Picture this: It’s Tuesday morning, and you’re already drowning. Your Slack notifications are pinging faster than you can read them. The sales team wants a new battle card for enterprise prospects. Marketing spotted a keyword gap that “absolutely must be filled this quarter.” Product needs a feature comparison sheet, and someone from demand gen just dropped a “quick request” for an industry-specific case study in your DMs.
Sound familiar? If you’re nodding your head, you’ve officially stepped onto the content treadmill—and like most marketing teams, you might not even realize you’re trapped on it.
The Hamster Wheel of Modern Content Marketing
It starts innocently enough. Someone on the team suggests a new ebook. The SEO tool shows keyword gaps that look like glaring opportunities. Sales wants a deck for a specific persona they swear will close more deals. The CEO mentions a competitor’s whitepaper at the all-hands, and suddenly everyone’s asking, “Where’s ours?”
Before you know it, you’re drowning in requests, Slack pings, and version 12.3 of a whitepaper that no one’s even sure is live on the website anymore. You’re running hard. You’re sweating. You’re checking boxes and hitting deadlines. But somehow, you never seem to get anywhere meaningful.
Welcome to the content treadmill—the endless cycle of creation that keeps marketing teams busy but rarely moves the needle on what actually matters: revenue, engagement, and genuine customer value.
How We Got Here: The Volume Trap
The truth is, content marketing became a volume game somewhere along the way—and most teams never questioned whether we were keeping score correctly. We fell in love with vanity metrics and output-focused thinking. We counted blog posts like points in a video game. We measured success by the number of assets in our content library, the frequency of our publishing cadence, and the thickness of our gated content offerings.
The more content we produced, the more successful we felt. Content calendars became packed tighter than a New York subway car during rush hour. Marketing automation platforms groaned under the weight of nurture sequences stuffed with every piece of content we’d ever created. We built content libraries that looked impressive in screenshots but functioned more like digital hoarding situations.
But here’s the brutal math that should make every CMO lose sleep: in most SaaS organizations, 60-80% of content goes completely unused. That’s not unused by prospects—that would be bad enough. That’s unused by anyone. It doesn’t get read, shared, repurposed, or even properly tracked. It just exists in a quiet graveyard of forgotten PDFs, broken call-to-action buttons, and outdated landing pages that someone forgot to update when the product roadmap shifted.
Think about that for a moment. If you created 100 pieces of content last year, statistically speaking, 60 to 80 of them are digital ghost towns. They’re consuming storage space, confusing your sales team, and diluting your brand message—all while contributing absolutely nothing to your bottom line.
The Three Deadly Sins of Content Creation
So why does this happen? How do smart, strategic marketing teams end up trapped in this cycle of productive procrastination? The answer usually comes down to three systemic problems that plague most content organizations:
Sin #1: Content Creation Gets Divorced from Strategy
Too often, content creation becomes reactive rather than strategic. Someone sees a competitor’s piece and says, “We need one of those.” A new keyword opportunity pops up in your SEO tool, and suddenly it’s an urgent priority. A sales rep mentions that prospects are asking about a specific topic, and boom—it’s added to the content calendar without any deeper investigation.
The result? Content that exists in isolation, unconnected to broader business objectives or customer journey mapping. You end up with beautiful, well-written pieces that have no clear purpose beyond “we should probably have content about this topic.”
Sin #2: Teams Are Rewarded for Shipping, Not Outcomes
Most marketing teams operate under KPIs that prioritize quantity over quality. Content creators are measured by how many blog posts they publish per month, how many assets they ship per quarter, or how consistently they hit their publishing deadlines. These metrics feel productive—they’re easy to track, and they create a sense of momentum.
But they’re also completely disconnected from business impact. You can ship 50 blog posts and see zero improvement in organic traffic, lead quality, or sales velocity. You can create 20 new case studies and watch your conversion rates remain stubbornly flat. The activity feels like progress, but progress toward what?
Sin #3: No One Audits What Already Exists
Perhaps the most damaging sin is the complete lack of content auditing and governance. Teams create new assets without checking whether something similar already exists. They launch new campaigns without considering how existing content could be repurposed or updated. They build new landing pages instead of optimizing the dozen that are already underperforming.
This creates a compound problem: not only are you creating content that might be unnecessary, but you’re also missing opportunities to maximize the ROI of content you’ve already invested in. That comprehensive buyer’s guide from two years ago might just need a refresh and better promotion, not a complete replacement.
The Sanity Check: Should We Even Make This?
Before you approve your next content request—before you assign it to a writer, before you add it to the editorial calendar, before you even finish reading the brief—pause and ask yourself three critical questions:
1. Has a version of this been created before?
This isn’t just about exact duplicates. Look for content that covers similar topics, addresses the same audience, or serves a comparable purpose. You might discover that what you need isn’t a new piece of content, but better distribution of an existing one. Or perhaps you have a piece that’s 80% right and just needs updating rather than starting from scratch.
2. Do we know where this fits in the buyer journey—or are we guessing?
Too much content gets created in a strategic vacuum. Be honest: can you clearly articulate which stage of the buyer journey this content serves? Can you explain how it connects to the content that comes before and after it? If you’re guessing, or if your answer is vague (“it’s for people interested in our solution”), that’s a red flag.
3. What will we measure to know it worked?
This question forces you to think beyond vanity metrics. Sure, you can track views and downloads, but what business outcome are you hoping to influence? Are you trying to increase demo requests from a specific segment? Reduce time-to-close for enterprise deals? Improve product adoption among existing customers? If you can’t define success upfront, you’ll never know whether the content was worth creating.
If you can’t answer all three questions confidently, pause. Not forever—just long enough to rethink the approach. Maybe what you need isn’t a new asset at all, but better activation of content you’ve already invested in creating.
The Path Forward: Becoming an Adaptive Content Team
The best content teams aren’t just efficient—they’re adaptive. They understand that in a world where customer behaviors shift rapidly and market conditions change overnight, the ability to pivot, repurpose, and optimize existing assets is more valuable than the ability to churn out new ones.
These teams know what to reuse, what to kill, and what to double down on. They treat their content library like a living, breathing system rather than a static repository. They measure success by business impact, not publishing frequency. And they’re not afraid to say no to new content requests when optimization of existing content would deliver better results.
They also understand that stepping off the content treadmill doesn’t mean stopping content creation entirely. It means being more strategic about what you create, more intentional about why you create it, and more disciplined about measuring whether it’s working.
The content treadmill is seductive because it makes you feel productive. But productivity without purpose is just expensive busywork. The real question isn’t how much content you can create—it’s how much value you can deliver with the content you choose to make.
Ready to step off the treadmill? Start by asking those three questions about your next content request. Your future self (and your budget) will thank you.
For a deeper dive into adaptive content systems, pattern analysis, and modular strategy frameworks that can help you build a more strategic approach to content creation, check out Chapters 2 and 5 of “The Adaptive CMO.”