Erik Dietrich(Editorial note: I originally wrote this post over on the Hit Subscribe blog. I’ll be cross-posting anything I think this audience might find interesting and also started a SubStack to which I’ll syndicate marketing-related content.)
Be decisive. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn't make a decision.
I don't know who originally said this, so I can't properly attribute it. I guess that makes it some kind of piece of folk wisdom, now best suited for cheugy merchandise.
But whoever dreamed it up has a gift for impactful figurative language. I'm sure you can picture the situation -- your car barreling down on some hapless squirrel who starts left, then right, then backward, then splat. Had the squirrel run in any direction, it would have met a better fate than it did by fretting to literal death about the decision while doing nothing.
I'm setting the stage with this gruesome metaphor to make my point here memorable. And my point here is that collective flat squirrel syndrome is going to be your organization's single biggest barrier to content and funnel metrics at scale. (And I should note this only applies to customer acquisition strategies that require and substantially economize on scale: SEO, communities, parasocial followings, podcasts, etc.)
Here are some things you might think would be the problem but aren't:
- It's so hard to find good writers.
- The keywords in our space are super competitive.
- {Insert our audience here} is such a picky audience.
- There just aren't any public distribution channels where our audience hangs out.
- So few people know how to talk shop to our audience.
Nope, nope, nope, nope, and...drumroll, please...nope.
Those problems are all actually relatively easy to solve compared to flat squirrel syndrome. The reason for that gets a bit into org theory but suffice it to say that this problem is intractable because it's human nature and because the solution has to come from within, unlike all of the logistical issues above that can be solved with staffing and experimentation.
The Content Manager Case Study
To make this less abstract, I'll describe a situation I've observed so often over the last seven years that I would definitely call it an anti-pattern.
Some A-round tech company with a first marketing hire is putting out content at a decent clip through a combination of freelance labor, internal collateral curation, and pure grit. It's not perfect, but it's moving funnel metrics up and to the right.
As the engine and labor pool grow, the company hires a content manager -- probably a historical individual contributor with a journalistic or comms background of some kind. That person comes in and pumps the brakes on content.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, this is all wrong, and our audience thinks we're amateurs. We can't keep putting out content until we straighten out our position on Oxford commas and get things up to snuff.
The longer the site goes without new content, the higher the stakes become. Which topics show our brand in the best light, and which distribution channels will garner the most halo effect and chance for the good kind of virality? Are we mentioning AI enough? We really need to nail this, so let's --
BAM!
Flat squirrel. It's been nine months with a grand total of two blog posts, and the content manager's Linked In profile is suddenly sporting the "Open to Work" banner and a message about how they loved their time at [A-round], but they're looking for their next challenge.
Flat Squirrels and Catastrophic Opportunity Cost
A firing like this is a genuine (and avoidable; more on this later) human tragedy, but it's also one that begets an organizational tragedy. For the individual, the stakes are a job search, but for the organization, the stakes are jaw-dropping sums of eventual unrealized revenue.
From a business perspective, any scaled-based content marketing channel (SEO, YouTube, audience-building, etc.) has a payback-value curve similar to one of compounding interest for retirement savings. In other words, a soon-to-be-flat squirrel dithering in the early going is like a 25-year-old dithering about retirement savings.
I'm too stressed out right now to opt into the 401k, so I'll wait till next year.
Poof. 50K gone from eventual retirement portfolio.
I don't want to invest in the wrong stocks, so I'll keep putting this off until I can take an investing course.
Poof. 150K gone from eventual retirement portfolio.
A shrewd executive recognizes this parallel, and so content-based flat-squirrelling doesn't appear to them as "we failed to publish a blog post yet again," but rather as "we just lost 200 more leads over the next two years through simple indecision."
The problem horizon of the flat squirrel for the organization isn't so much traffic or subscribers moving down and to the right at the moment. It's how much longer it will take to get into the fun part of the hockey stick than if they had just kept the trains running.
Significant Chokepoints of Indecision and How to Address Them
While I imagine that a significantly frenzied squirrel could find any point in the process to panic, there are generally two major chokepoints in content programs for this kind of thing. I'll address each in turn.
Indecision in Ideation
The first major bottleneck tends to occur during ideation. This could be thematic ideation for campaigns or even channels themselves. But the more problematic form of it tends to happen at the component level: blog post, video, podcast episode.
Basically, "What should we talk about this week?"
If you haven't started on the campaign yet, you might face organizational blank page syndrome, or you might have nerves resulting from spotlight effect. "These first few need to be bangers."
Or perhaps you're in the thick of things, and the daunting prospect of having micro-strategy sessions each and every week encourages procrastination. Cadence slips because thinking of a unicorn idea that is thought-leader-y and SEO-y and mentions your product, and goes viral and gives the C-suite warm fuzzies when they read it is understandably daunting.
So eventually content shrivels to changelog posts and the occasional PR piece.
Fixing Indecision in Ideation
First, and I can't stress this enough, do not make decisions episodically and one-by-one. That. Is. Exhausting. (And a recipe for cannibalization and redundancy.)
Decide upfront on campaigns and make idea acceptance criteria a feature of them. "If it's about MySQL at an advanced level, we'll ship it" or "if it's a question from a customer, we'll record a YouTube video to answer it." By doing that, you've neatly pre-made decisions and removed in-situ judgement from the equation.
Secondly, boot some cooks out of the kitchen. As a lifelong cynic, I've always enjoyed despair.com for its witticism, such as
Meetings: none of us is as dumb as all of us.
While that is, of course, nakedly cynical, there is a grain of truth to it in the sense that additional stakeholders can create diminishing and even negative returns, especially when decisiveness is important. And if you have six people that all need to agree on topics for your blog, I'll save you the suspense: you're not going to have a blog.
Make one person the primary on ideation and trust that person. Let them solicit feedback as needed but grant them autonomy.
Indecision in Review
The next major source of indecision will come in the substance of the content itself or, more specifically, in the review of that content, as opposed to the collaboration.
There are two sub-forms of this. One involves post-creation review collaboration, and the other is more about incorporating feedback into future content.
The first form tends to involve having multiple gatekeeper-style reviewers of content. Someone writes it, then a copyeditor reviews it, a product marketer asks for more incorporation of the market position, a PR person takes a whack at it, and maybe a founder even wanders by for good measure.
I've written in the past about how multiple reviewers absolutely torpedo your cadence. But beyond this, you'll inspire a kind of non-productive learned helplessness in those tasked with producing the content. Your staff writer, for instance, might start phoning it in with ChatGPT content since six other people are going to turn it into a frankenpost anyway.
The second variant is a little better for cadence in that you publish before gathering a lot of "next time could you" type feedback. But it still creates the dynamic of confusing, often-conflicting guidance that depresses the cadence of content creation.
The common thread in both of these situations is collective, fear-based indecision. Generally, the editors, product marketers, SME reviewers, PR people, executives, etc. aren't weighing in from an angle of "I'm excited to mention X" but rather "I'm afraid that X will happen if we publish this as is, so let's hold off, discuss, and revise."
And hold off you will. Until, well, you know. Bam.
Fixing Indecision in Review
Fretting over draft content tends to be harder to overcome than fretting over ideas. After all, you don't publish ideas, nor do you have the ability to tangibly imagine someone reading (and reacting poorly to) an idea.
That said, the same tactics apply to fixing this as to fixing ideation. Shoo as many of the cooks out of the kitchen as you can. This will serve both to make creating the content less soul-crushing and also to reduce time to publish by simple virtue of less calendar time to solicit all of those reviews.
Also, establish acceptance and rejection criteria for content, rather than having a subjective review pass. In other words, if the criterion for publication is "Gatekeeper Greg must say it's good," then you're only going to publish as quickly as Greg can read it and decide he likes it. If you have clearly defined criteria for acceptance, you can round-robin the review process for efficiency, and you have pre-canned evaluation criteria for "is this good" that don't require subjective, ad hoc decisions in the moment.
One final way to steel yourself against delay-causing indecision about content is to make peace with the fact that, no matter what you publish, someone will think you're an idiot. The internet can't collectively agree that the earth is round. So no matter how correct, fact-checked, grammatically perfect, and Shakespeare-esque your prose, if enough people read it, someone will roast you on Twitter saying, "your wrong and dumb and your grammer is wrong and i hate you"
Once you accept the inevitability of negative feedback, it's easier to stop fretting about it and get down to business.
The Content Manager, Revisited
I want to conclude this post by circling back to the fired content manager. I called that a tragedy, and I genuinely mean that. Because most likely, the faceplant the content manager authored was ultimately leadership's fault.
I say this because they most likely told the content manager upon hiring, "you need to produce high quality content that earns traffic." And when you hire a technician and cast that person as a subjective expert in charge of adjudicating quality of craft, they will dive into the craft weeds (Oxford commas) rather than the comparably inscrutable business weeds (traffic, pipeline, and CAC).
You will then probably worsen this problem if, early in the content manager's tenure, an executive reads them the riot act for some "bad" piece of content they wrote or commissioned. Lesson learned. Produce less content, agonize over it more, and make sure it's "high quality" for some definition of "quality" that nobody has established.
When consulting on content programs, I often say something that people mistake for a joke. "If your main goal is subjective quality to avoid criticism, the easiest way to achieve that goal is to produce as little content as you can." That's not a joke -- not producing content is literally the most cost-effective way to achieve criticism avoidance.
Establish Clear Goals, KPIs, Countervailing Concerns
At this point, people I'm talking to will say, "okay, okay, smartass, obviously that's not what we mean." But I spent a bunch of years as a management consultant and I can tell you from extensive experience that people will achieve the goals (explicit or implicit) you set for them even it means burning your company to the ground to do so. You don't get to say "but that's not what I meant!" after creating a perverse incentive for them.
Therefore, achieving volume funnel goals means being very clear about primary goals and countervailing goals. You have to establish that the true north goal is, say, qualified leads and that KPIs for qualified leads are things like (in reverse order) site traffic, rankings, followers, content produced, and content scheduled.
Then you establish that quality is a countervailing concern, meaning the charter becomes "produce the true north goal of funnel metrics, mustering as much 'quality' as you can." (It also doesn't hurt if you de-subjectify "quality" with things like acceptance criteria and style guides.) This makes it clear to them how to resolve two simultaneous and potentially conflicting charters you've handed them.
The only last thing you might find yourself wondering is "what if I want quality as the primary goal and funnel metrics as the countervailing concern?" And to that I say "then forget any volume acquisition strategy involving funnel metrics, because you're going to fail."
That, also, is probably a story for another post. But coming full circle, giving up on volume now and pursuing a different set of tactics is better than standing in the road, trying to do both, until BAM. So flip a coin, pick one true north or the other, and get moving. Either direction is better than 3,500 pounds of car rolling over you.
