Making content is the easy bit

The corporate content machine is a very expensive photocopier pointed at a locked cupboard.

It produces beautifully. Videos, reports, podcasts, carousels, all arriving on schedule with immaculate brand gradients. Twelve people see them. Four were in the production meeting.

So the company makes another one.

Distribution is treated as the boring bit because it exposes the awkward question production can postpone: who gives a toss? “We’ll put it on LinkedIn” is not a distribution strategy. It is leaving a trifle on the pavement and calling it a restaurant.

Start with the first hundred plausible viewers. Not “decision-makers”. Actual routes. The buyer searching the exact problem at midnight. The salesperson answering the same objection for the ninth time. The customer community already arguing about the workaround. The partner with a mailing list and a reason to use it. If nobody can name the route, changing the camera angle will not help.

Format comes later. Search might need an ugly, literal title. Sales might need 63 seconds answering one uncomfortable objection. A community may trust the candid screen recording the brand team considers insufficiently cinematic. Good distribution often looks less impressive internally because it is designed for a real doorway, not the launch meeting.

And repetition is not creative failure. Your team is bored because it has stared at the message for six weeks. The market has encountered it once while waiting for a train.

Make fewer things. Give each one a job, a route and enough repetition to become familiar.

Nobody ever bought because the lighting had stakeholder approval.