Hero, Hub, Hygiene Assumes One Audience. Here's What to Do When You Have Two.

Two weeks into a content plan for a new leadership programme, the marketing lead I was working with asked me a question I didn't have a template for. We were sitting over a half-built content calendar for a mid-sized organisational-change consultancy, mapping out posts for the launch of a new emerging-leaders programme, and she said: "Which of these are for people who'll never buy this, and which are for people who might?"

I didn't have a clean answer, because the framework we'd both been trained on doesn't ask that question. Hero, Hub, Hygiene has been the default content-planning model for a decade, and it earns that place: Hero content builds reach, Hub content builds relationship, Hygiene content answers the practical questions people search for. It's a genuinely useful map of content by job-to-be-done.

What it doesn't map is audience value. Hero, Hub, Hygiene assumes one audience moving through one journey, consuming all three types of content on the way to one kind of outcome. That's fine when you've got one audience. We didn't. We had two, and they were worth completely different things to the business.

One audience was there to engage. Mid-career managers, HR generalists, people five years into their career who'd save a good post about leadership and might attend a webinar, but had no budget and no mandate to buy a leadership programme for anyone. The content built reach and reputation. It made the brand feel relevant. It almost never produced a lead.

The other audience was there to decide. L&D directors and heads of people, evaluating whether to commission the programme for forty or four hundred of their own people. They wanted proof points, case studies, a clear articulation of outcomes - and when they engaged, that engagement was worth a conversation with sales, not just a nice completion rate on a LinkedIn post.

Hero, Hub, Hygiene had no answer for which content was doing which job, because it was never built to separate two audiences with two different values to the business. Every post idea sat in the calendar as if it were working toward the same goal, and nobody could say with confidence whether a strong week of engagement meant the brand was growing or the pipeline was.

This is the part that's genuinely messy, and worth naming honestly rather than smoothing over. The marketing team wanted reach numbers because they'd always been measured on reach. Sales wanted leads and got twitchy every time a "great week" on social produced nothing in the CRM. Leadership, caught in the middle, kept asking why the content strategy wasn't "working" without ever agreeing on what working meant for which audience. None of this was anyone being difficult. It was a genuine structural gap: nobody had built the plan to tell these two stories apart in the first place, so the data couldn't either.

The fix wasn't a new framework. It was a question asked earlier, at the planning stage rather than the reporting stage: for this piece of content, which audience is it actually for, and what does success look like for that audience specifically? Once we asked that of every post in the calendar, the Hero, Hub, Hygiene categories didn't disappear - they just stopped being the only axis. 

A Hero post aimed at the engagement audience got judged on reach and saves. 

A Hygiene post aimed at the decision-making audience - a detailed outcomes case study, say - got a different CTA entirely: not "save this," but "talk to us," routed straight into the CRM as a tagged lead rather than a vanity metric.

That's the lens I now run before I run Hero, Hub, Hygiene, not after: map the stream split first, then slot content into hero, hub or hygiene inside each stream. It's the same discipline that sits underneath the Selection System I teach strategists - not picking a framework because it's the one you know, but checking what your actual situation needs before you reach for anything, including the frameworks you already trust.

Where this breaks is worth being honest about too. If you genuinely have one audience - one job title, one buying journey, one value to the business - forcing a two-stream split is just extra admin for no benefit. The split only earns its place once you can point to two distinct groups whose engagement means genuinely different things commercially. Most content plans don't need it. The ones serving a membership community and a B2B buyer at once, or a practitioner audience and a budget-holder audience, almost always do, and the content plan will quietly fail until someone names the split out loud.

The marketing lead and I didn't invent a new content pillar that afternoon. We just stopped asking one framework to do a job it was never built for, and started asking a sharper question before we reached for it at all. 

What split have you been quietly failing to name in your own content plan?