It’s Time To Rethink Your Content Strategy
AI has changed how people discover content. If your strategy hasn’t changed with it, it may be time to rethink how you plan, create and distribute what you publish.
By Sam Mittelsteadt
Many organizations don’t have a content problem. They have a strategy problem. They’re creating more content than ever, yet seeing diminishing returns as audiences become harder to reach and AI increasingly sits between people and their websites.
The Content Marketing Institute found that among marketers who have a content strategy, just 29% rate it as extremely or very effective, meaning roughly seven in 10 are running programs they’d describe as middling at best. More than half say their single biggest challenge is producing content that actually prompts their audience to act.
What Is a Content Strategy?
“Content strategy” and “marketing strategy” get used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing. A marketing strategy sets the broader direction, while a content strategy governs the assets that carry it — every tangible thing you produce, whether words, design, audio or video.
A content strategy pairs your organization’s vision — the how and the why — with execution guidelines that serve a specific business goal. It answers fundamental questions: Who are we trying to reach? What are they trying to accomplish? What should we create? Where should it appear? And how will we know it’s working? This written document should include audience and competitor research, an audit of your current content, guidelines for future content, success metrics and a distribution plan.
That last piece is where most strategies fall apart, and it’s where the landscape has changed the most.
Start With Behavior, Not Demographics
When you’re building or rebuilding a strategy, your audience and your business goals have to be considered together. They aren’t separate exercises.
Audience: Start with what people are trying to do, not who they are on paper. What questions are they asking? Which problems send them searching in the first place? Where in their decision-making process do they encounter you? Demographics still have their place, but leading with age and location tends to produce personas that describe a person without explaining their behavior. Pain points and intent are what make content useful.
This is also the moment to take stock of your first-party data. The information your audience gives you directly — newsletter signups, form submissions, on-site behavior, preference centers — is the most reliable picture of whom you’re actually reaching.
Business goals: Why are you investing in content at all? Get specific. A DMO may want to lift bookings during a slow winter season by 25%. A health system may focus on reaching prospective patients with awareness and preventive care messaging rather than speaking to current ones. A university may need to reengage lapsed alumni ahead of a campaign. The goal determines the content, not the other way around.
Factor In How People Search Now
This is the piece most content strategies written even a few years ago are missing entirely.
AI-generated answers increasingly sit between your audience and your website. People ask a question, get a synthesized response and never click through. That changes what “distribution” means: It’s no longer enough to rank — you have to be the kind of source that gets surfaced, cited and trusted by AI.
Increasingly, your content has two audiences: the people you’re trying to reach and the AI systems deciding which sources to surface in response to their questions. That doesn’t mean writing for algorithms instead of humans. It means creating original, trustworthy content that’s useful to both.
Practically, that means a few things for your strategy:
- Depth and expertise beat volume. Thin, generic content was already underperforming. Now it’s competing with a machine that produces thin, generic content instantly and for free.
- The winners compete on judgment, not output. When CMI asked the top-performing B2B marketers what drives their success, the answers were distinctly human: understanding their audience (82%), producing high-quality content (77%) and industry expertise (70%). Your own numbers, surveys and case studies are things no AI can synthesize from someone else’s work.
- Owned channels matter more, not less. As search sends less traffic your way, your newsletter, your website and your direct relationships carry more weight.
AI is also now part of how content gets made, and that’s fine — as long as it’s serving the strategy rather than substituting for one.
Signs You’re Due for a Rethink
A good organization re-evaluates its business plan regularly, and your content strategy should be no different. Ask:
- Is your website converting the way it should?
- Are your results improving, flat or quietly declining?
- Is anyone — your audience, your competitors, your leadership — actually noticing the work?
If the answers are unsatisfying, it’s time to reassess. That doesn’t automatically mean a full overhaul, just looking honestly at what’s working and what isn’t. Often your existing analytics will tell you, if you’re measuring the right things.
The Mistakes We See Most
- Using yourself as the target audience. Creating content for you, by you, is appealing — and rarely effective. Your organization isn’t your personal brand. Consider your full range of audience personas and how to reach each of them at different points in their journey.
- Equating content with blog posts. Publishing constantly won’t drive results on its own, and it’s an expensive way to stay busy. Think about how segmented email, short-form video, LinkedIn posts, gated research and your newsletter work together to tell a coherent story.
- Skipping the distribution plan. Content creation and digital marketing go hand in hand, but distribution is routinely an afterthought — or handed to whoever has time. A piece nobody sees didn’t work, no matter how good it was.
- Letting AI set the strategy. Using AI to help produce content is reasonable. Letting it decide what to produce, for whom and why is how organizations end up with more content and less impact.
Where To Start
Building a content strategy isn’t a task you check off in an afternoon. Start with research — into your own organization, your audience and your competitors. From there, you can move into planning and execution with something firmer than instinct underneath you.
If that sounds like a significant undertaking, it is. But the payoff scales with the rigor you put in, and an outside perspective helps — whether for audience research, editorial planning or distribution.
Content has never been easier to produce. What separates organizations today isn’t how much they publish, but how intentionally they plan, connect and distribute it. Strategy, not volume, is becoming the real competitive advantage
Ready To Rethink Your Content Strategy?
From audience research to distribution, C/A helps organizations build content programs that earn attention and prove their value.
Sam has nearly four decades of experience as an all-rounder in marketing and editorial content. His writing, editing, proofreading and design clients have included the CBS television network, two Condé Nast magazines, The Ritz-Carlton, metro-area daily newspapers, state and county destination marketing organizations, dental education publishers and platforms, and some of the nation’s top universities and healthcare centers.
Sam is originally from Montana but rapidly approaching his 30th year as an Arizona resident. Ever since he moved to the metro Phoenix area to work at a weekly entertainment magazine, he’s been investigating the best places to eat, drink, shop and visit.