You don’t need a content strategy. You need a point of view.
Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post about “optimising your own name.” Tidying up your search results, claiming your social handles, making sure a prospective employer Googling you didn’t just find some questionable Facebook photos from someone’s birthday do.
Well-intentioned stuff. Reading it back now, it’s very much a product of its time. Open Site Explorer doesn’t even exist any more!
But the core idea has aged better than the tools did: people search for you before they decide to trust you. That’s more true now, not less. What’s changed is what they’re searching with, and what they’re actually hoping to find when they get there.
The search has changed. The stakes haven’t.
Nobody’s just Googling your name and scrolling ten blue links any more. They’re asking ChatGPT what a good fractional CMO looks like. They’re asking Perplexity to summarise your thinking on attribution, or pipeline, or brand versus demand. People are forming an opinion of you before you’ve said a word to them.
The old advice still stands, to a point. Tidy your LinkedIn photo, claim your handles, keep your CV current. None of that’s wrong. It’s just basic and not enough alone. A clean profile tells someone you exist. It doesn’t tell them anything about how you think.
A content calendar won’t save you. An opinion might.
Most marketing leaders and founders get stuck at the same spot. They know they should “be putting content out there,” so they build a calendar, batch some LinkedIn posts, maybe launch a newsletter. Six weeks later it’s quietly died, because a content strategy without a point of view is just homework.
I’ve sat inside enough marketing functions — agency side, in-house — to recognise the pattern instantly. Teams build the machine for producing content long before they’ve worked out what they actually believe.
Cadence before conviction. Wrong order every time.
The founders and marketers who actually get remembered, and get hired, are the ones who’ve taken a position. Not a hot take for clicks. An actual, considered, mildly uncomfortable opinion about their industry — one they’re willing to repeat and defend.
What a point of view actually looks like
Forget “authenticity” as a buzzword. Ask yourself something simpler: what do you believe about your industry that most people in it either haven’t noticed, or won’t say out loud?
Mine’s fairly straightforward. RevOps and marketing strategy get treated as separate disciplines by most agencies and most internal teams, and that’s a structural mistake costing businesses pipeline every single quarter. Some people disagree with that. Good. That’s rather the point.
Once you’ve got a position like that, the content sorts itself out. You’re not staring at a blank calendar wondering what to post this week. You’re restating the same handful of convictions in different contexts, for different audiences. Far easier to sustain than inventing a new topic from scratch every Tuesday.
Why this matters more if you’re a founder or a senior marketer
If you’re leading marketing at your organisation, or you’re a founder without a marketing hire yet, your personal point of view is your brand’s point of view — whether you’ve decided that on purpose or not. People buy from organisations, but in B2B especially, they’re reassured by the person stood behind them. A founder with a clear, consistent opinion beats a polished “About Us” page every time.
It’s also why so much content marketing quietly underperforms. Optimised for volume and keywords, not conviction. Written to satisfy an algorithm rather than change anyone’s mind. People can tell the difference. So, increasingly, can the AI tools now summarising your industry for whoever’s searching it.
Where to start
Skip the twelve-month content calendar. Sit down and answer one question honestly: what do I believe about my industry that I haven’t said publicly yet?
Write it down. Say it plainly. Build everything else around it.
