Stress-tested content: what held up (and what didn’t)

Please stop me if this sounds familiar.

You’ve poured your heart into a piece of content. It’s been thoroughly researched, edited to an inch of its life and, miracle of all miracles, you have internal buy-in. Everyone loves it! It’s going to be a hit!

Except, it’s a flop.

Your target audience is looking at it with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for charity hawkers. You’ve tried sprinkling some extra glitter on it, but still no bites.

You have two options here. The first is to bury that content somewhere so deep that future web archeologists will struggle to find it. The second is to work out what went wrong, and fix it.

Obviously, if I’m writing this, it’s because we chose to do the second option. We picked up the phone and asked people why the content wasn’t resonating.

Here’s what happened.

The piece that made sense to us (and no one else)

We’d published a report called “Content as infrastructure”. Internally, we loved it. We even built our rebrand around the concept. 

The thesis was sound: stop treating content as a campaign deliverable and start treating it as a system that compounds over time. Build it properly once, and everything else gets easier.

For us it was a bit of a call to arms for the marketers we support every day, the ones subjected to Random Acts of Marketing on the regular. You know, like the CEO who has seen a great TikTok and wants marketing to drop everything. Or the sales guy who needs a presentation for tomorrow that doesn’t align with the GTM plan in the slightest.

We were excited to launch this piece. Talking about it with peers, we could see lightbulbs go off.

After all, it fit nicely with this sentiment:

But the result didn’t live up to our expectations.

The report was launched, accompanied by an email outreach and social media campaigns and…crickets. No one was interested.

The stress-tested content in action

Quite simply, we picked up the phone and called some people from our mailing list, to find out why it wasn’t resonating.

“Oh I thought it was going to be about Hubspot and Zapier” said one of them. At a quick glance of our email he thought we were talking about marketing automation platforms, not marketing strategy.

As he began re-reading the email on the call, it clicked into place, and the underlying message resonated. 

But the subject line and the name “Content as infrastructure” were enough to lose him before we had a chance to explain ourselves. Brutal. 

The lesson: your headline has to pass the two-second test. The “I’m scrolling at speed and making instant judgments” test.

What we changed

We rewrote the title and the first chapter to make our thesis more obvious from the first glance. 

Here’s what the original opener looked like:

And here is the revised version:

“Your content isn’t the problem: A framework for getting more from every asset you create

Your marketing team is talented. You have a content strategy. You’re firing on all cylinders: blogs, webinars, whitepapers, social media posts, you name it. In short, you’re doing all the things you’re supposed to produce.

So why does it feel like it’s no longer enough?

Here’s what we found after surveying 150+ technology CMOs and interviewing market leaders: the problem was never the content. The problem is making sure the content works harder without burning your team out.

High performing teams have built systems that do just that. Where a single webinar turns into multiple assets, where content created last year still generates leads the next.

Start treating content with the same seriousness as product.

Product teams get roadmaps, dedicated resources, iteration cycles, and executive attention. Content teams get a brief and a deadline. But in B2B, content often is the product experience. It’s the first thing prospects encounter, the thing that builds trust before sales ever gets involved, and frequently the reason a deal moves forward or stalls.

This report aims to show you how to treat content as a strategic asset that deserves the same operational rigour as anything else the company builds.”

We stopped writing for ourselves and started writing for someone scrolling past. We led with outcomes, made it about them, and tried to include the elements that resonated in our offline conversations.

Time will tell if this new approach resonates more (and I’ll report back here to share this with you). 

How could you stress test your content?

Talking to a prospect isn’t always practical in every scenario, so instead, here are some questions you could ask yourself to gut-check your content:

• Does the headline pass the scroll-by test? 
• Would this stand out in a competitor audit? 
• Read the first 50 words to a stranger. Would they keep going? 
• Are you putting emphasis on the right thing (e.g outcome vs process, them vs you)?
• Are you overcomplicating your wording?

Want us to stress-test your content? Send us a line at hello@isolinecomms.com