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The Other Way: Our Content Strategy
Six months ago, Tim and I made a bet that would either validate everything we believed about content marketing or prove us spectacularly wrong.
We launched The Other Guys. We did that with a radical proposition:
that the content marketing industry had fundamentally broken its original promise to help brands earn attention by being genuinely useful…. and that the solution wasn’t to double down on the old playbook, but to reimagine what great content strategy could look like from first principles.
The bet was simple.… but profound in its implications.
Instead of the typical agency model of taking on 15-20 clients and churning out volume-based deliverables, we would work with exactly four clients at a time, spending the kind of deep, concentrated effort on their content that most agencies reserve for their biggest retainers.
The early results have been fascinating, counterintuitive, and occasionally uncomfortable.
Walk with me.
The Broken Promise of Content Marketing
Before diving into our approach, it's worth understanding why we felt compelled to build something different.
The content marketing industry has evolved into something that would be unrecognizable to the strategists who pioneered it. It began as a way to genuinely help and inform audiences. Now, it’s mostly about churning out as much content as possible and chasing meaningless metrics.
The numbers tell a stark story. The average B2B company publishes 11 pieces of content every month. That’s a blog post every three days. A steady drumbeat of production.
But most of those posts get fewer than ten meaningful engagements. Not ten thousand. Ten. And the average conversion rate from content to qualified lead hovers around 0.5%.
We’ve never produced more content. And it’s never worked less.
What's really troubling is, most companies know this. In my conversations with potential clients, I consistently hear the same frustration.
- "We're publishing constantly, but nothing seems to stick."
- "Our content gets decent traffic, but it doesn't feel like it's moving our business forward."
- "We're spending significant budget on content, but we can't point to deals it's actually influenced."
Companies are handling this problem in the wrong way, which isn't surprising. Rather than asking if their basic strategy is broken, most businesses just try to do more of the same thing.
They bring on more writers, put out content more often, and make fancier publishing schedules. This is like trying to fix a bucket with holes in it by dumping water in faster instead of plugging the holes.
This volume-first approach creates three distinct problems that compound over time:
It commoditizes the content creation process.
When you're optimizing for quantity, you inevitably standardize the creative process. You develop templates, frameworks, and systems that allow you to produce content efficiently.
The result is content that feels interchangeable, because it essentially is. When your audience can't tell the difference between your content and your competitor's content, you've lost before you've started.
It creates a false sense of progress.
Publishing feels like momentum. Content calendars feel like strategy. Editorial dashboards full of green checkmarks feel like success.
But these are all input metrics masquerading as outcome metrics. The real question isn't whether you published your planned content, but whether anyone cared that you did.
It trains your audience to expect mediocrity.
When you consistently publish average content, you're teaching your audience that your content isn't worth prioritizing. They'll skim it instead of reading it. They'll consume it instead of sharing it. They'll forget it instead of referencing it.
Once you've trained your audience to have low expectations, it becomes exponentially harder to break through with something exceptional.
The Attention Economy Reality
The fundamental challenge that most content strategies ignore is that we're not competing for traffic, or even for engagement. We're competing for attention, and attention is both scarce and expensive.
What happens when someone in your target audience sits down to consume content?
They're choosing between your content and everything else demanding their attention: industry publications, social media feeds, internal communications, personal interests, and the constant stream of notifications from dozens of apps.
In this context, "good enough" content is just actively counterproductive. It takes up space in someone's attention budget without delivering sufficient value to justify that investment. It's a negative-sum transaction where your audience invests their time and attention but receives less value than they put in.
This is why we've become obsessed with what we call "attention density". It’s the ratio of insight to time invested.
Every sentence should do something: teach, challenge, provoke, or delight. But it should also provide insights that are immediately applicable and valuable enough that the reader wants to share them with others.
To consistently hit that bar, we needed a different way of working. One that prioritizes quality over quantity and treats attention as the scarce, valuable resource it is.
Our Process: The Content Kitchen
Our alternative approach centers on what we call the "Content Kitchen". The whole idea is to operate like a high-end restaurant: serve fewer covers but create memorable experiences every single time. Meaning… we focus on creating fewer pieces of content that have significantly more impact.
The process begins with deep research into your audience's unspoken assumptions and unexamined beliefs. Or, Insight Archeology, as Tim puts it.
Most content strategies start with keyword research or competitor analysis. We start by understanding what your audience believes to be true, and then we look for evidence that those beliefs might be incomplete or incorrect.
This research phase typically takes 2-3 weeks per client and involves several distinct activities. For example, we look at comments on industry content to see how people really think about their problems. We also talk to people in your target audience to learn how they make decisions. And we study top-performing content in similar industries to find out what formats and strategies are working outside your usual competition.
The goal isn't to find topics that haven't been covered before. That's essentially impossible in most B2B contexts. The goal is to find angles that haven't been explored, frameworks that haven't been applied, or connections that haven't been made.
Once we've identified these insight opportunities, we enter what we call the "narrative architecture" phase.
This is where we construct the intellectual framework that will make the content genuinely valuable rather than just informative. Like creating a thinking tool that readers can apply to their specific situation.
Here’s how that works in practice.
Say you’re working with a SaaS client who wants content about sales forecasting. The obvious approach would be to write about forecasting methodologies, best practices, and common mistakes.
But we dig deeper.
Instead of rehashing what everyone already knows, you’ll find that the research reveals something more interesting: most sales leaders don’t struggle with the mechanics of forecasting. They struggle with the politics. The real friction comes from misaligned incentives, cultural resistance, and the fear that forecasting exposes internal dysfunction.
So we take a different tack.
We write about the psychological and organizational dynamics that make forecasting so fraught. We unpack why technically sound approaches often fail (not because the math is wrong, but because the environment is hostile to accountability). We explore how to navigate those tensions, build trust, and create forecasts people actually use.
The resulting piece still teaches readers about forecasting. But it also gives them a lens to understand why their past efforts failed and what to do differently next time.
This approach requires significantly more time and intellectual investment per piece of content. But it produces content that readers actually remember and reference.
More importantly, it positions the client as someone who understands not just the technical aspects of their industry, but the people, teams, and real-world situations that decide whether those solutions actually succeed.
Economics of The Content Kitchen
The counterintuitive reality is that creating exceptional content is often more economically efficient than creating mediocre content, even though it requires more upfront investment per piece.
Let’s do this math.
You publish 50 pieces of content per year, each with an average total cost (including creation, promotion, and distribution) of $2,000.
- Total annual investment: $100,000.
- Average meaningful engagement per piece: 15.
- Total annual meaningful engagements: 750.
Now, consider our approach. Say you publish 20 pieces of content per year, each with an average total cost of $ 2,000.
- Total annual investment: $40,000.
- Average meaningful engagement per piece: 200.
- Total annual meaningful engagements: 2,400.
The math is striking. The content kitchen content approach costs 28% less while generating 220% more meaningful engagement. But the real economic advantage is in the compound effects that exceptional content creates.
Exceptional content gets shared more widely, which means it reaches audience members who wouldn't have encountered it through owned channels. It gets referenced in other content, which creates backlinks and authority signals that improve search performance. It gets remembered longer, which means it continues to influence decision-making weeks or months after publication.
Most importantly, exceptional content creates what we call "authority momentum." When someone consistently encounters valuable content from a particular source, they begin to seek out that source's perspective on new topics. They become subscribers rather than occasional readers. They become advocates rather than passive consumers.
This authority momentum is particularly valuable in B2B contexts where purchase decisions involve multiple stakeholders and extended consideration periods. The company that has provided consistently valuable insights throughout the consideration process has an enormous advantage when the decision-making process begins.
This Approach Isn't for Everyone
The most obvious requirement is patience. Our approach doesn't produce immediate results in the way that volume-based content marketing can. You won't see traffic spikes in month one or lead generation improvements in month two. But the benefits compound over time. This patience requirement eliminates most companies immediately.
The second requirement is intellectual ambition. Our approach only works if you're willing to take positions, share genuine insights, and occasionally say things that might be controversial or challenging to your audience. If your content strategy is built around saying things that everyone will agree with, you're optimizing for the wrong outcome.
This intellectual ambition requirement is particularly challenging for companies with risk-averse cultures. If every piece of content needs to be approved by legal teams or stripped of anything that might be considered opinionated, you can't create the kind of content that actually moves people.
The third requirement is staying disciplined with how you use your resources. Our approach focuses on putting more effort into fewer, high-impact pieces of content, instead of trying to do everything. That means turning down content ideas that might look promising but would distract from your core focus.
Most marketing organizations struggle with this discipline because they're optimized for activity rather than impact. They measure success by how busy they are rather than by how effective they are.
And no, this doesn’t mean we can’t leverage some opportunities (trends if you want) when they arise.
The Path Forward
Our approach isn’t for everyone. It demands more time, deeper thinking, and a level of organizational discipline that most teams simply aren’t built for. It’s slower. It’s harder. And it often requires saying “no” to quick wins in favor of long-term momentum.
But for the companies that can commit, the payoff is lasting. It provides a sustainable competitive advantage that becomes stronger over time.
The broader implication is that content marketing is splitting into two clear paths.
- Volume-based content marketing
- Impact-based content marketing
One focuses on pumping out lots of content cheaply and efficiently. The other focuses on creating fewer pieces that build real influence and authority. These two approaches need different resources, different ways of measuring success, and even different company mindsets.
The companies that understand this split (and choose their path intentionally) will have a big edge over those that try to do both or treat all content marketing as the same.
We've built The Other Guys to serve companies that want to compete in the impact-based category. It's a smaller market, but it's also a more valuable one. The companies that invest in exceptional content marketing operate in a fundamentally different competitive environment where the barriers to entry are intellectual rather than financial.
This is the other way: fewer pieces of content, significantly more impact, and a sustainable competitive advantage that compounds over time. It's not for everyone, but for the companies that can embrace it, it's transformative.
If that sounds like the kind of bet you're ready to make, we’d love to talk.
