What do you do when your content is vague?

What do you do when your content is vague, unfocused, and has no point?

Excellent question – this is the problem I find myself having at the moment. I’ve been working on this week’s newsletter and to be honest, what I wrote is terrible. I won’t subject you to it.

It was mostly disconnected thought with no point. Unfortunately, a lot of content ends up like this (not just mine!) I have lost count of how many times I’ve read a post or an article that has no real point (I’m looking at you, thought leadership pieces).

How do we fix this?

I’ll be honest with you. I’m coming up short this week on solutions but the problems are glaringly obvious to me. Eventually, I will have to face my other post and rewrite the heck out of it to make it useful.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some thoughts from our Free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers.

I recently asked them what their current pain points are. Here are some of the responses:

“GA4. Everything about it is a challenge”

“Gaps in data and a long pathway from lead to enrolled student”

“Talent. We need more hands on deck…to execute the strategic opportunities in front of us”

What struck me most is that these are common issues. I see and hear about a lot of teams that are struggling with similar issues.

So where are the solutions if these issues are so common?

I see I’m coming back to the same question as I had earlier, “how do we fix this?”

The content I was working on earlier was some vague thing about how a lot of our problems aren’t technology problems. The problem starts with people. That is what you need to fix first.

The first pain point – GA4 (Google Analytics 4) – that’s a people problem. Not that the people using the system are the problem, but that the people who designed it and rolled it out are the problem. GA4 was rolled out suddenly and then slowly in disconnected pieces. Had there been better communication around the whole experience, marketers may not be so frustrated.

The second pain point – gaps in the data – that’s also a people problem. Sure, there are technologies that could start to fix this but first, there needs to be a process around how this data is collected. The technology that you put on top of the problem won’t work correctly without a process. To create the process, you need people to decide what it’s going to be.

The last pain point – talent – is, you guessed it, a people problem. The person that mentioned this point is working with a staffing agency as the solution.

So what’s the point here? The point is that most, if not all, problems start with people. Whether there is a lack of clarity on what they want to do, whether you don’t have enough of them, or perhaps it’s just the wrong fit all around. People dictate the process. The process dictates the platform. Not the other way around. Oh, and people create technology. So if it’s not working, start with who made it.

My problem is 100% a people problem – me. I can’t get my head around the concept I was trying to write about. I’ll get back to it though and keep trying to work it out. Stay tuned for that piece.

In the meantime, join our Free Slack Group and come tell me about the “people” problems in your company.