Let’s talk about a thing that happens constantly, in companies of every size, in every industry, with every content team I have ever worked with or talked to:
Someone builds a content strategy. It is good. It’s grounded in data, aligned with business goals, realistic about resources. The work that went into it is real and solid and valuable.
Then it goes into a meeting.
And in that meeting, there is a person — senior, not ill-intentioned, often holding the budget — who has not read a piece of content on the internet for pleasure in years. Who does not follow blogs. Who skims email newsletters at 6 a.m., and deletes most of them. Who has not personally googled something and clicked through to a website since approximately 2017.
This person now has opinions about your content strategy.
Not bad opinions, necessarily. Not uninformed opinions, exactly. But opinions shaped by a completely different relationship with content than the one your actual audience has. Opinions about what “feels right” and what “seems like a lot” and whether the tone is “on brand” — where “on brand” means — and I’m not trying to be mean — but it is something this person absorbed years ago that may or may not have anything at all to do with what the brand actually needs to be doing now.
Your content strategy is being held hostage. The price of ransom is approval from someone constitutionally unable to evaluate what you’ve built.
This Is Not
a Solvable Problem, But
It Is a Reframeable One
I want to be clear: I am not saying senior stakeholders are wrong to have opinions about content. I am not saying C-suite buy-in doesn’t matter. It absolutely and obviously does, and anyone who tells you otherwise is about to hand you a beautiful strategy document that dies in a drawer.
What I am saying is that you have been trying to get the wrong kind of buy-in, using the wrong kind of evidence, in the wrong kind of meeting.
The strategy document is the problem.
A strategy document is a written artifact. It requires sustained reading, the ability to grasp and hold into an argument across multiple pages, and at least baseline familiarity with the concepts being deployed.
It rewards people who read. It punishes people who don’t.
And the people whose approval you need — the ones with budget authority, the ones who can unblock your roadmap, the ones whose “yes” actually means something — are not, in most organizations, the people who read.
They are the people who decide.
Those are different skills. Conflating them* is why your strategy document is sitting in a shared drive with twelve comments that say “great work!” and zero action items.
* (This person is going to be one of those who conflate them. Do not be distracted or disheartened by this. We cannot know what we do not know.)
What Deciders Actually Respond To
I have spent a lot of time in rooms where content strategy needed to be approved by people who will not be
reading strategy document. Here is what I have learned.
- Deciders respond to specificity over abstraction.
“We should invest in long-form content” lands nowhere. “This specific search query is generating 1,780 visits a week to a page that doesn’t answer it” lands immediately.
The gap between these two statements is the gap between your strategy-as-argument and evidence-as-strategy.
- Deciders respond to competitive fear over opportunity.
“Here’s what we could gain” is less motivating than “here’s what we’re currently losing, and who’s getting it instead.” Pull the competitor who ranks above you for your core keywords. Show them the page. Make it concrete and uncomfortable. As it should be.
- Deciders respond to small, irreversible first steps.
I promise you that your full strategy is too big to approve in one meeting! It requires too much trust in too many variables! The question isn’t “do you approve this strategy” — it’s “do you approve this one thing we can test in the next six weeks.”
Get the small yes. Build the evidence base. Get the next yes.
- Deciders respond to their own words.
Before you walk into the approval meeting, you should know at least three things the decision-maker has said publicly — in all-hands meetings, in interviews, in emails — about what this company needs to be. Your strategy should visibly connect to those things.
This is not politics or messing with anybody’s head. Alignment is a real thing, and you can and should be able to demonstrate it.
Approvals Are a
Content Problem
Here is where I land: getting buy-in on a content strategy is itself a content problem.
You have an audience — your stakeholders — who need to be moved from one position to another. You have evidence and an argument. You need to figure out how to present it in the format that will actually be received.
Most content teams do not apply their content skills to their internal communications. They write strategy documents when they should be building dashboards. They give presentations when they should be sending one-page memos. They argue for abstractions when they should be demonstrating with examples.
The person blocking your strategy isn’t the problem. The medium you’re using to reach them is.
So. Reframe the work. A strategy document is a deliverable for your own team — a record of decisions made, a reference for execution, a thing that matters once the work is approved and running. It is really and necessary, but it is not the approval vehicle.
The approval vehicle is a different document, built for a different audience, optimized for a completely different kind of reading. Short. Evidence-heavy. Competitive. Connected to what the decision-maker already cares about.
Asking for a specific, bounded yes rather than a global one.
Build that. Circulate it before the meeting, not in the meeting. Give people time to absorb it without an audience watching them absorb it. Follow up with the one question that moves things forward.
AND The Larger Point
The most common reason good content strategies die isn’t budget, it isn’t resources — it isn’t even organizational dysfunction, although all of those things are real, not to say ubiquitous, concerns.
It’s that the people who build content strategies have not learned to sell them. Not in a cynical sense — in the literal sense of understanding your audience, meeting them where they are, making a case in a format they can receive.
You are a content professional. This is what you do.
So apply it internally. Your strategy will stop dying in meetings and start proving you gloriously right. Which makes the next one easier, and the one after that…
Until you find over time that you have, yourself, become the approval vehicle. That now it is you who ARE the one that decides. That position is the payoff of building a real content strategy — not just a plan.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the gap between what brands publish and what their audiences actually need.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · Book a discovery call
When too many stakeholders are involved, the original “spark” of a piece usually gets sanded down. By the time everyone adds their corrections and safety checks, the content often ends up being generic, safe, and ultimately invisible. The goal is to move away from “approval by committee” and toward a system where authority is clear.
The bottleneck is usually a lack of clear criteria. If reviewers are just looking at a draft and saying “I don’t like this,” the process stalls. Speed comes from having a defined set of standards—like a brand voice guide or a specific list of technical “must-haves”—so reviewers are checking against a rubric rather than their personal tastes.
Editing should be about making the piece better —sharpening the argument and fixing the flow. Approval is simply a green light that the piece meets business and legal requirements. When these two get mixed up, you end up with non-writers trying to rewrite sentences, which wastes time and frustrates the creative team.
Ideally, there should be one “Editor-in-Chief” figure who owns the brand’s voice. While subject matter experts (SMEs) should verify the facts and legal should check for compliance, the final decision on the style and “feel” of the content should rest with a single person who understands the overall strategy.
The best way to manage this is by getting buy-in earlier in the process. Instead of showing a finished draft, show an outline or a “content brief” first. If everyone agrees on the angle, the goals, and the structure before a single paragraph is written, there are far fewer surprises—and fewer reasons for a total rewrite—at the end.
This is a common hurdle. To solve it, try “interviewing” the expert for 15 minutes rather than asking them to write or edit a long document. You get the high-level insights you need, and they only have to spend a few minutes verifying the final output. It respects their time while keeping the content accurate.
It starts with trust and a strong strategy. When the team knows exactly who they are writing for and what the goals are, they need less hand-holding. Setting clear boundaries upfront allows writers to take risks and be creative, knowing they are still aligned with the company’s bigger picture.