Content : The Fifth Pillar of a Sticky Brand 

Almost every enquiry that comes into Natterjack arrives as a content question. Can you do our social media. Can you write our blog. Can you have a look at our newsletter, we've been meaning to start one since about 2023 and it keeps sliding down the list. Occasionally somebody wants a video or a podcast or a set of case studies, but it's nearly always a request for more of something, and it's nearly always the first thing anybody thinks to ask for.

What nobody has ever rung me up about is their positioning. In eight years I don't think a single person has said they reckon they might not be clear on who they're actually for, or that their messaging has drifted, or that the reason the phone isn't ringing might be sitting somewhere further back than the Instagram grid. And that's not because business owners are daft, it's because content is the bit you can see and everything underneath it isn't. If you've not posted in a fortnight you notice, and so does everybody else, or at least you assume they do. Nobody has ever lain awake at two in the morning worrying that they haven't revisited their audience definition.

So content becomes the proxy for doing marketing at all, and if you're busy, which everyone is, it also becomes the entire strategy by default.

The thing I'd want anyone to take from this last pillar is that content is really only ever the output of the other four. It's the visible end of a much longer process, and when the four underneath it are in decent shape it more or less takes care of itself, or at the very least it stops being something you dread on a Sunday night while you're trying to work out what on earth you're putting up on Monday.

Take clarity, which we covered first in this series. When you actually know what your business stands for and what you want to be known for, the question of what to say stops being a blank page. You're not casting about for a topic, you're just saying the thing you always say, in a slightly different way, again. That sounds repetitive and it is, deliberately, because that repetition is what makes anything stick in the first place.

Consistency gives you the rhythm, so you're not producing in frantic bursts followed by three weeks of silence, which is the pattern most businesses fall into and the pattern that quietly undoes everything. Connection means you've got some sense of who's on the other end, which changes what you write and how you write it, and stops the whole thing reading like it was addressed to nobody in particular. And community, the fourth one, is the bit that does the heavy lifting once it's working, because other people start sharing the content for you without being asked, which is worth considerably more than anything you can buy.

Get those four right and content becomes the easy part of the job. Get them wrong and content becomes an expensive treadmill.

I've watched businesses turn out a couple of hundred blog posts over three or four years and generate almost nothing from any of them. And when you go back and read the posts, they're usually fine. Well written, decent information, nothing embarrassing about them. There just wasn't anything underneath holding them up, so each one landed, got its handful of views and disappeared, and none of it accumulated into anything. Four years of effort and no compound interest on it whatsoever, which is a genuinely miserable thing to discover in year five.

There's a newer wrinkle to all this as well, which is that AI has made content very nearly free over the last eighteen months or so. Anybody can turn out a reasonable blog post in the time it takes their coffee to go cold, and a lot of people are, which means the sheer volume of decent-enough content in the world has gone up enormously while the amount of attention available to read it has stayed exactly the same.

What that does is strip out whatever competitive advantage was left in simply producing more. If everyone can produce, producing stops being the differentiator, and the things that are harder to copy become worth more. Your point of view. The fact that people actually know who you are. The audience you've built up over years who open your emails because it's you. All of which lives in the four pillars underneath, not in the content layer itself.

So if you're sat there feeling guilty about not posting enough, the honest answer is that posting more probably isn't the fix. It might be worth a couple of hours working out what you'd actually want to be known for, and who you're really talking to, and whether the people you want to reach have any idea you exist. Then the content question gets a lot easier, because you'll know what to say and you won't be starting from nothing every time.

That's the five pillars done. Clarity, consistency, connection, community and content, roughly in that order, though in practice you'll be working on all of them at once and that's how it goes.

If you've read the whole series and want to talk about where yours are strongest and where they're a bit wobbly, drop me a line.