Content Creation Is a Company Sport, Not a Marketing Job

Content creation should involve more than the marketing team. The departments that consistently produce the most useful, credible, and commercially effective content are the ones that pull in sales, product, customer success, and leadership, not because it looks collaborative, but because those teams hold the raw material that marketing alone cannot manufacture.

The question of which departments should be involved is less about org chart politics and more about where the real knowledge lives. Marketing can shape, structure, and distribute. But the insight that makes content worth reading usually comes from somewhere else in the business entirely.

This is fundamentally a go-to-market question. How you create content, who feeds into it, and how it maps to the buyer experience is part of your broader growth architecture. If you are building or refining that architecture, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is where the broader thinking lives.

Why Marketing Cannot Do This Alone

I have run agencies where the content team worked in near-total isolation from the clients’ commercial operations. They would write blog posts, produce social content, and build out editorial calendars with genuine craft and effort. And then the client’s sales director would look at it and say, “This is fine, but it’s not really how our customers talk about this problem.”

That gap is not a writing problem. It is an information problem. The marketing team was working from briefs, personas, and category assumptions. The sales director was working from 40 customer conversations a month. Those are not the same source material, and the content reflected it.

Marketing’s job in a cross-functional content model is to own the editorial function: the strategy, the structure, the quality control, the distribution. But the raw material, the real insight, the language that resonates, the objections that need answering, that has to come from the people closest to the customer and the product.

This is not a new idea, but it is one that most businesses implement badly. They either exclude other departments entirely, or they try to involve everyone and end up with content by committee, which is the fastest way to produce something that says a lot and means nothing.

Sales: The Most Underused Content Asset in Most Businesses

If I could only pull one department into the content process, it would be sales. Not because they are better writers or sharper strategists, but because they are the only people in the business who hear the customer’s actual words, every day, in real time.

Sales teams know the objections that kill deals. They know which competitor keeps coming up. They know the question that gets asked on every second discovery call. They know the framing that makes a prospect lean in and the framing that makes them go quiet. That is the most commercially valuable content intelligence in the business, and most marketing teams have almost no systematic access to it.

The practical implication is not that sales should write content. They should not, in most cases. What they should do is feed the content process with structured input: the objections they hear most, the questions that come up before a deal closes, the language customers use to describe their own problems. Marketing takes that raw material and turns it into content that actually addresses the buying conversation rather than floating above it.

When I was at iProspect, one of the things that shifted our new business performance was getting our sales team to document the ten questions that came up in almost every pitch. We built content around those questions, not the questions we thought prospects should be asking. The difference in resonance was immediate. Prospects would reference specific pieces in follow-up conversations because the content was speaking to their actual situation, not a generic version of it.

Product and Technical Teams: Where Depth Comes From

For businesses with a product, a platform, or a technical service, the product team is where genuine expertise lives. Marketing can describe what a product does. Product can explain why it works the way it does, what trade-offs were made, what problems it was specifically designed to solve, and what it does not do well.

That last part matters more than most content strategies acknowledge. Content that is honest about limitations, that explains constraints and trade-offs, builds more trust than content that reads like a feature list. Buyers are sophisticated. They know every vendor claims to be the best option. Content that says “this is where we are strong and here is where you might need to think carefully” is far more credible, and far more useful in a buying decision.

Product teams also tend to be ahead of the market on where things are going. They are tracking competitor development, talking to customers about unmet needs, and thinking about the next version of the problem. That forward-looking perspective is genuinely valuable in thought leadership content, the kind that positions a business as a credible authority rather than just a vendor with a blog.

The challenge is translation. Product people often communicate in a way that is precise but inaccessible to a general audience. Marketing’s job here is to extract the insight and make it readable without dumbing it down to the point where it loses the substance that made it worth saying.

Customer Success and Support: The Retention Content Nobody Writes

Most content strategies are built around acquisition. They are designed to attract new prospects, move them through a funnel, and support the sales process. That is legitimate, but it leaves a significant gap: the content that keeps existing customers engaged, reduces churn, and drives expansion revenue.

Customer success and support teams are the ones who know what happens after the sale. They know the onboarding questions that come up every time. They know the features that customers consistently underuse. They know the moments where customers start to disengage, and they know the moments where customers become advocates. All of that is content territory that acquisition-focused marketing teams rarely touch.

There is also a feedback loop here that most businesses are not using properly. Support tickets, customer interviews, NPS comments, renewal conversations, all of that is a live signal about what customers value, what frustrates them, and what they wish the product or service did differently. That signal should be feeding content strategy continuously, not sitting in a CRM that marketing never looks at.

Tools like Hotjar’s feedback mechanisms are one way to surface some of this behavioural and attitudinal data, but the richest material tends to come from direct conversation with the people who own the customer relationship post-sale. If your content strategy does not involve a regular conversation with customer success, it is almost certainly missing the most commercially important part of the story.

Leadership and Subject Matter Experts: When It Matters and When It Does Not

Leadership involvement in content is a topic that generates strong opinions. Some businesses treat the CEO’s LinkedIn as their primary content channel. Others have a CEO who has never been near a piece of content in their professional life. Neither extreme is obviously right.

The honest answer is that leadership involvement in content matters when leadership has a genuine point of view that is worth sharing, and it does not matter when it is performative. A CEO who has spent 20 years in an industry and has genuinely contrarian views about where it is going can produce content that no junior copywriter can replicate. A CEO who approves a ghostwritten LinkedIn post about company values every quarter is not adding much.

Subject matter experts, whether internal or external, are a different category. In technical industries, in regulated sectors, in any business where credibility is a competitive asset, having genuine experts contribute to content is not optional. It is what separates content that builds authority from content that fills a publishing schedule.

I have judged the Effie Awards, and one of the things that distinguishes genuinely effective marketing from the kind that just looks impressive is whether there is real substance behind it. Content is the same. The businesses that win on content over time are the ones with genuine expertise to draw on, and that expertise almost always sits outside the marketing department.

Finance and Legal: The Departments That Kill Content and the Ones That Should Not

Finance and legal involvement in content tends to be framed as a blocker. Marketing wants to publish quickly. Legal wants to review everything. Finance wants to know the ROI before committing to a content programme. The tension is real, but it is also largely avoidable if the process is set up properly.

Legal review is not the problem. Publishing content that creates regulatory, reputational, or contractual risk is the problem. In regulated industries, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, legal review is not bureaucracy, it is risk management. The answer is not to bypass it but to build it into the editorial process at the right stage, not as a final gate that kills content after significant investment.

Finance is more interesting. The CFO and their team understand the commercial levers of the business better than almost anyone. If you can get finance to articulate the business problems they are trying to solve, the metrics they care about, the decisions that are being made on the basis of incomplete information, that is genuinely useful content territory. The challenge is that most marketing teams never have that conversation.

The broader point about go-to-market alignment is worth noting here. Go-to-market execution is getting harder across the board, and a significant part of why is that commercial functions are not aligned around the same understanding of the customer and the market. Content strategy, done properly, is one of the mechanisms that can close that alignment gap.

How to Structure Cross-Functional Content Without It Becoming a Committee

The risk with cross-functional content is that it becomes unwieldy. Everyone has opinions. Everyone wants their priorities reflected. The content ends up representing the internal politics of the business rather than the needs of the audience.

The way to avoid that is to be clear about roles. Marketing owns the editorial function. That is non-negotiable. Marketing decides what gets published, how it is structured, and whether it meets the quality bar. Other departments contribute raw material and expertise. They do not get editorial control.

In practice, this means building structured input mechanisms rather than open-ended collaboration. A monthly 30-minute conversation with a sales manager to document the top objections and questions from the previous month. A quarterly review with product to understand what is changing and what customers are asking about. A regular pull from the support team’s most common queries. These are inputs into an editorial process, not co-authorship arrangements.

The early days of building a content function at iProspect taught me something about this. When we were small, everything was informal and fast. When we scaled from 20 to 100 people across multiple offices, the informal model broke down. The businesses that scale content well are the ones that formalise the input process early, before the chaos forces them to. BCG’s work on scaling agile functions is instructive here: the structure that enables speed at scale looks different from the structure that enables speed when you are small.

Approvals need the same clarity. Who has the right to block a piece of content, and on what grounds? Legal can block on compliance grounds. Leadership can block on strategic grounds. Individual departments cannot block because they do not like the framing or because it does not mention their team. If those boundaries are not set in advance, every piece of content becomes a negotiation.

The Practical Model: Who Does What

To make this concrete, here is how I would structure departmental involvement in a content operation of reasonable scale.

Marketing owns strategy, editorial standards, production, distribution, and performance measurement. They set the content calendar, commission pieces, edit for quality and consistency, and report on outcomes. This is the core function.

Sales contributes objection mapping, buyer language, deal-stage questions, and competitive intelligence. The mechanism is a regular structured conversation, not ad hoc requests. A good sales enablement lead or a commercially minded marketing manager can own this relationship.

Product contributes technical depth, roadmap context, and honest capability framing. The mechanism is a quarterly briefing and access to product documentation. Marketing translates, not transcribes.

Customer success contributes post-purchase insight, common failure modes, expansion triggers, and customer language. The mechanism is a regular review of support queries and a monthly conversation with the CS lead.

Leadership contributes genuine point of view on industry direction, company strategy, and the decisions that shaped the business. The mechanism is structured interviews or ghostwriting with editorial review. Not approval loops that last three weeks.

Legal and compliance contribute a review function, not an editorial function. Build them into the process at the right stage and define what they are reviewing for.

This model is not complex. What makes it work is the clarity of roles and the discipline to protect the editorial function from becoming a service desk for everyone else’s communication priorities.

There is a broader strategic dimension to all of this that connects to how businesses structure their go-to-market approach. If the thinking on content, distribution, and commercial alignment interests you, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider landscape in more depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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