Most Organisations Have More Stories Than They Realise

One of the strange things about working in marketing is hearing organisations say that they do not know what to post about. In many cases, the problem is not a lack of stories. It is that nobody has built a reliable way of finding them.

Working inside Cardiff Met Sport has reinforced that for me. Once you begin looking beyond fixtures and results, there are athletes, coaches, students, alumni, volunteers, researchers, events, competitions, community programmes, partnerships and countless individual journeys taking place across an organisation. The content exists long before somebody turns it into an article or social post.

That has changed the way I think about content strategy. The creative output is only the visible end of the process. Before that comes what I would describe as the content supply chain: relationships, information gathering, internal communication, planning and the ability to recognise when something happening in one part of an organisation could matter to an audience somewhere else.

This is where market orientation and segmentation become particularly relevant. A story is not automatically valuable simply because an organisation is proud of it. The marketer still needs to ask who might care and why. A performance achievement might matter to current students because it creates pride, prospective students because it demonstrates opportunity, alumni because it reconnects them with the institution, and external audiences because it strengthens Cardiff Met's sporting reputation.

The story remains the same, but the audience value changes.

I think this is also where marketers can become too obsessed with formats. A conversation might begin with “we need more Reels” or “we should post more on LinkedIn”, but those are distribution decisions. The more fundamental question is whether the organisation has enough interesting things to say and whether the marketer understands which stories support which objectives.

That requires marketers to build relationships internally. People need to know what sort of information might be useful and who they should tell when something happens. In a larger organisation, that becomes even more important because no individual marketer can possibly know everything taking place.

The strategic opportunity is therefore not merely producing more content. It is creating an organisation where useful stories have a better chance of reaching the people who can tell them.

That might not sound as exciting as a viral campaign, but it creates something far more sustainable. Instead of staring at a blank content calendar every Monday morning wondering what to publish, marketing starts becoming connected to the real activity of the organisation.

The best content strategy might therefore begin long before anyone opens Photoshop, writes a caption or picks up a camera.

It begins with paying attention.