Ask Yourself: Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Dying?

First published in 2014, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

Content marketing has been a fixture of every marketing plan for well over a decade now, which is exactly why it's worth stopping to check whether yours is genuinely working. It's easy to keep publishing because that's what the calendar says to do, without ever asking whether the output is building your brand or just filling space.

A strong content strategy is a lot of ongoing work: research, planning, writing, editing, distribution and measurement, repeated month after month. A blog post here and a social update there isn't a strategy, it's activity. The difference matters, because content marketing only pays back what you put into it, and it rarely pays back quickly.

Ask yourself these three questions and be honest about whether your content is alive, drifting, or already dead.

1. What's your primary motivation?

Most businesses want the same things from content: more sales, a bigger audience, growth. That's fine as a business goal, but it's the wrong motivation to write from. Content marketing works on a long game, building trust and authority over time, not chasing the quick-fix conversion.

The moment a blog post turns into a thinly disguised sales pitch, readers notice and switch off. This was true when the original version of this article cited research showing a salesy sign-off could turn off around 30% of readers, and it's still true now. If anything, audiences have become more allergic to obvious selling, not less, as they've had a decade more content marketing to develop a nose for it.

If your content exists purely to push people towards a "buy now" button, that's a habit worth breaking.

2. Are you exploring enough formats and channels?

The scope for content is effectively unlimited, so however much you're doing, you could probably be doing more, or doing it differently. Relying solely on a blog and the occasional social post was thin in 2014 and it's thinner now, given how much the channel landscape has changed.

Since the original version of this piece, some of the channels brands leaned on have disappeared or been replaced entirely: Google+ closed to consumers in 2019, and plenty of businesses have shifted budget towards video, email newsletters, and platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts that didn't feature in most 2014 content plans at all. The tools change; the underlying idea doesn't.

If you sell hair products, a genuinely broad content approach might include:

• Industry news and trend commentary relevant to your customers
• Video demonstrations and tutorials
• Educational resources for people newer to the subject
• Customer stories and results, told honestly rather than as adverts

The wider and more useful your content footprint, the more reasons people have to keep coming back to you rather than a competitor.

3. Are you a genuine expert, or just a vending machine?

Every online business sits somewhere between two extremes: a web-based vending machine that exists purely to process transactions, or a genuine resource people trust for information about the subject. Compare any two competitors and this difference is usually obvious within a few pages of their site.

Being the expert means being a reliable source of real information and useful resources for your audience, not just a shopfront with a blog bolted on. This has become more important, not less, since 2014. Google's Helpful Content Update and its E-E-A-T guidance (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust) now explicitly reward sites that demonstrate genuine subject knowledge, and penalise thin, generic content written mainly to rank rather than to help.

There's also a newer complication: the flood of AI-generated content since the early 2020s means genuinely expert, human-written content stands out more than it used to, not less. If your content could have been produced by anyone with no knowledge of your industry, that's a sign it's not doing its job.

Where this leaves your strategy

None of this requires a total rebuild. It requires an honest audit: is your content written for your audience's long-term benefit, is it spread across enough useful formats, and does it actually demonstrate that you know your subject better than most? If the honest answer to any of those is no, that's your starting point, not a reason to abandon content marketing altogether.