Enterprise marketing organizations invest heavily in content. While they may understand and value how content unlocks and enlivens a brand’s digital experience, those experiences are often fragmented, reactive, and inconsistent. Marketing performance suffers as a result. This all-too-common scenario leads CMOs and marketing VPs to start asking hard questions about their content investments.

Why is our content not performing? Why aren’t we generating the leads we expected? Why can’t customers find what they need? Why isn’t personalization working? And so on.

Tendo has helped many enterprise clients implement content strategies that address these hard questions. Over the years, Founder/CEO Karla Spormann and EVP/Partner Lindy Roux have seen one blind spot undermine even the best laid content plans. Enterprises often have only a partial understanding of what content strategy is, why it’s important, and what it requires at enterprise scale.

A mature enterprise content organization demands no less than a unified definition of content strategy that transcends silos and the dedicated content strategy expertise and authority to orchestrate it across all of marketing.

In a recent conversation, Karla and Lindy shed light on the hidden content strategy gaps that are at the core of so many enterprise marketers’ frustrations.

Content Strategy Is Foundational to Marketing Success

What may seem like unrelated marketing challenges to Tendo clients usually are symptoms of the same ailment: a fractured content strategy. In that strategy vacuum, key marketing functions can spiral:

• Content marketing programs become reactive.
• Websites evolve into patchwork, redundant, and ineffective systems.
• Governance breaks down or is non-existent.
• UX and martech investments underperform or become excessive.

“We see clients come to us with discrete problems,” explained Karla. “They’ve been throwing content and small incremental fixes at a challenge without taking a step back and systemically looking at the overarching ecosystem of their content assets and coming up with a master strategy, which informs all of these discrete needs underneath it.”

When strategy is incomplete or fragmented, teams compensate with output. Campaigns multiply. Landing pages proliferate. New technology is introduced to fix performance issues. But without structural alignment, the organization ends up producing what Tendo calls “random acts of content”—content at scale without a cohesive strategy and experience design.

The impacts to the overall business can be significant:

• Customer experience is fragmented and inconsistent.
• Brand equity erodes.
• Costs compound because of rework and inefficiency.
• Performance degrades despite increased investment.

More hard questions follow.

“If there isn’t some kind of overarching strategy, and if there are strategy gaps, what you see is largely reactive content marketing.”

— Lindy Roux, EVP/Partner, Tendo

More content initiatives or marketing technology will not solve misalignment across content channels, programs, or the marketing organization. The solution is a unifying enterprise content strategy. And that does not happen by accident.

New CMI research suggests that enterprise marketers are coming around to the significant benefits of strategies anchored by intention. In the past 12 months, 61% of enterprise marketers saw significant or somewhat improved content strategy effectiveness, driven primarily by three factors: strategy refinement (73%), team restructuring and resource changes (53%), and new technology implementation (47%).

To Tackle Content Strategy, You Need the Right Team in the Right Roles

One recurring issue Karla and Lindy have observed is the conflation of content marketing and content strategy roles.

Content marketers develop programs designed to drive revenue, pipeline, and measurable campaign outcomes. Their work is essential. But enterprise content strategists operate at a different level: they architect ecosystem-wide digital experiences that span channels, business units, and customer journeys.

When functional content marketing roles are labeled “strategic” or when content marketers talk about strategy, organizations can assume the capability already exists. But architectural thinking, governance authority, and cross-channel systems design require distinct expertise.

Karla described this distinction using a familiar analogy: architects and designers both contribute to building a house. Both roles are valuable, but they serve different purposes. Designers furnish and finish while architects build the structure into which the designers’ work fits.

“Seldom do content strategists lay claim to demand or content marketing expertise,” Karla noted. “But so often content marketers say they are content strategists. That’s where the biggest point of confusion lies.”

Without systemic authority and governance, even strong content marketing teams struggle to deliver consistent digital experiences. Enterprise content strategy is not only about creating compelling assets; it’s about defining the architecture that governs how those assets are structured, connected, and optimized over time.

When “Content Strategy” Means Different Things to Different Teams

Many enterprise marketing leaders believe they have content strategy covered when in actuality they have equated content strategy with specific artifacts or initiatives:

• Editorial calendars
• Campaign roadmaps
• Content marketing plans
• AEO or GEO strategies
• Website or microsite redesigns
• Roles labeled “content strategist”

None of these alone constitutes an enterprise content strategy. At a minimum, true enterprise content strategy includes:

• Audience and journey definition
• Prioritization and roadmaps
• Messaging pillars and themes
• Omnichannel journeys
• Information architecture
• Governance frameworks
• Measurement and optimization

This work is foundational. It transcends discrete goals, functions, and business units. It also tends to be less visible and less glamorous than campaign execution.

“The devil’s in the details in terms of what elements of content strategy are included and it’s all over the map.”

— Lindy Roux, EVP/Partner, Tendo

Lindy recalled a large enterprise tech client that engaged Tendo to define content strategy for their digital ecosystem. When Lindy shared what Tendo had learned from interviewing an adjacent marketing group, the client clarified that the other team was also “doing content and strategy” but that they were focused on asset creation, not digital ecosystem design. Two strategies existed in parallel, each valid within its scope, but lacking alignment.

That kind of siloed structure is common in large organizations. KPIs are defined locally. Strategy is owned within functions. Without architectural oversight at the enterprise level, customer experience becomes a collection of optimized parts rather than a cohesive whole.

Karla captured this dynamic with a Hollywood analogy: a few great scenes will never win a film the Academy Award if the overall plot doesn’t hang together. Micro content moments cannot compensate for macro strategic gaps.

The Silo Problem: Multiple Content Strategies, No Overarching System

In large enterprises where content spans marketing, digital, product, and brand, silos are inevitable. Specialization has value, but it can become counterproductive when it isn’t integrated.

When each team optimizes for its own KPIs, the result can be:

• Redundant content across properties
• Inconsistent messaging and metadata
• Fragmented user journeys
• Governance that is advisory rather than enforceable

Decision rights around structure, taxonomy, and architectural standards are often unclear. Enterprise content strategy requires authority to be effective. Governance goes beyond documentation; an organization needs to have clarity about who defines the model, who owns taxonomy, who approves structural changes, and who can enforce compliance. Without that authority, siloed execution is bound to happen.

The Uncomfortable Truth and Immediate Opportunity of Content Strategy

Content strategy at enterprise scale is larger and more complex than many marketing leaders assume. That’s the recurring challenge that Tendo has encountered over decades of enterprise engagements. Even sophisticated organizations struggle to centralize and scale it effectively.

We really are, in an ideal world, mapping to a point at which you would have a chief content officer at the top of an organization who has the role of overseeing the strategy for content across the entire organization.”

— Lindy Roux, EVP/Partner, Tendo

The good news is that content strategy is an ongoing evolution that can start anytime. The goal is not sweeping transformation. In fact, attempting to overhaul an entire ecosystem at once often creates more friction than progress.

Lindy offered encouragement for leaders navigating this complexity: “Everybody’s evolving, maturing over time. It’s not this idea that if you’re not doing all of these things, you’re destined to fail. It’s really about starting to address those gaps and fill them in where you can, so you can grow and mature at a pace that is consistent with everything else going on in the organization.”

Evolution, not revolution. Reach out to Tendo if you need help evolving your enterprise content strategy.