From asset to albatross: What to do when your content is the problem
You invested real money and real hours in your content. Writers wrote it, subject matter experts reviewed it, editors polished it, someone published it, and for a while it was the best in your industry. But customers and clients now complain that they can't find anything, or that what they do find is out of date, or that two pages say two different things.
If that sounds familiar, you're running into something that happens to almost every growing organization: content that was once an asset has turned into a weight on your mind. There’s so much of it, and you have a diverse audience, and you're not sure where to start fixing it.
The good news is that the fix usually isn't a new piece of software, a bigger budget, or starting over from scratch.
The fix starts with getting the right people in a room and agreeing on what your content is for and who it's supposed to serve. This article walks through how content quietly goes wrong, why the usual fixes don't stick, and what a realistic first step looks like.
Good content gone bad
You didn’t set out to create an unwieldy mass of content; it just accumulated. Across the projects I’ve seen, the same handful of causes show up again and again:
The technology purchase drives everything. The old system is outdated or no longer supported, so an organization buys a new one and rushes to move everything over. There's no time to look closely at what's worth keeping, so people copy and paste from the old system into the new one. The mess simply moves to a nicer-looking home. This is what I call a “lift and shift.” The organization is on a new platform, but no customer, client, or publishing issues are fixed.
Nobody actually owns the content. Keeping content accurate takes ongoing attention where people are responsible for the task and is often a grassroots movement. When people change roles or leave, the upkeep quietly stops. Nobody reviews content for accuracy or consistency, and it becomes out of date without anyone noticing.
Teams that create content don't talk to each other. Marketing writes to sell. The training team writes to teach. Support writes help articles. Each team uses its own labels, its own tone, and its own idea of who the audience is. Each team may have its own audiences, but you need to agree on these audiences and how you will write for them. Typically, no one is responsible for coordinating across teams. The result is an organization that contradicts itself without realizing it.
The structure underneath was never set up for the way people actually look for things. Most systems come with default settings that were never adjusted to fit your business or your users. Content can't be reused, people can't filter or browse to what they need, and you can't get a clear picture of what's working.
You may recognize one of these. You may be experiencing all four at once!
Why the usual fixes don't stick
When the complaints pile up, the instinct is to buy a new platform. New software feels like decisive action. But if the underlying problem is that nobody agrees on what the content is for, who owns it, and how it should be organized, a new platform just gives you a cleaner place to repeat the same mistakes.
The deeper issue is rarely technical. It's that the people responsible for content have never been brought together to align on the basics:
Who are we serving and what do they need?
What business goals are we trying to accomplish with this content?
Who is responsible for keeping each piece current?
What are our processes for content creation, maintenance, and archiving?
Where do our teams overlap, conflict, or duplicate each other's work?
How do we coordinate better?
Those questions need to be answered by the people who own the work. Projects that skip this alignment step end up in the same dead end, not because the technology was bad, but because people were never on the same page.
The first step: get the right people aligned
The most important part is also the hardest. It’s not technical, it’s focused on people. It’s about talking to the right people and getting their buy-in and support.
Many projects fail simply because they don't involve the right people early enough. The people who matter here fall into two groups:
The leaders and managers who are accountable for results and carry the business goals
The people on the ground who create, manage, and maintain the content day to day
Both groups have business needs, business goals, insights on user needs, and requirements. You need to talk to both of them.
In practice, this alignment work happens in two stages.
The first is one-on-one conversations. Before any group meeting, it helps to talk to people individually. Some people simply won't speak up in a crowded room, and you lose their perspective if the only forum is a big meeting. Private conversations build trust, surface concerns early, and give quieter voices time to shine. The questions I ask are simple:
What's your role?
What do you understand this project to be?
What do you need it to accomplish?
What might get in the way?
How would we get past that?
Giving people the chance to get their concerns off their chest early prevents a lot of friction later. It builds trust and helps people feel heard. Their individual opinions and needs are taken into consideration.
Second is a workshop to align everyone. Once you've heard from people individually, you bring them together. A good alignment workshop builds a shared understanding of the goal, clarifies who's responsible for what, airs disagreements when they’re less entrenched, and commits to a plan.
It's also where silos break down. In large organizations, teams sometimes don't know what other teams have been working on. When they come together, they have amazing insights, research, and knowledge to share with each other. It can be quite inspiring. When people help shape the plan, they can support it through to the finish.
In these alignment workshops, you bring various interview results to the table and discuss them. You’ll need to discuss:
The competing visions for the project
Similar and competing business needs
Main audiences and which will you prioritize
Further efforts to learn more about the users (aka user research)
Barriers you may or will encounter and how to get past them as a team
Content revision and maintenance
The overall vision of success that the group agrees on
Alignment forces an honest conversation about resources. Rewriting and reorganizing content is genuinely hard. It is the hardest part of any website or intranet project. The people who own that content need to know early what's coming, so the organization can plan for who's going to do the work. If you don’t have the time or resources, you need to make a plan to prioritize what you’ll do.
You don't have to fix everything at once
The most important thing to know is that you don't have to overhaul everything all at once. You don't need a massive budget or a multi-year program to begin. You can pick one painful area, get the right people aligned on it, and work from there.
For example, if you can reveal the competing visions for the website, you can discuss what a united vision would be and what content is needed to support that. Then you can review your website to see if you have the right content for that.
The shift from "content we're stuck with" to "content that actually works for us" is absolutely possible, even in large and complicated organizations. It starts with a shared understanding of what your organization needs to do with the website.
If your content has started to feel like an albatross and you're not sure where to start, that conversation is exactly the kind of thing Key Pointe helps organizations work through. Reach out and let's talk about what's weighing you down.