You’re doing the things. Writing posts, showing up on the channels that matter most to your business, maybe even doing a Reel every now and then. You’re publishing consistently enough. You’ve probably started using AI to help keep up with the pace.
And yet.
The crickets are loud. The clicks aren’t there. The leads aren’t generating. People in your audience aren’t doing what you need them to do to grow your business.
You can feel it, even when you can’t quite name it. In your gut, you know something isn’t working. And knowing why — and then what the heck to do about it — that’s the hard part.
You ain’t the only one. I promise.
We go looking for answers in the wrong places
When content isn’t landing, most of us do the same thing: we troubleshoot. Usually at a surface level, and usually urgently. Change the platform. Post more often. Try a different format. Hire someone new. Add AI for “efficiency.”
None of it holds, because the problem usually isn’t up top.
I know this pattern intimately; not just from working with founders and marketing leaders for the past 20 years, but because I lived it myself, embarrassingly recently.
When I published the first edition of Content With Purpose last year, I did something that, in hindsight, is almost funny. I wrote a book about content marketing strategy and then barely marketed it. I was so consumed with getting the framework out of my head and onto the page — so absorbed in finishing something I’d been building for years — that by the time it was done, I had nothing left for promotion.
I also, if I’m honest, found the whole “tooting my own horn” thing deeply uncomfortable. This is a very common founder affliction, as I well know from my work with founders.
My team nudged me. My friends nudged me. My whole workshop at a conference last summer nudged me (Hi, SVI peeps!).
So I did what a lot of us do when we know we should be doing something but don’t quite have the heart for it: I went from nothing to a quick burst of five or six posts, wrote them fast, threw them out there, and waited.
Nothing. Not much response at all. And I went right back to saying nothing.
The problem wasn’t the volume. It wasn’t the timing, or the platform, or the writing. The problem was that I hadn’t heeded my own damned advice. I didn’t have the structure underneath the content. I hadn’t done the work I teach.
Content problems are almost always structure problems
What I’ve learned — both from that experience and from years of watching it play out with clients — is that when content isn’t landing, the gap is almost never at the content level. It’s somewhere deeper in the stack.
Not missing effort. Not missing talent. Not missing budget. Missing structure.
The Content With Purpose framework is built around six layers: Foundation (your purpose and values), Strategic Clarity (your goals and OKRs), Audience Alignment (who you’re actually talking to and what they need), Messaging (what you stand for and how you sound), Content Planning (your story pillars, channels, and calendar), and Execution and Measurement (the systems that make it all sustainable).
When any of those layers is weak or missing, the content built on top of it will be too. Every time.
What that actually looks like in practice
Let me show you what this looked like for me, comparing my Edition 1 promotion to what I’m doing now with Edition 2 and this workshop series.
The foundation of the book was solid from the start. But the promotional content for Edition 1? Layers two through six were essentially missing (or half-assed). I hadn’t documented clear goals; “market the book” is not a great objective. I also hadn’t defined what success looked like, or tied any of the content to specific business outcomes. I wasn’t writing for anyone in particular — no persona, no real sense of what a specific reader needed to feel, believe, or know before they’d buy. The messaging was rushed and generic; it could have been anyone’s book launch. And the “plan,” such as it was, went from zero to batch to silence with nothing in between.
A year later, preparing for the second edition and this workshop series, I am trying to do this work properly. I have set clear objectives with real targets. I built content around a specific audience: founders and marketers who feel overwhelmed by modern content demands and want structure, not more tactics. Every post, this blog, the workshop invitation itself — all of it is anchored in a consistent message and sequenced intentionally across channels.
And I’ll tell you something else: I feel genuinely more confident about this content than I did a year ago. Partly because the framework itself is stronger. But mostly because I built the structure first and let the content come from that place. That’s a different experience entirely.
The fix isn’t more content. It’s clear content.
When the structure underneath your content is solid, everything else gets easier. You stop publishing into a void and start communicating with intention. AI actually becomes useful; not just faster, but meaningfully more effective, because you’re feeding it clarity instead of confusion. And the work starts to feel like it actually reflects who you are.
That’s what doing content with purpose means. Not producing more. Communicating from the inside out.
Want to find your gap?
On April 30, I’m hosting a free live workshop — Why Your Content Isn’t Working — where we’ll use the six-layer framework to audit your own content in real time. You’ll leave with an actual diagnosis: not a theory, not a checklist to file away and forget, but real clarity on exactly where your biggest structural gap is and what to do about it first.
If any of this landed for you (i.e., if you recognized yourself somewhere in that book launch story, or in the pattern of troubleshooting at the surface), this could be a great next step.
It’s free. It’s live. And it’s built for people who want their content to actually mean something.
Register for the free workshop — April 30
