The Algorithm Is Not Your Story
How to build a content engine that ships fast without losing the plot.
The algorithm isn’t your audience. And it’s definitely not your story. Story is what sells; distribution is how the story travels (and the content production frameworks you use). Treat them as the same thing, and you’ll get noise.
The Library and the Laboratory
Think in two rooms.
The Library is your permanent collection: foundational stories and core assets that are factual, evergreen, and authoritative. These are the pieces that survived hard debates with multiple stakeholders. They capture what you do, why it exists, who it serves, and how it creates outcomes. They take time. They earn consensus. They carry your voice.
Some examples: original research papers, customer narratives, journalistically sound thought leadership, in-depth walkthroughs, product showcases (but not product briefs, the library has stories which are full narratives with emotional hooks… for selling). These can live as video, audio, long-form articles, visuals, etc. Formats are flexible, but voice is not. Library assets are finished pieces.
The Laboratory is your activation and experimentation engine. It’s where you reshape core stores into channel-specific micro-narratives; for a segment, a use case, an event, a timing window, and so on. The process of creating content in the laboratory is messy by design, built for speed and testing.
In the laboratory, a 40-minute client interview becomes a dozen short clips, three blog posts, a sales sheet, social ads, a newsletter feature, sales enablement training slides, a pre-roll ad, content for a landing page, and more. Same story; many scenes.
Because the library pieces were already vetted, the lab doesn’t repeat committee cycles. It iterates.
TIP: The lab can be fast and varied, but its output must never sound like it’s coming from a different voice/company/entity. The library protects the brand, so the lab can drive it.
Why this split works
Timeless stories survive endless retellings. Archetypes travel across eras and cultures with only surface changes: names, places, costumes. That’s the idea: adapt the presentation without murdering the plot.
Apply that to B2B: let rigid, descriptive, formal work happen in the library. Let flexible, emotional, experimental work happen in the lab. Most teams already operate like this informally; formalizing the handoff between these two frames of mind will prevent drift.
Put it into practice
Diagnose your rooms
Most B2B orgs over-index in one way:
Big lab, thin library: Lots of formats and hooks, but no unifying brand story with a singular and powerful voice. Results and collateral will always feel scattered.
Big library, no lab: Assets exist, and they’re polished. But nothing ships with speed. Everything reads like ossified reports and is overly technical, where business outcomes are buried at the end, just hanging on.
Even with both rooms “staffed”, if there’s no library → lab conveyor, your go-to-market gets fractured. Strategy can lead, product-led, but the story is the common denominator. Regardless of your GTM, this framework will help it be story-led.
Build the conveyor
Craft/refresh a core asset for a priority narrative
Translate it into micro-narratives by audience, problem, and channel
Ship and test copy, creative, offers, placements, etc.
Loop learning back into the next lab batch without rewriting the library
Building core assets that carry
Adding a title to the library should be hard. These pieces rarely expire. They accrue value as more derivatives reference them. Because they endure, they deserve a singular narrator—a small team or one owner who keeps tone, voice, and point of view consistent.
The biggest blocker? Teams and organizations that confuse collaboration with consensus theater. Committees that must leave visible fingerprints on every micro-narrative produce safe, personality-free sludge. Stakeholders can be heard without diluting the story… that’s where the craft is.
Assign ownership. A principal brand & content strategist governs the canon and keeps the conveyor moving; deciding what earns library status, which asks should move to the lab, and how the pieces or output are used.
Quality is your best lab partner
Chaotic labs tend to chase trends for borrowed attention. Viral moments that pop up into everyone's algorithms, timelines, and fyp are great for people… but they rarely build brands. Audiences remember the meme, not the company (unless trend-jacking is native to your core GTM, and some brands absolutely do this well).
Invest in the library. When the source material is strong, lab output stays on-brand and on-voice even as formats multiply. You get to scale without losing the plot (and do it quickly).
Operate for speed and standards
The lab isn’t a Von Neumann machine; it can’t endlessly create exact copies of itself. Entropy applies. As assets are sliced, summarized, automated, and outsourced, detail and context will naturally degrade.
Design the system accordingly:
Separate the purposefully slow processes from the go-fast pars. Do the heavy narrative work upstream. Protect it.
Decide on your ratios. How much polish is required before the lab can safely touch and move into micro-narratives? Who enforces it?
Staff smart. Mix in-house creatives, trusted freelancers, fractional talent, agencies, and genAI tools. But keep core curatorship close to the brand.
Instrument the loop. Use channel and performance data to refine micro-narratives, not to rewrite core truths.
If you’re a small team (or a one-person team)
You can’t do everything from scratch at a high bar while also running a strategy. Something needs to give, but you absolutely can know what “good” looks like.
Self-audit. Keep the skills you’re best at; outsource the rest with clear briefs tied to library assets.
Curate outputs. Vendors, agencies, and genAI are your lab extensions, the instruments on the table. Your job is just to maintain the voice and standards.
On genAI: Favor partners whose workflows include human editorial control; don’t hand your standards blindly to a tool, or develop a framework that depends on a tool. Tools change, your story should not. It’s better to build your framework around techniques.
The bottom line
The story is the asset. Story-led is just a sales-centric perspective on brand marketing… and of course, brand marketing is just future revenue, future demand.
Build a library that deserves to be quoted. The laboratory micro-narratives that can move will quote the library, iterate on those stories, and do so consistently at scale. Keep the conveyor belt tight by being strict with the RACI of the two rooms. And remember: the algorithm ins’t your story, so don’t make it your strategy.
