Stop the Content Machine – The Seven Deadly Sins of Content Marketing
Every minute, 4.5 million blog posts are published. Yet most go unread.
Content marketing started as a revolutionary idea: educate, don’t just sell. But somewhere along the way, the mission changed — from teaching to churning. The content machine took over.
When done right, inbound marketing builds trust and a steady flow of qualified opportunities especially when you are trying to educate potential customers about a new technology, a new approach, or to establish expertise. But somewhere along the way, the mission changed. What began as a way to build expertise has turned into a production race
“Content Marketing is the only marketing left.”
– Seth Godin
Why stop then?
Many marketers took “every brand should become a publisher” and “don’t build a marketing team. Build a media company for your niche” very seriously. They built media teams, hired journalists, and filled content calendars.
In the process they took their eye off the real goal. The goal of content marketing can only be the same goal of all marketing activities: to grow the business.
Marketers love shiny objects—augmented reality, the metaverse, chatbots, social audio. Each promised to change marketing forever. Some were useful, most were distractions. The truth is, these are just tools. You don’t plan dinner based on whether you’ll use a fork or a spoon; you choose the tool after you know what’s on the menu. The same applies to content marketing. The “content machine” became our shiny object.
The Content Machine is on Hyperdrive – and Failing
Back in 2013 a presentation titled The Content Marketing Deluge alerted us of the risks of the obsessive focus on creating content. Now, with the power of AI, the content machines have gone on hyperdrive.
Many teams proudly showcase dashboards full of production metrics: articles published, videos created, social posts scheduled, webinars per week. But customers aren’t asking for more content—they’re asking for better content.
Consider the following stats:
While 70% of tech marketers plan to create more content, 78% of IT decision-makers say it’s hard to find quality, trusted information.
66% of B2B buyers say vendors provide too much material (Forrester research),
57% of buyers say much of the material is useless, and
58% say the material is focused more on style than substance.
The fundamental problem with the content machine is that it is a factory focused on volume and production efficiency, not on quality and usefulness. In our obsession with volume, we’ve sacrificed value — and trust.
The Seven Sins of Content Marketing
None of this means content marketing is bad. In fact, education remains the most powerful form of marketing. The challenge is not whether to create content, but how to make it meaningful. A start is to look at the 7 Fundamentals to Build a Content Marketing Competency, which is over 10 years old.
To rebuild effectiveness, we must stop the content machine and avoid the seven sins of content most marketers fall into.
Sin #1 – Optimizing for SEO not for Insight.
When you chase algorithms, you lose authenticity.
Too often the content team starts with keyword analysis to determine what to write. The top priority is to rank for something that is popular today. This often results in your content following the herd, right from the back.
Good content is authentic, interesting, and useful.
Great content supports the company growth. It lives at the intersection of what your audience cares about, what you know deeply or have unique expertise in, and what drives your business forward by predisposing people to buy form you.
The ideas that live in the intersection of these three circles should be the basis for the main topics your company talks about, the points of views that the company can express in multiple formats. These PoVs should guide your content marketing efforts.
Sin #2 – Mistaking Volume for Value.
More content doesn’t mean more impact — it often means more noise that hides your best ideas.
With hundreds of pieces of content your customers are overwhelmed, your good content is buried. Your content is victim of the paradox of choice. We all have a short attention span, and we are short on time. We don’t want dozens of things to read; we just want one good piece of content that tells us what we want to know.
Imagine if you re-focused all the effort, instead of producing more content, to improve your most important pieces of content. When was the last time you looked at your website, your datasheets, and your core assets that communicate your essential value to customers? They can be diamonds that are continuously polished and become more and more valuable.
The best marketing teams build and continuously refine two or three top pieces of content by audience, industry and use case. It makes it easy for sales teams, partners and customers to find the best content. The content teams continuously improve and update these assets to make them more effective.
Your Content Doesn’t Need More Volume. It Needs More Value.
Sin #3 – Skipping the Learning Journey
if your content isn’t sequenced to their understanding, you lose them early.
Content must be aligned with what customers are looking for, their level of understanding on the topic, and where they see themselves in the relationship with your organization. From a marketing perspective, this is close to where the customer is in the funnel. But not a sales funnel, a learning funnel. Marketing is education, remember?
Multiple pieces of content must be sequenced. Yes, TOFU and MOBU is useful. But there is more to it. Every piece should recommend the next logical content – one to three options that allow the customer to continue on their learning path and ideally channels them eventually into a natural buying path.
The concept of the inverse funnel states that the level of commitment and interest from a customer is inversely proportional to their position in the funnel.
Which means, at the stage where the funnel is the broadest, at the beginning of their journey, they want something short and sweet. As a marketer your goal is to give them just enough content to get them to move to the next stage in the funnel, where they have more commitment and are willing to read more.
This is the attention funnel within one piece of content:
The attention funnel across multiple pieces of content:
In simple terms, content needs to be shorter and easier to digest in the earliest stages. As users progress, their interest and willingness to invest time in your content increases, giving you an opportunity to go deeper into topics.
At the same time, the goal of each piece of content in the sequence is to educate and to move customers forward in their learning process.
In summary words, be careful about pushing for a sale to quickly, or giving too many details in the early stages. More importantly understand your content cadences from the perspective of the customer.
When publishing content, don´t organize it by content type. No one says Ï need a white paper¨ or Ï want to spend 30 minutes in a webinar¨. Instead, organize it by problem, industry, or some other taxonomy that is customer centric.
Sin #4 – Playing the Hero Instead of the Guide
Your audience doesn’t want another sales pitch — they want a story where they are the hero and your brand helps them win.
Most brands make the mistake of putting their product — and its features — at the center of the story.
Here’s the hard truth: no one cares about your company. They don’t care about your products, your features, or your news. What do they care about? Their problems, their goals, their challenges.
Take case studies as an example. At one B2B software company, my team reviewed a two-page case study that mentioned the company 64 times. It wasn’t a case study — it was an ad. And a bad one. No wonder no one read or shared it.
We changed the rule: mention the company no more than twice — and never in the first half of the story.
The most useful content is about the customer. They are the hero. Their struggle — and their success — is what readers relate to.
Think of it this way: your customer is Luke Skywalker; your product is Yoda — the wise mentor who helps the hero on their journey.
You’re not the star of the movie. You’re the guide who helps the hero win.
Sin #5 – Speaking in Marketing, Not Human
The moment your content sounds like an ad, your audience’s B.S. filter turns on — and your message is lost.
With so many ads, every customer has developed an instinct for detecting -and ignoring- marketing messages. Even us marketers do it. When we visit websites, we unconsciously ignore banner ads. We know they are trying to sell us stuff. Our brain blocks them out.
Your customers also detect marketingspeak and fluff in your content. The moment your content starts reading like an ad, customers engage their B.S. Shields. It takes one phrases like ‘synergy-driven transformation’ for them to be skeptical about the rest of the content, or stop reading altogether.
Create a marketingspeak filter in your content process. Avoid jargon and platitudes, and replace them with plain, human language. Speak to customers like you speak to a friend.
My guidance for my marketing teams is to write content as if is a conversation in a pub among two friends who happen to be in the industry and they are just chatting about their problems. Make it human and personable.
Sin #6 – Publishing on Autopilot
A rigid posting schedule turns content into filler. Relevance beats frequency every time.
Content factories usually have a strict schedule. When I joined my current team, there was a mandate to publish on LinkedIn twice a day, at 9 am and at 4pm. The content machine could not keep up, so our poor social media marketer was forced to publish repetitive, useless, or mediocre content.
Here is a better idea: Publish only when you have something valuable to say.
We don´t have a schedule, we publish whenever we have something authentic, interesting, and useful. We publish every time we have something in that intersection between what customers care about, the unique knowledge or perspective we have, and what may predispose someone to buy from us. Last week we published two blog posts in one day. The week before we did not publish anything.
In three years, no customer has asked – Hey, it´s 4pm, where is Today´s post? However, our customers have noticed our feed is interesting and useful. The LinkedIn algorithm has noticed too. We launched a newsletter and it has organically (no promotion whatsoever) reached tens of thousands of subscribers.
Consistency is not about frequency; it’s about value.
Sin #7 – Locking Away Your Best Ideas
Gating great content kills reach and trust — it tells customers your data matters more than their learning.
Some years ago, I realized I hated filling registration forms and then getting calls and emails for weeks from a company I had no interest in. I stopped downloading white papers and other materials unless I was really interested. I was wondering if our customers behaved this way too.
So, I took a reputable white paper from the leading analysts and promoted it across channels. I measured the number of clicks in these ads who landed on the form, people who arguably thought it was interesting, versus form complete numbers. The result? A 99% drop-off.
In my latest test, the drop-off was 99.75%. This means that for every 400 customers we wanted to engage with our content, we turned away 399 because of our appetite for contact information for one person.
The behavior is based on both a selfish need to get more leads, and a belief that if we get the customer´s name, email, and phone, our magnificent powers of persuasion and our amazing nurture campaigns will be able to convert them from readers to customers.
I don´t believe that.
It is more valuable to reach 400 customers, share our knowledge with them, and get them informed about our point of view, than block them, possibly upset them and try to sell to one person who completed the form.
It is a question of control versus reach. If you are a massive company and just want to identify people interested in a product maybe the gate can work. Maybe… For most marketing teams, I can´t see a reason why control is more valuable than 400 times largest reach, brand image, and the positive impact of customer education.
If you produce good quality content, set it free, and cross-promote it properly, you will have higher changes of creating awareness, educating your customers, and getting customers who want to talk to you because they want to know more.
Conclusion
It’s time to stop the content machine.
Slow down. Think like your customer.
Build less — but better. Educate, don’t overwhelm. Lead with perspective, not production.
The future of content marketing isn’t louder. It’s smarter.
Your customers will thank you. Your sales teams too.
