https://cliftoncreative.agency/stakeholder-management-content-strategy
The Previous Post
Was About a
General principle.
Focus keyword: Slug: /Meta:
Make people feel understood before you make them feel wrong.
This one is about specific applications. The CMO is not the same person or conversation as the founder, the content manager is not the same as legal. Treating them all as variants of “stakeholder to be persuaded” is how good strategies die in rooms full of reasonable people.
Here is how to think about each of the major stakeholder types in a content engagement, what they actually care about, and the approach that works best with them.
The Founder
What the Founder actually cares about
The brand’s identity and reputation, usually through a lens that is more personal than professional. The brand is, in some sense, them. So content that does not feel like them is content that feels wrong, even though they cannot articulate why.
What moves a Founder
not data. Connection to the original mission, the thing that made their company worth building. The founding story is thus a resource: if you can connect the content strategy to why the company exists — to the specific problem it was built to solve and the specific audience it was built to serve — you will have the founder’s attention.
What doesn’t work with a Founder
leading with analytics. The founder, who built a company on instinct, will not be persuaded by traffic projections. They will be swayed by whether the content feels true. Make the content feel true first. Bring the data to support a decision they’ve already made emotionally.
What to watch for with Founders
founders who want to be in every piece of content. This is anxiety about whether the brand will sound like itself without them — a legitimate concern! But one that should be addressed structurally, not by giving the founder approval authority over every post.
The CMO
What the CMO actually cares about
performance and attribution, with significant pressure from above. The CMO is accountable for outcomes; content is notoriously difficult to attribute. Their resistance to a content investment is often rooted in having been burned before — having championed content ideas or plans that couldn’t demonstrate ROI, and absorbed the consequences.
What moves the CMO
a clear measurement framework, established before the work begins. Not projected outcomes — a shared definition of what success looks like, agreed upon early, that gives both parties a fair way to evaluate the work. A CMO who helped define measurement criteria is a CMO who will defend the program when the CFO asks hard questions.
What doesn’t work with a CMO
Promising outcomes you can’t guarantee. The CMO has heard confidence in projections before. Specific, conservative commitments and clear methodologies are more persuasive than ambitious projections with fuzzier logic.
What to watch for with a CMO
CMOs who change success metrics after the work has started: a sign your original measurement conversation was not complete. So go back and have it again.
Any VP
What a VP actually cares about
depends heavily on the VP, but in my experience, VPs are more concerned with how the content reflects on their area of responsibility than the strategy itself. A VP of Product wants product content to be accurate. A VP of Sales wants content that generates leads, enables sales conversations. A VP of Customer Experience wants content that doesn’t create more support tickets.
What moves A VP
Show you have thought about how the content serves their specific function, not just abstract marketing goals. “Here is how this content will reduce the question your team gets most often” is a more effective pitch to Customer Experience than “here is the organic traffic projection.“
What doesn’t work with a VP
asking for approval without involving them in the brief. A VP reviewing content for the first time at approvals has no context for any decision that was made. Build that context earlier. Include them in the brief. Ask their input on the question the piece is trying to answer. Include them, and their expertise.
The Content Manager
What the Content Manager actually cares about
Workload, clarity; not being blamed for the things outside their control. The content manager is usually the person most affected by new strategy and least consulted. They legitimately know things about the practical constraints of content production your strategy does not account for.
What moves the Content Manager
Being truly consulted, not performatively included. Ask them about process problems before you design a strategy around process. They will tell you things that improve the plan, and they’ll be invested in the plan’s success.
What Won’t Fly with a Content Manager
Handing down a strategy and asking them to implement it. A content manager who has not been involved in building the plan will implement it to the letter and miss the spirit, because they don’t have the context to make the judgment calls that inevitably arise in execution.
Legal
What Legal actually cares about
Liability, not content. Legal is not your adversary, Legal is tasked with identifying the risk in everything they review. The issue with that is that they often have the authority to change content in service of risk reduction, without any balancing mechanism for the editorial cost of those changes.
What moves Legal
Clarity about what specifically needs their review. Legal doesn’t need to review everything — they need to review claims, statistics, comparisons, regulated language, and anything involving specific people or organizations. A well-designed review protocol that routes the right content to legal and protects the rest from unnecessary review is more effective than any individual negotiation.
What cannot Happen with Legal
Resenting the legal review — and showing it. Legal is doing their job, so you move like water. Organizational problems are structural, not personal. Fix the structure, not the world.
The CFO
What the CFO actually cares about
cost, return, and whether a budget can be defended. The CFO’s relationship to content is almost entirely financial, something that’s clarifying once you can accept it.
What moves the CFO
specificity and comparability. “We are spending X to generate Y, which compares favorably to our cost-per-lead in paid channels” is a conversation the CFO can engage with. “Content builds brand awareness over time” is not.
What doesn’t work with a CFO
intangible value of any kind. If you cannot express the value of the content program in terms they can compare to other investments, you will lose every time.
The Principle
Beneath All of This
Every stakeholder is asking the same question, in different language, with different metrics: does this serve the thing I care about?
Your job, before you walk into any stakeholder conversation, is to know what that thing is.
Not what you assume it is: What it actually is. Ask. Listen.
Then, and only then — then, and only after thinking about what you have heard; then, and once once you have taken the measure of what is important to this person and how you can help them achieve it — then and only then:
Start talking.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the organizational dynamics that determine whether content works. For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative