You're wasting money

Here's a pattern I see almost everywhere. Marketing develops brand messaging. HR creates employer brand content. Sales builds its own presentation materials. Leadership works on thought leadership. Each department has its own budget, its own production and its own story.

The result is four content strategies where one integrated approach would be more effective and cheaper. Departments end up operating like separate companies instead of parts of the same organisation, and the business pays for the same creative thinking several times over.

What connected content looks like

A while ago I worked with a manufacturing client who was making exactly this mistake. Instead of four separate shoots, we planned one strategic shoot day. The morning was for leadership interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, the afternoon for employee testimonials and workplace culture.

From that single day, every department got what it needed. Marketing had brand videos and social content. HR had recruitment videos and employer brand material. Sales had case study videos and presentation content. Leadership had thought leadership and speaking material.

It cost €25,000 instead of the €45,000 they usually spent across separate shoots. The quality was better, because everything shared one message and one visual style. And the impact was higher, because each piece reinforced the others wherever people came across it. I told the longer version of a similar project in one video concept that solved four business problems.

One piece, four jobs

Once you start looking, most content can do more than one job. A customer success story is a social post and case study for marketing, a testimonial for sales, proof for HR that great people work here, and evidence for leadership that the strategy is being delivered.

An employee interview works the same way. HR gets recruitment content that shows the culture, marketing gets behind-the-scenes brand content, sales gets proof of the team's expertise, and leadership gets a demonstration of organisational strength. One shoot, four objectives served.

This isn't a niche problem. In the Content Marketing Institute's B2B research for 2025, 43% of marketers said aligning content across sales and marketing was a challenge, and 40% struggled with communicating across organisational silos.

The two-hour meeting that changes things

The simplest fix I know is a quarterly session that brings Marketing, HR, Sales and Leadership together for two hours. Not another status meeting, but a proper content alignment session.

In the first hour, each department shares its objectives and content needs for the quarter, and you look for overlapping goals and shared messages. In the second hour, you plan integrated shoots that serve several departments, allocate the budget and agree on timing and success measures. That's it. Asana's Anatomy of Work research estimates people lose 3.6 hours a week to unnecessary meetings, so I don't propose another one lightly. But in my experience, those two hours save somewhere between eight and twelve hours of scattered coordination over the quarter, and they prevent expensive duplication.

The objections, and what I say back

"We don't have time for more meetings." This one replaces several smaller ones, so you get time back rather than losing it.

"Our departments have different audiences." Most B2B audiences overlap more than people think, and one good piece of content can speak to several stakeholders at once.

"Approving budget across departments is complicated." Create a shared content pool during annual planning, with each department contributing 20 to 30% of its content budget to joint projects. The pressure on budgets makes this more relevant, not less. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of revenue, with most CMOs saying they don't have enough to deliver their strategy.

Why this needs someone who sees the whole picture

Coordinating content across departments takes someone who can see the connections between business objectives, balance competing priorities and protect creative quality while keeping costs down. Most companies hand it to a project manager. That covers the logistics, but it misses the strategic opportunities.

A strategic creative director understands what each department is trying to achieve and can guide the conversation beyond execution towards one integrated plan. Done well, the payoff shows up in lower production costs, faster sales conversations thanks to consistent messaging, and a brand experience that feels like one company.

Start small

You don't need to reorganise everything at once. Hold one quarterly meeting. Plan one integrated shoot. Track the cost, the consistency of the message and how much each department actually used. Then scale what works.

The biggest content opportunity usually isn't making more. It's connecting what you're already making. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on where your departments overlap, I'm glad to help. You can read more about how I work, see selected work, or book a 1-1.

— Joost