Why Big Companies Make Bad Content
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes. HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans. Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles are bad. They won’t resonate with decision-makers. Nobody will buy a HubSpot license after Googling “how to buy bitcoin stock.” It’s the very definition of vanity traffic: tons of visits with no obvious impact on the business. So why does this happen? I did a double-take the first time I discovered this article on the HubSpot blog. What if bad content is… deliberate? There’s an obvious (but flawed) answer to this question: big companies are inefficient. As companies grow, they become more complicated, and writing good, relevant content becomes harder. I’ve experienced this firsthand: extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval creeping into processes. content watered down to serve an ever-more generic “brand voice”. growing misalignment between search and content teams. a lack of content leadership within the company as early employees leave. As companies grow, content workflows can get kinda… complicated. Similarly, funded companies have to grow, even when they’re already huge. Content has to feed the machine, continually increasing traffic… even if that traffic never contributes to the bottom line. There’s an element of truth here, but I’ve come to think that both these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story. It is wrong to assume that the same people that grew the company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and wrong to assume that companies willfully target useless keywords just to game their OKRs. Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is deliberate, and not oversight. I think bad content—and the…
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