Working across
organizations
for 15-20 years, I’ve
noticed something:
the people who work in content, the people who work in marketing, the people in finance, and the people in the C-suite are not just doing different jobs. They are, in a meaningful and interesting sense, different kinds of people — shaped by different training and success metrics, with different relationships to risk and to time.
None of this is judgment, it’s observation, and I’m sharing it because it has practical consequences for how you work with each of them.
Content People
Content people — writer, editor, SEO — tend to be audience-first thinkers. The primary question they are always asking, consciously or not, or at least they should be, is: is this useful to the person reading it?
This produces strengths: genuine empathy for the audience, who are a superset of 100% of our customers. Sensitivity to what does and does not work at the sentence level. A long-term orientation toward building credibility and trust.
It produces characteristic weaknesses, too.
Content people often struggle to connect their work to business outcomes in the language business can hear. They care about quality in ways that can become or present as perfectionism. They resist content that’s strategically useful but editorially undistinguished — and sometimes they are right, but sometimes they are being precious.
What moves content people: genuine engagement with their work product. Not “great job!” — specific recognition that someone read the thing and found in it something worth noting. Editorial feedback that takes the work seriously rather than managing it. Any sense that their content is actually reaching and serving the people it was made for.
Marketing People
Marketing people are campaign thinkers. The question they are always asking is: does this move the target audience toward the desired action?
They think (or they should think) in funnels, segments, conversion rates. They are comfortable with measurement in a way content people often are not. They are oriented toward the campaign cycle — launch, metrics, retrospective — in ways that can conflict with the longer editorial timelines that produce the best content.
Their characteristic strengths: clarity about objectives, comfort with data, connecting content to ROI or business outcome.
Their weaknesses: a tendency to optimize content for the conversion at the expense of audience experience, and a short-term orientation that will undermine long-term brand building.
What moves marketing people: demonstrable results in their metrics. They will care about content quality when you can show them that quality produces better CTR, better time-on-page, better conversion rates.
Make the connections explicit, and present them in a way they can show people on your, and their own, behalf.
Finance People
Finance people are looking at one thing: the return. Not strategy, not brand, not audience experience — return on investment, expressed in a way that can be compared to other investments.
This is clarifying, once you accept it. It is also their main question, their strength and their weakness.
Your CFO is not hostile to content, they’re applying the same evaluative framework they apply to everything. The problem is that content’s return can be diffuse, delayed, difficult to attribute, and a financial framework handles none of that very well.
What moves finance people: comparability. “We spent X and generated Y leads from organic, at a cost-per-lead that is Z percent lower than our paid channels” is a sentence the CFO can engage with.
“Content builds long-term brand equity” just isn’t.
Build the financial case in financial language. working on this is very worth it.
C-Suite People
The C-suite are solving a different problem from everyone else on this list: they are managing risk while trying to grow.
They are simultaneously looking at the company relative to competitors, to the market, and to the board’s expectations.
They are often less interested in the specifics of any particular piece and more interested in whether content as a whole is contributing to the company’s competitive position.
This is a useful orientation — they are persuadable with strategic arguments that bypass the tactical debates that consume everyone else on this list.
What moves C-suite people: competitive framing and big-picture clarity. “Here is where our content sits relative to our main competitors, here is the specific gap, here is what it would take to close it” is more effective with a CEO than, say, a content calendar review.
Always Be Closing.
The
Practical Application
Every stakeholder conversation you have is with one of these people and they’re not interchangeable.
What persuades a content manager — specific feedback on a piece they care about — is not what persuades a CFO. What persuades a CMO — performance data with clear attribution — is not what persuades a founder (whose concern is whether the content sounds like the company they built).
Know who’s in the room before you decide what to say. The argument that is “correct” in the abstract doesn’t matter in the slightest, and this is hard to wrap your head around if you are interested in something as crude as winning.
But eventually you get to the point where you realize that winning is itself about constructing an argument that will land when made in the right language to the right person.
You have an audience, a goal and the tools to persuade. This is a content problem, you are a content person. So solve it.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the organizational dynamics that determine whether content works.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative