In the world of enterprise B2B marketing, the pressure to publish is relentless. But what if the key to success isn’t creating more, but creating less? We sat down with Anastasia Braitsik, a leading expert in global SEO and content marketing, to discuss a radical idekilling 80% of your content to make way for what truly works. Anastasia shares her framework for a ruthless content detox, explaining how teams can shift from a culture of volume to one of value. We’ll explore how to identify your top-performing assets, repurpose them for maximum impact, streamline chaotic approval processes, and fundamentally change how you measure success—moving from motion to real business progress.
Many enterprise teams find that a small fraction of their content drives most of the results. When starting a ruthless content audit, what practical tools or methods do you recommend for measuring “pipeline influence” and how should a team decide what to archive versus what to keep?
The first step is always the hardest: you have to be brutally honest with yourself. It starts with a comprehensive content inventory—every blog post, eBook, webinar, you name it. Pull all the performance data you can, but look beyond surface-level engagement. The most critical metric is pipeline influence, which you can track through your marketing automation platform or CRM. See which assets were touched by contacts in deals that actually closed or moved to a late stage. Then, categorize everything with a simple framework: does this piece teach, prove, or help the customer decide? If an asset doesn’t clearly fit one of these roles and, more importantly, hasn’t influenced a real sales opportunity in the last six months, it’s time to say goodbye. Archive it. It sounds harsh, but you’ll quickly see that a very small percentage of your work is carrying all the weight.
You propose a framework where content must have a clear Purpose, Persona, Proof, and Path. Can you share an example of a piece of content that failed this test, and how would you advise a team to handle internal requests from sales or leadership for assets that don’t fit?
Absolutely. I see this all the time with assets born from internal pressure, not customer need. Think of the classic “monthly whitepaper” that a team produces just to check a box. It often fails the test immediately. Its purpose is vague—”to be a thought leader”—not to solve a specific customer problem. The persona is a generic “C-level executive” instead of a specific role with defined pain points. The proof is often just recycled talking points, not credible data or unique expertise. And worst of all, there’s no path; it just ends, leaving the reader with no clear next step. When sales or leadership requests an asset like this, you have to shift your role from a content factory to an editor-in-chief. Instead of just saying yes, ask “Why?” Ask them, “What specific problem will this solve for our ideal customer?” and “What do we want them to do after reading it?” By reframing the conversation around impact, you can often steer them toward a more strategic idea or show them how an existing asset can be repurposed to meet their need.
Once a team identifies its top-performing content, the next step is often repurposing. Beyond turning a guide into a webinar, what are some more creative, high-impact ways to repurpose a single strong idea across multiple channels, and how do you measure the success of those repurposed assets?
Repurposing is where the magic really happens. A high-performing guide isn’t just one asset; it’s the seed for an entire campaign. Don’t just stop at a webinar. Pull out the five most compelling data points and turn them into a series of shareable social media graphics or a short, punchy video. Take the core argument and have an expert break it down in a candid, five-minute audio clip for a podcast feed. Extract the most impactful customer quote and make it the centerpiece of a nurture email. You can even create a one-pager specifically for the sales team that summarizes the key takeaways for their conversations. Measuring success means you stop counting vanity metrics. For each of these new, smaller assets, you measure progress. Instead of just tracking views on the video, track how many contacts who watched it later entered an active sales cycle. It’s about connecting each repurposed piece back to the metrics that matter: influenced opportunities and pipeline velocity.
In large organizations, the approval process can often dilute quality. Can you describe how to implement a “tiered review” system effectively? For instance, what distinguishes a high-impact piece requiring full polish from a routine asset needing only a light check? Please provide specific examples.
Approval-by-committee is the silent killer of great content. A tiered review system brings sanity back to the process. It all starts with a clear creative brief for every single asset. That brief outlines the audience, the strategic goal, and the desired outcome. This is what determines the review tier. A high-impact, flagship thought leadership report, for example, is in the top tier. It needs the full editorial polish: multiple rounds of review, executive sign-off, and a deep design treatment. But a routine asset, like a one-pager summarizing a product feature for the sales team, doesn’t need that level of scrutiny. It falls into a lower tier, requiring maybe just a quick check for brand voice and technical accuracy by a single, designated owner. The key to making this work is having a documented voice and tone guide. When everyone is working from the same playbook, reviewers can focus on their specific area of expertise instead of rewriting the whole piece to suit their personal style.
A common challenge is shifting from measuring activity, like page views, to measuring progress, like pipeline velocity. Could you provide a step-by-step guide for a marketing manager looking to change their team’s dashboard and reporting to better reflect actual business impact?
This is a critical shift. First, a manager needs to redefine the team’s primary dashboard. Remove the vanity metrics like traffic and raw MQLs from the top spots. Instead, elevate the metrics that show true progress. Make “Opportunities Influenced” the hero number. Feature “Engagement Depth”—are people actually consuming the content, or just bouncing? And most importantly, track “Pipeline Velocity”—is our content helping to speed up the sales cycle? That’s step one: change what you see every day. Step two is to build the human feedback loop. Schedule regular, brief check-ins with the sales team and ask them one simple question: “What content is actually helping you move deals forward right now?” Their anecdotal feedback is often more valuable than any report. It tells you why something is resonating. By combining this qualitative insight with the new quantitative dashboard, you create a powerful, holistic view of what’s actually driving business impact.
Changing a team’s mindset from valuing output to valuing impact can be difficult. How can a marketing leader effectively demonstrate the value of saying “no” to low-impact work and celebrate the success of a single, well-performing asset to secure buy-in from both their team and executives?
This is entirely a leadership challenge, and it requires courage. You have to lead by example. The most powerful way to do this is to change how you celebrate. Stop praising the team for publishing ten new blog posts in a month. Instead, when you identify a winner—say, a single, refreshed guide that generated more qualified pipeline than all of the new content from the previous quarter—make a huge deal out of it. Share that success story widely, from the team meeting to the executive briefing. Show the data. When your team sees that one focused, high-quality piece gets more recognition than a dozen mediocre ones, their mindset will start to shift. At the same time, you, as the leader, have to be the one who says “no” to the endless stream of internal requests. You have to be the one who asks “why” and protects your team’s focus. Over time, everyone—from your direct reports to your CEO—will see that this discipline isn’t about doing less; it’s about creating the freedom to do more of what truly matters.
Do you have any advice for our readers?
My advice is to be brave. It feels safer to keep publishing, to keep feeding every channel, and to say yes to every request. But the truth is, most of that content is just adding to the noise. Only 44% of marketers believe their content actually drives conversions, which tells you everything you need to know. The real competitive advantage today isn’t volume; it’s clarity and trust. Have the courage to audit your content ruthlessly and archive what isn’t working. Focus your energy on that small fraction of assets that genuinely helps your customers. This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about making room for the ideas that matter. When you commit to a “less but better” philosophy, your message becomes sharper, your brand becomes more trustworthy, and your results will speak for themselves.
