You spend three hours writing a killer blog post. Then another two hours reworking it for LinkedIn because "the audience is different." By the time you're staring at your newsletter template, you're out of steam and end up shipping something mediocre. Next week, you do it all over again.
This constant reworking kills your velocity and creativity. Companies that publish consistently high quality content (versus those that burn out) have figured out how to turn one strong insight into five pieces of content without the mental overhead.
Think of a great piece of content like a Thanksgiving turkey. After the main dinner, the turkey can be carved up to make sandwiches, soup, and casserole. One well-executed meal feeds the family for a week through different preparations. Content works the same way. One substantive, valuable piece of thinking - a contrarian take, a framework, a clear point of view - becomes your turkey. Everything else is just a different way of serving it up.
We’ve found that the format of different channels merely shapes how you present the insight; the core message doesn't change much. For example, LinkedIn wants a hook and a punchy takeaway that stops the scroll. Your newsletter audience may expect context and a personal angle that feels like you're talking directly to them. Sales collateral demands proof points and specificity that helps close deals. Same insight, different packaging.
This approach creates consistency, and that has a compounding effect on your brand. When you say the same thing ten different ways across ten different surfaces, you build recognition and trust. People start to associate you with that idea. They remember it, reference it, and eventually act on it. But when you’re inconsistent and scattered, you create noise instead of signal and lose the audience’s attention.
Let's walk through a full example. Say that your core insight is: most B2B marketing focuses too much on features and not enough on business outcomes. That becomes your turkey. Your long-form blog post dives deep into why this happens and provides a framework for shifting the conversation. Your LinkedIn post pulls out the most counterintuitive piece - maybe that technical demos actually hurt deal velocity - with a punchy story that illustrates the point. Your newsletter section adds personal context about when you learned this lesson the hard way. Your sales deck gets a slide with specific data points about outcome-focused messaging and win rates. By the time your next podcast appearance rolls around, you've got a clear set of talking points with examples ready to go.
The main constraint on your content output is the process overhead. When you stop treating each piece of content as a unique creation and start treating it as a variation on a theme, something shifts. You move from scrambling to produce enough content to having time to express your best thinking.
Every time you reshape that core insight for a new format, you also get a chance to sharpen it. You find better metaphors, tighter arguments, and clearer examples. The insights get battle-tested across different audiences and contexts until it becomes undeniable.
