Content without Story is Just Stuff
Why being understood is no longer the same as being believed, and the framework that bridges the gap.
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GrowthWaves isnât open to guest post contributions.
But I make exceptions for people Iâve known for a while and whose work I follow and admire.
Dan J. Levy is one of those people.
Dan has worked with some great companies over the years.
Recently, he went out on his own and started Storyline. Iâve been watching his work closely, and the methodology heâs developed is worth your time.
When I asked him to write a guest post for GrowthWaves, he said yes right away.
Iâll let Dan take it from here.
Back in the early days of content marketing, my boss at the time coined a phrase that became a meme. Not a meme in the âThis is Fineâ dog or Distracted Boyfriend way, but a meme in the old-fashioned, quasi-scientific sense. An idea that wormed its way into the brains of generations of marketers:
âContent without strategy is just stuff.â
All these years later, with a hat tip to Arjun Basu, I think itâs time to update his famous quote. Because what todayâs AI-generated, AI-assisted, and AI-optimized content is missing is not just strategy.
Itâs story.
The Missing Layer
The B2B tech industry has a word for what you do and where you fit: Positioning. It has a word for the copy you use across different channels: Messaging.
But there is a critical layer that sits between them â the overarching narrative that makes your positioning compelling and gives your messaging something to anchor to.
Most companies skip it entirely. They go straight from âhereâs what we do and who itâs forâ to homepage copy, AEO tactics, and sales decks.
Think of positioning as a bag of Lego bricks. It gives you the raw materials: your category, your core capabilities, your ideal customer profile (ICP), and your competitive alternatives. These are essential inputs.
But a bag of Legos is not the Millennium Falcon, even if every brick is the right color.
The storyline is the assembly. It is the connective tissue. It communicates what you do, how itâs different, and, above all, why it matters right now.
The Clarity Trap
There used to be a debate in the content world: clear vs. clever. Should your words inspire and delight people or simply convey the right information in the most direct way? The âclearâ camp won, and they were mostly right. We spent the last decade optimizing hard for clarity. Clearer positioning, clearer messaging, clearer homepages.
And it worked. Companies are clearer than ever.
But they are also losing more deals than ever to âno decision,â âletâs circle back next quarter,â and enterprise buyers who nod along enthusiastically to your content and then settle for the âgood enoughâ solution theyâre already using.
Why? Because it turns out clear vs. clever was the wrong question. Clarity is no longer a competitive advantage. AI is perfectly clear. AI can generate thousands of perfectly clear, strategically targeted, keyword-optimized blog posts, ad variants, and email sequences.
Clarity alone gets you understood. But in a crowded market flooded with AI slop, being understood is not the same as being believed.
If you want your content to fuel growth (and who doesnât), you need to do better than clear and optimized. You need a story that gets buyers to buy in.
Brands have Lost the Plot on Storytelling
Before we get into the mechanics of bringing a clear, compelling, and differentiated storyline to market, we need to address the elephant in the room. And thatâs the current hype around storytelling.
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece late last year about the rise of the storyteller, and it went everywhere. Suddenly, every Fortune 500 company and Series B scale-up is hiring Chief Storytelling Officers, Editors-in-Chief, and Directors of Narrative.
This isnât a bad thing. I am here for the investment and the executive-level recognition that story matters. But it feels like everyoneâs kind of lost the plot.
Companies are hiring for the act of storytelling without having an actual story to tell. There is a cottage industry of marketers trying to apply screenwriting mechanics and the âheroâs journeyâ to B2B software. But winning the enterprise takes more than a crash course in âSave the Cat.â
The telling of the story â while certainly an art in itself â isnât the hardest or most important part. The heavy lifting is finding the story. Itâs distilling your positioning, your executive point of view, and your competitive differentiation into a compelling narrative.
If you hire a brilliant Editor-in-Chief but hand them a fragmented set of messaging docs and generic positioning, you are setting them up for failure. Without a foundational storyline to anchor to, those expensive new storyteller roles will just generate more âstuffâ â and sadly, theyâll inevitably be caught up in the next round of tech layoffs.
Bridging the Brand Story and the Commercial Story
I learned firsthand what happens when content has no story to navigate by. I started my career as a journalist. When I transitioned into B2B content marketing, my teams were incredibly good at optimizing for the channels we were accountable for: Blogs, webinars, ebooks, press releases. But over time, I realized something was fundamentally broken.
The content we were producing was largely disconnected from what the companies we worked for actually did, and what made them different. The brand story â which my team owned â lived on a completely different planet from the commercial story, which is what actually drove revenue. Marketing was promoting lofty, abstract ideas to build awareness, while sales was trying to hit quota.
That disconnect led me down the product marketing path. I figured if the brand side was too detached from reality, the PMM side would have the answers. I was wrong. The teams crafting positioning and messaging were far too fixated on commoditized features and generic âbenefitsâ or business outcomes. It wasnât their fault, either. They were mostly recovering product managers and MBAs, not writers or storytellers.
If the brand story was too aspirational to close a complex deal, the commercial story was too bland to open one. What we needed was a bridge. That bridge is the storyline.
The Marketing Toll
When a company lacks an overarching storyline, the natural instinct is to compensate by turning up the volume on their marketing spend.
I saw this play out recently with a scaling HR tech company. They were in an incredibly crowded space, fighting against massive incumbents. Because their foundational narrative was unclear and sounded just like every other vendor in their category, they were overly reliant on paid search and SEO to generate pipeline.
They were spending $10,000 a month on an SEO agency that was producing content that ranked beautifully, but had absolutely no connection to what their software actually did. Simultaneously, they were paying 12k/month to a content firm that was producing high-level thought leadership pieces and another massive retainer to a PR firm that was pitching a completely different narrative to the media.
There was zero connective tissue.
When you fragment your go-to-market across isolated agencies and channels without a singular storyline holding it all together, youâre paying a massive premium to confuse your own customers.
Your CAC skyrockets because your content is acquiring people who are looking for the very commodity your sales team spends valuable time proving youâre not.
After the Sales Pitch
Content marketing and AEO help get the buyer onto the shortlist and into the room, but the storyline is what runs the room.
Imagine youâre at a steak dinner at an industry conference. Across from you is a VP at a company youâve been trying to close for six months. Youâve done the small talk. Kids, travel, the game last night. Now thereâs a lull.
You could talk about your product, but that feels like a demo. You could ask about their challenges, but that feels like a discovery call. So you talk about the weather again and go home feeling like you missed something.
Positioning tells you what you do. It doesnât give you anything to talk about as the prospect cuts into their rib-eye.
Your storyline does. Itâs your point of view on the market, the context your buyer is operating in, and why any of this matters right now. It gives your sales team a framework for those conversations. A shared language.
When you have a storyline, you lean in and say, âHey, whatâs going on with [industry shift] at your company? How are you dealing with that?â Suddenly youâre talking shop. Youâre an industry peer discussing a shared reality. You build more trust in 90 minutes than in six months of automated email sequences.
And when that VP has to go pitch your software internally to a CFO or CIO who wasnât on the demo, they arenât just reciting a list of features. They are armed with a narrative that explains the cost of inaction. That is what survives the buying committee.
The CPSV Framework: How to Craft the Storyline
If you want to stop generating âstuffâ and start building a storyline, you need to sequence your narrative correctly. Get the order wrong, and the buyer builds a different thing in their head than you built on paper.
To show you what this looks like in the wild, letâs look at an EdTech client I worked with. They had been around for decades and were highly profitable, but they lacked an overarching go-to-market strategy.
As they looked to expand into new markets, prospects couldnât figure out what category to put them in. And sales reps had trouble articulating why they needed to be included in their already-bloated tech stack.
Hereâs the framework we used to build their storyline:
1. Context (The âWhy now?â) You canât lead with your product. You have to lead with the context the buyer is operating in. What is the massive shift happening in their industry? What new mandate has been handed down to them? Context proves you understand their world and injects immediate urgency into the conversation.
For the EdTech company, the context wasnât just âschools need better software.â It was the reality of declining public school funding and rising regulatory scrutiny. Coming out of COVID, North American school districts were under the microscope to modernize their tech stacks while showing solid financial management of public funds. My client was selling a platform that helped districts with this exact mandate.
The context was ripe, but it was important to lead with empathy for their buyer, not fear. Thatâs why problem always follows context.
2. Problem (The blindspot) Within that new context, what is the specific friction your buyer is facing? This shouldnât just be a generic pain point. It should expose a specific blindspot â an urgent problem they didnât fully realize they had, or didnât realize the actual cost of ignoring. The problem is earned by the context.
The blindspot for my clientâs buyers (district CFOs) was serious. They were spending millions on massive ERP systems that managed 95% of the districtâs budget. But they completely ignored the remaining 5% â literal cash sitting in teachersâ desk drawers and Excel spreadsheets for extracurricular funds like field trips, football uniforms, and hot lunches.
The problem was that this unmanaged cash is where the lionâs share of school fraud and failed audits actually happen. And in the largest public school district, that 5% blindspot amounted to millions of dollars at risk.
3. Solution (Your differentiated approach) Once the context and problem are defined itâs time to introduce what you actually do â your core positioning. But you donât list features. You present your unique, opinionated approach to solving the problem you just framed. This is where you plant your flag and separate yourself from the alternatives; both who you compete with and who youâre confused for. The problem earns the solution.
Instead of pitching an accounting solution for school bookkeepers or a payment portal for parents, we planted a flag as a School Finance Platform. One that is purpose-built to lock down that exact vulnerability in the CFOâs office, with accounting, payments, and auditing capabilities all rolled up into one solution. This platform positioning helped unify a bunch of separate products the company had developed or acquired over the years under one narrative umbrella. One platform, one storyline.
4. Vision (The bigger why) Enterprise buyers are signing multi-year contracts. They arenât just buying your current roadmap. Theyâre interested in your worldview, and how you will grow along with them. The vision explains how your solution ultimately changes the paradigm for their business and industry long-term.
My clientâs vision wasnât about digitizing student payments or driving more efficiency in the back office (although that was key messaging we double-clicked on later). It was about safeguarding district finances so every dollar goes where it belongs â to students.
By closing the narrative on a visionary note, you remind the buyer of the bigger âwhyâ behind what you both do, leaving them feeling inspired and ready to take action.
The solution earns the vision and the vision changes the context, which is why I like to visualize the CPSV framework as a flywheel, with every element powering the next:
Context. Problem. Solution. Vision. Itâs a simple framework that works whether youâre pitching to small businesses, large enterprises, or even potential investors and acquirers. Try it on and see how it fits.
Final Thoughts
In a world of feature parity and AI-powered everything, brand alone is not a moat anymore. Content alone is not a moat. Strategy alone is not a moat.
Your story is the moat.
Content without a clear and consistent storyline is just a collection of disconnected assets optimized for an algorithm or LLM. A storyline is what actually aligns your content with your larger go-to-market strategy. It gives your brand a point of view, your positioning a narrative, and your messaging a consistent theme.
Donât just generate more stuff. Find your storyline, and make it stick.
Research Disclaimers and Limitations
GrowthWaves and its author are not sponsored by or compensated by any company mentioned in this note. This is independent editorial analysis and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice. The author may have relationships with, work with, or hold equity in companies referenced; however, no content in this piece was influenced, commissioned, or incentivized by any such relationship. AI tools were used as a research assistant in the preparation of this piece. All claims are sourced and linked throughout.
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