Episode 11: How a Wrong ICP Breaks Your Content Strategy: Why Your Content Performs but Doesn't Convert

I'm Jason Haeger, and this is Marketing Notes for Entrepreneurs from Grey Leaf Media,

where impact-driven leaders use trust, clarity, and strategy to turn good work into sustainable

growth.

This is the third episode in our series on how a wrong ICP cascades through your entire

marketing system.

Last time, we talked about how a wrong ICP breaks your social media.

Today, how it breaks your content strategy.

Here's a scenario most content creators know too well.

You spend hours on a piece of content, a blog post, a video, a long-form LinkedIn

article, you research it, write it, publish it.

It gets traction, comments, shares, people tell you it's great, but nobody buys.

And you start telling yourself it's working.

The engagement is there, the reach is there, but your pipeline is empty.

Revenue is flat.

That's not a content quality problem, that's a content direction problem.

You're creating content for the wrong people.

Useful, well-crafted content, but completely misaligned.

It's aimed squarely at someone who will engage and never buy.

And here's what makes this particularly dangerous right now.

The tools we use to create content have made it faster and easier than ever, to publish

at scale.

Which means it's also faster and easier than ever, to build the wrong audience at scale.

Speed without direction isn't efficiency, it's just getting lost faster.

This is Episode 11, how a wrong ICP breaks your content strategy.

Let's talk about creating content for ghosts.

The three ways it breaks.

When your ICP is wrong, your content strategy breaks in three specific ways.

First, you're solving the wrong problems.

In 2020, Quibi launched with nearly $2 billion in funding and some of the best creative talent

in Hollywood.

Their entire strategy was built on one assumption.

People want high quality short-form video to watch during commutes and idle moments throughout

the day.

The content was good.

The production quality was excellent.

The creators were world-class.

But the ICP was wrong.

Quibi's theoretical customer commuted to work, pulled out their phone during a 10 minute

train ride and wanted premium entertainment in quick installments.

That customer existed.

It just wasn't the one who showed up.

What actually happened?

People watching short-form content on phones wanted to share it, react to it, watch

it together.

Quibi's platform didn't allow any of that.

And when people wanted to relax and watch something longer, they switched to Netflix on

their couch.

They built for a problem their actual users didn't have, so the quality didn't matter.

It solved for the wrong moment in the wrong context for the wrong person.

You don't need $2 billion to make the same mistake.

You just need to build your content calendar around what you think your customer struggles

with, instead of what they actually tell you keeps them up at night.

Second, you're using the wrong language.

In 1985, Coca-Cola ran extensive research showing people preferred a sweeter taste in blind

tests, so they reformulated.

New Coke, better taste, tested better.

The research was built on the wrong assumption.

It assumed Coke drinkers were buying based on taste preference, that if the taste improved,

loyalty would follow.

What did it miss?

Other customers weren't buying Coke primarily for the taste.

They were buying it for what it meant, identity, nostalgia, a connection to something familiar.

The backlash was immediate and severe, not because new Coke tasted bad, because it spoke

the wrong language entirely to the people who actually bought.

Every customer segment has its own vocabulary, the words they use to communicate their problems,

the phrases they reach for when they're frustrated, the terminology that signals you actually understand

their world.

When your ICP is wrong, your content uses language that resonates with your theoretical

customer, not your actual one.

Your actual customers read your content and it feels slightly off, like someone who almost

speaks their language, but not quite.

Close enough to be interesting, not close enough to feel like you understand them.

And that gap, that slight separation of language, is the difference between content that builds

trust and content that just fills a feed.

Third, you're creating the wrong format and depth.

Quibi made another critical content mistake beyond the ICP problem itself.

They locked the platform to vertical mobile viewing, not casting to TV, no desktop, mobile

only.

Their assumed customer watched content on the go.

Their actual customers wanted to watch wherever they were comfortable, which was usually

their couch, on a screen that wasn't 5 inches wide.

The format didn't match how actual customers consumed content, so even when the content

was good, the delivery created friction that made it easier to go somewhere else.

Different customers consumed content differently.

Some want long-form deep dives, some want tactical quick reads, some watch video, some listen

to podcasts like this one, some want frameworks, some want step-by-step guides.

When your ICP is wrong, you're producing content in the format your theoretical customer

prefers, not your actual one.

When the format is wrong, content doesn't get used, even when the topic is right.

The Engagement Trap

Here's what makes this so hard to catch.

Wrong ICP content can perform well by every standard metric.

Traffic, shares, audience growth, positive feedback, people telling you was the best thing

they've read this week.

And you keep going, because the signals look good.

This is the Engagement Trap.

You get enough positive feedback to keep going, but none of it converts, because the people

engaging aren't the people who buy.

I see this constantly with consultants and service providers who want to move up market.

They start creating content about enterprise challenges, sophisticated operations, complex

organizational problems, because that's who they want to attract.

But their actual buyers are small business owners who find that content interesting but

irrelevant to their immediate reality.

The content performs.

The wrong audience grows.

The pipeline stays empty.

And then comes the next step, the dangerous one.

You start optimizing for the content that performs best.

You double down on what gets the most engagement.

You build your entire strategy around the signals you're getting.

But if those signals are coming from people who won't buy, you're not optimizing your

content strategy.

You're optimizing your misdirection faster.

Six months later, you have a larger audience, a full content calendar, and no new customers

to show for it.

That's the engagement trap closing.

And right now, AI-generated content has made this problem significantly worse.

Not because AI is bad at writing, but because AI defaults to the average.

When you use an AI tool to generate content without deeply informing it about your actual

customer, their specific language, their specific pain points, their specific context, the model

fills in the gaps with assumptions about who might be interested.

Which means it writes for everyone, and no one specific enough to buy.

Here's what average content looks like.

It covers the topic correctly.

It's structured well.

It hits the expected points.

Someone reads it, thinks, yes, that's accurate, and keeps scrolling.

What it doesn't do is make someone stop and think, how did they know exactly what I was

struggling with?

Because it wasn't written for them.

It was written for a statistical average of people who might care about this subject.

And that gap between content that's accurate and content that's specific is where trust

gets built or lost.

Now I'm not saying don't use AI in your content process.

That's not the point.

The point is that AI amplifies whatever inputs you give it.

If you give it a vague ICP, it produces content for a vague audience.

If you give it deeply researched specific customer language and real context, it can produce

content that serves a specific audience extremely well.

The tool isn't the problem.

Using the tool before you've done the work of understanding your actual customer is the

problem.

Starting at scale without specificity isn't a content strategy.

It's a very efficient way to build the wrong audience faster than you ever could have manually.

Quibi spent $2 billion to get lost in the wrong direction quickly.

AI gives everyone that same capability for the cost of a monthly subscription.

How to diagnose it.

Here's how to tell if your content strategy is broken by a wrong ICP.

Diagnostic one, map your content to your actual customers.

Take your last 10 pieces of content.

For each one, name a specific paying customer who would find it immediately useful.

Not hypothetically, immediately.

I needed this today useful.

If you can't name a real customer for most of your content, you're creating for ghost.

Diagnostic two, check the language gap.

All three actual customer conversations, sales calls, onboarding notes, client emails.

Write down the exact phrases your customers use to describe their problems.

Now, look at your content.

Does that language appear anywhere?

If your customers say, "I feel like I'm drowning in work that isn't moving the needle,"

and your content talks about optimizing operational efficiency, you have a language gap.

You're speaking an adjacent dialect.

Close enough to attract.

Not close enough to convert.

New Coke addressed the right category.

Taste.

With the wrong understanding of why people actually bought.

More content can do the same thing.

Write topic, wrong language, wrong result.

Diagnostic three, follow the content to customer trail.

Look at your last 10 customers.

Trace back how they found you.

How many came through your content?

Of those, what did they actually read or listen to before buying?

That content is your template.

That is what's actually working.

Everything else is noise.

And the gap between your best performing content and your content that actually converts

is where your ICP problem lives.

Think for, who is your content actually attracting?

Look at the people who engage most consistently, who comments, who shares, who subscribes.

Are they your actual ICP or a completely different segment?

If your most engaged audience doesn't match your actual customer base, your content is

a magnet pointed at the wrong material.

How to fix it.

Step 1.

Start with customer language.

Not content ideas.

Before you create any new content, AI assisted or otherwise, go back to actual customer

conversations.

If you haven't had them yet, have them before you write another word.

Listen for the exact language your actual customers use.

The phrases that repeat.

The frustrations described in their own words.

The way they explain the problem to someone who doesn't understand it yet.

Language is your content strategy.

Not your editorial calendar.

Not your content pillars.

The words your actual customers use to describe their actual problems.

And if you are using AI tools in your content process, this customer language becomes your

most important input.

Feed the tool real customer language, real pain points, real context.

The output will reflect the specificity of what you put in.

Garbage in, garbage out, has always been true.

It's just more obvious now that garbage can come out faster.

Step 2.

Select content for the journey your customers are already on.

Your actual customers have a specific path from awareness to purchase.

Specific questions at each stage.

Specific objections.

Specific information gaps.

Map it for your actual ICP.

Then create content that serves each stage of that actual journey.

Not the one you designed.

The one they're already on.

Quibi designed content for a commute journey that COVID eliminated.

But even before COVID, they hadn't validated that the journey actually existed at the scale

they assumed.

They built the map before confirming the territory.

Don't build the map before confirming your territory.

Step 3.

Accept that better targeted content will initially perform worse.

When you pivot your content to serve your actual ICP, your overall engagement will probably

drop because you're no longer optimizing for everyone.

You're only optimizing for the right people.

It feels wrong, the metrics go down, the audience narrows.

But a smaller audience of people who buy is infinitely more valuable than a large audience

of people who don't.

Every time.

Specificity repels the wrong people and magnetizes the right ones.

What that makes the wrong person think this isn't for me is working exactly as it should.

Step 4.

Kill content that builds the wrong audience.

If content consistently attracts people who don't buy, stop creating it.

Even if it performs well.

Even if it gets shares, even if it's easy to produce with AI.

Content that builds the wrong audience actively works against you.

It sends algorithms in the wrong direction, delutes your ability to reach the right people,

and consumes creative energy that could go toward content that actually moves your business.

This is the hardest step because it means walking away from something that looks like it's

working.

But looking like it's working and actually working are two very different things.

This week do this.

Take your last three pieces of content.

For each one, name a specific actual paying customer who would find it immediately useful.

Then look at the language you used.

Does it match the language your actual customers use when they describe their own problems?

If the answer is no to either question, you're serving ghosts.

And if you're using AI to accelerate your content production, ask yourself one more question.

What specific customer input did you give the tool before it wrote anything?

If the answer is nothing or not much, you're just producing ghost content faster.

The fix starts with your customers.

Their language, their journey, their problems.

Not the theoretical ones, the real ones.

I'm Jason Hager and this is Marketing Notes for Entrepreneurs from Grey Leaf Media.

For leaders who believe profit and purpose don't have to be at odds.

If you need help rebuilding your content strategy around your actual ICP, that's the work

we do.

Brand positioning, content strategy, and marketing systems built around reality instead of assumptions.

And if your website isn't working as hard as your content should be, we build and maintain

WordPress sites designed to convert the right traffic, not just any traffic.

Start here.

GreyLeafMedia.com/Diagnostic.

Next time, how a wrong ICP breaks your positioning.

Why your actual customers don't understand what you do.

And why that's not their fault.

Until then, go look at your actual customers.

Then look at your content.

Ask yourself honestly.

Are you writing for them or for someone who doesn't exist?

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