Busy brands lose the room

Your team is publishing on schedule. Launching on plan. Checking every box.

And nobody can tell you what moved the needle last quarter.

That's the tell. When you're running on activity instead of impact, the work feels like progress but the market doesn't move.

Most fintech brands aren't leading the conversation. They're decorating it.

The brands breaking through right now aren't the loudest. They're the clearest.

They've stopped asking "What should we publish?" and started asking:

Would we still say this if no one else in our category did?

Do our customers repeat our story without prompting?

One fintech came to us after two years of steady publishing. Three social posts a week. Quarterly campaign launches. An editorial calendar that would make a media company jealous.

The problem: growth had stalled, and their CMO couldn't name a single piece of content that had actually moved pipeline.

We didn't fix the content. We killed it.

For six weeks, we mapped every message, campaign, and post to one question: "What do we want to be known for?"

The team couldn't answer it consistently. The VP of Product said one thing. The CEO said another. Marketing was caught in the middle, publishing everything to please everyone.

We got them aligned on one sentence. Then we audited everything against it.

Half the content died. What survived got brutal edits. No hedging, no "we also do this," no feature salad.

Two quarters later, engagement was down 15% and inbound demo requests were up 40%.

They'd stopped optimizing for reach. They started optimizing for belief.

The hard part wasn't the audit. It was getting leadership aligned before cutting anything. Here's what made the difference:

We led with cost. Showed them the team hours spent on content that generated zero pipeline and then translated that to salary dollars and opportunity cost.

We made the risk visible. Framed the choice as "keep everything and stay stuck" or "cut half and double down on what's working."

We gave them a success metric they cared about: inbound demo requests, not impressions.

Once leadership saw the trade-off in those terms, they gave the team permission to kill. That's when momentum shifted.

Pull your last quarter's content calendar. For every major asset, campaign, post, and event, ask three questions:

What belief does this advance?

Can we say in one sentence why this matters to our buyer?

Would we still do this if we weren't worried about "staying visible"?

If you can't answer all three with confidence, it's noise.

Now comes the hard part: building the case to kill it.

Before you cut, do this:

Calculate the cost. Add up team hours on low-performing content. Multiply by hourly rate. Show leadership what "staying visible" actually costs.

Frame the trade-off. "We can keep publishing three posts a week with no pipeline impact, or focus that time on the two pieces that drove 60% of our demos."

Pick one metric leadership cares about. Not impressions. Not followers. Pipeline. Demos. Deal velocity. Then show what you'll move if you focus.

The content that survives will be sharper. And your team will finally have permission to do work that matters.

Busy brands lose the room. Clear brands own it.

The barrier isn't knowing what to cut. It's getting buy-in to cut it.

Lead with cost. Make the trade-off visible. Tie it to a metric leadership cares about.

The BrandThnk Briefing is invite-only, but you can share it.

Know a leader who's too good to be overlooked? Forward this their way.

—Allison
brandthnk.co