Why Content Strategies Fail

If content that used to work has stopped landing, your ideas probably aren’t the problem. Your plan is. Most senior leaders in 2026 are still running content strategies built in 2019, and those strategies were designed for beginners who needed help producing volume.

In this LinkedIn Live, communications and media strategist Erin Trafford explains why content pillars, colour-coded calendars and templated posting plans are failing leaders who already know what they want to say.

She also covers what to build in their place: a defensible position, clear guardrails, and the discernment to respond in the moment.

In this Live: The one question most content plans ask, and why it’s a beginner question The “senior operator problem”: why leaders have too many ideas and too little positioning Why your position needs to be clear enough that someone else can say it for you How archetypes help leaders decide how to show up, in any situation Why the strongest communicators are also the best at being reactive

Transcript Below:

 Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the LinkedIn Live version of The Narrative Advantage. I’m Erin Trafford. I am a communications strategist, a media strategist, and a multifaceted entrepreneur. I work with solo operators. I work with large organizations. I work with leaders on how to position themselves and how to show up in ways that feel truly authentic and also match up with the business and revenue objectives that they have set.

There is a distinct feeling right now in the market, and I know you have felt it. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in. It really doesn’t matter. There’s a distinct feeling that 2026 is different. Everything feels different, and I am having a multitude of conversations with leaders, whether they are clients or not, um, in what I will say the back halls, so over dinner, uh, over a quick Zoom.

I actually ran into somebody at the grocery store last week, and a very similar sentiment of what worked before, not only is it not working anymore, but it is failing in spectacular fashion. And I have been very upfront about how I have had to shift my business, how I have had to go back to what I would call my core principles as I grow and adapt and change my business as a result of this.

But I think what we’re all feeling is that there is this sense that we need to change something now, but we’re scared of changing the wrong thing, so we end up getting stuck. We end up getting stuck. So these quick live hits I’m gonna tell you now are my gift to you to help you get unstuck. And as part of my shift of how I’m going to do things is that these LinkedIn Lives go over really well.

I get lots of comments on them after they’re already done. Um, so I’m gonna try to keep them way tighter, and then what I’ll do is go deeper on the actual podcast feed, which you can find across the pod sphere, uh, The Narrative Advantage, every other week. So I’ll do a deeper dive every other week. You’ll get a nice little hit on LinkedIn Live, uh, weekly.

Um, but then also the best thing to do, and I’ve got a little, uh, banner here, is to subscribe to The Narrative Advantage newsletter. So whether you subscribe using the LinkedIn function, or better yet, head to my website, erintrafford.com, and sign up using your email. Um, I send those out weekly, and it’s kind of like a redux of everything that I have seen, all of the things that are coming up for me, uh, some of the trends that I am spotting in the communications media brand positioning world, and I try to be really frank in that newsletter.

And it’s not long, but it’s often just one of those things that’ll be like, oh, aha, that… Yes, I’m feeling that. Um, and I’ll give you a little heads up. Hmm, I know it’s only the end of September right now. Um, but I am working on something new, and people who are on the newsletter are going to get first kick at that can when it becomes real.

So I would say, if you’re watching this, if you are a fan, I would very much like for you to take the next step and subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the newsletter, um, and we’ll go from there. So today what I wanna talk about is this feeling of how do we get unstuck? And it all comes down to, what I’m gonna say, is that the concept of the pillar is failing.

The concept of the pillar is done. The frameworks, I’m seeing it, I can see it in real time happen. The frameworks that most senior operators are using now in 2026 were actually the frameworks and the strategies built in 2019. And those strategies, I’m gonna say, were built for beginners. They were built to be simple.

They were built for efficiency first. And if you stick with me over the next month as I unveil some of the findings that I’ve had, you’ll see that one of the key shifts I’ve noticed in comms, marketing, content, and branding is that the table has flipped, and efficiency is no longer the core value of content creation.

And the reason is, you know, is because we’re all suddenly realizing that volume over quality is not what we actually want. So when you re-evaluate that stack, suddenly your desire to be more efficient becomes less important. But what takes the first place? That’s what I wanna talk about. So today we’re gonna unpack why this is happening, why content pillars and why the frameworks from 2019, if applied today, are starting to fail, especially if you are a senior operator.

Number one thing you need to do is identify if and when this is happening to you. So here’s what I want you to think about. A framework… A- and ask yourself this plainly, am I working inside an old framework that’s not serving me? A framework organizes things, okay? I think that’s a pretty blunt way of putting it.

It organizes things by topic, but not necessarily by position. It organizes things by pillars. We could call them buckets. We can call them color-coded calendars that are keyed to certain categories, to five-part templates. We’ve all seen them. We have all used them. I have taught them in the past because, as I said last week on the live, they used to work.

They used to work. They don’t work anymore. The question a framework like that asks of you is what will you post about today? And I hate to break it to you folks, but that is kind of a beginner question. It’s a bit of a kindergarten-level question. A beginner needs help generating volume. A beginner needs help generating energy, but what happens when you’re already a leader?

What happens when you know what you wanna say? What happens when you have strong conviction and a strong internal sense of who you are and what you stand for already? That question is not gonna solve your problem. You do not need volume. You don’t need the volume the framework is enabling for you. You actually need a defensible position with clear guardrails and permission to express it.

The framework will not get you there. That is number one, the number one reason why we’re seeing these kinda old-school content strategies start to fail. Number two is what I’m gonna call loosely the senior operator problem, and I, and I just said it, is that when you know who you are and you know what you wanna say, the problem that I see show up on my doorstep with my clients is not a lack of what I’ll say topics or ideas.

Leaders and visionaries have tons of ideas. You have a glut of ideas. What you actually need is a position for those ideas that will not only survive being described by other people. You know, you’ve heard Caitlin Burgoyne is great at this. She talks about the ownable idea. It… Your position has to be something that is so strongly articulated that someone else can say it for you when you’re not there, okay?

You need that. But you also need to be able to defend that position across multiple planes of reality, and that’s where we get into the concept of channelizing your position. That’s where you get into the nuance of how do you say the same thing, not just three different ways, but six different ways to six different audiences?

Harken back to last week’s live when I talked about how do you make something matter to people? How do you make something matter to people? None of this is going to be solved by a color-coded spreadsheet and the old-school concept of a content pillar. None of that will solve what I have just called the senior operator problem, which is that a senior operator is not short on ideas.

They’re short on the strategic positioning, the guardrails, and the permission that help define the cadence Third point I’m gonna make on this Live today, I’m hoping that this is getting through and you’re starting to really think about this, is that the r- and, and the question we’re really trying to answer is why have these old school strategies started to fail so spectacularly, right?

Is that those frameworks, you can also call them templates. It’s a templated approach to visibility and showing up. Well, if you post this many times, and a lot of it was based on how we were dictating success based on showing up in an algorithm, right? It forced us into this thinking that if we had a calendar or a template or a spreadsheet and we just stuck to it, that it would work.

Here is the slight nuance that I want you to hear me say as someone who works with leaders who have something to say, and this is, uh, something I have just noticed, is that the senior operator or the visionary or whatever you wanna call it, the leader, doesn’t want a template. They’re not logging in and color-coding stuff.

Maybe their EA is doing that. Maybe their team is doing that. But the senior leader who needs to have a personal brand above and distinct from the corporate brand perhaps actually needs a tool for discernment, not volume They need a live, living, reactive diagnostic that they can run against any situation that is not static.

In fact, it is almost more malleable and more flexible than any framework they could ever develop. And that’s why when I work with my clients, I work in terms of archetypes. So if you’ve been in narrative or branding or marketing or psychology or anything, you’ve heard of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, right?

That helps you see how archetypes work with the human brain. When we look at brand positioning, when we look at leadership positioning, when we look at communication strategy, when we look at market strategy, all of those things, I have about 10 different archetypes that we like to work with. And so the question we ask when we’re looking at discernment is, what archetype are we fulfilling at this moment?

And when we answer that question, it helps us develop discernment in how to show up and communicate the answer. So this also lends itself to one of my, my next findings, is that the majority of organizations actually do need a new playbook, a reactive playbook. I know that sounds scary. It’s like, “Don’t be reactive.

We need to be proactive.” Actually, the strongest communicators know how to be reactive and make it a real moment. So future lives, we’re gonna talk about that, but I’m just giving you all of these seeds to think about right now, okay? So I want you to… I’m just gonna run back through those. The tell is that you are working from a framework that isn’t asking you the right question.

The framework is forcing you into volume rather than a defensible position. The second thing to think about is that you know you don’t need more things to talk about, right? But rather, you actually need a defensible position that someone else could describe for you. And then the third thing to think about is that you don’t need templates, you actually need discernment.

For these three reasons, and a multitude of others, this is why old school content strategies are starting to fail. This is why old school communications are starting to fail leaders. This is why I’m getting so many whispers from leaders saying, “Erin, nothing’s working anymore. I don’t know how to show up.”

Well, it’s ’cause you’re using the wrong tool. It’s ’cause you’re coming at it from a beginner stance, and you’re not a beginner. We need to update. We need to upgrade our operating system So that’s it for me today on this Live. I do hope that you will consider signing up for the newsletter, subscribing wherever you find the link, wherever you’re watching this.

You can always head to erintrafford.com and sign up there. If you’re on LinkedIn, you can subscribe to my LinkedIn version of the newsletter. Also, check out The Narrative Advantage on your podcast feeds. Wherever you get your podcasts, I will be publishing there bi-weekly now as I’m here live on LinkedIn, and all of these LinkedIn Lives also get pushed over to YouTube.

So the other thing I would suggest you do is if you wanna binge, you can go back and watch last week’s LinkedIn Live where I talked a little bit about what happens when what you’re saying is really not landing with your intended audience. There were a lot of really good nuggets in there. But today, the message is loud and clear.

You are not a beginner, so you need to stop using beginner tools and start using tools to build your leadership. As always, I’ll find you in the comments, I’ll find you in the DMs. Until next week, thanks for watching