strategy around a single goal — getting e-commerce brands unhappy with their current 3PL to request their matching service — the results were blunt. “We killed 80% of what we were planning and doubled down on comparison content and cost calculators. Our qualified demo requests went up 340% in four months.”
Wahls closes the loop on what actually changed when his content found its job. “The moment I shifted the content’s job from ‘attract traffic’ to ‘remove the confusion that creates delay,’ everything else fell into place,” he said. “Topics, tone, format — all of it became obvious after that. But none of that could happen until I defined the actual job. That’s what businesses consistently skip. Not ‘what do we want to say’ but ‘what does our audience need to stop believing before they’ll take action.’”
Figure it out: Set a 90-day marker when you define a piece’s job. What should it have moved by then — a lead metric, a conversion rate, a specific behavior? If that question doesn’t have a clear answer at the time of assignment, the content is being produced on an assumption rather than a strategy. The job description comes first. The content comes second.
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The Job Description Comes Before Everything Else
Most content problems aren’t content problems but definition problems that content gets blamed for.
The businesses that get this right aren’t necessarily producing more. in most cases, they’re probably producing less. But what they’re doing differently is starting with the right questions. Not in a general sense. Not “build awareness” or “drive traffic.” Specifically, concretely, measurably — what action, what behavior, what belief needs to change, and how will you know it did?
That question doesn’t require a bigger team or a bigger budget. It requires honesty about what the content is for before anyone opens a blank document.
If your content calendar is full and your pipeline isn’t, let’s get to work on fixing it.
Book a quick call or Contact Me, and we’ll start with the right question.
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Chris Karl is a content strategist and writer who helps brands turn what they know into what people trust. He has led large editorial teams, developed investor campaigns supporting multi-million-dollar raises, and helped SaaS companies double revenue by aligning content with real search intent. His work has appeared in outlets including Screen Rant and Wealth of Geeks, with syndication on MSN.