I had a call last month with a skincare founder who was close to tears. Her team of three was producing 60 pieces of content per week across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. They were spending £25k a month with an agency for the "hero" content. And when I asked her which posts were actually driving sales, she went quiet.
This is the content treadmill, and nearly every beauty brand I speak to is stuck on it.
How we got here
The platforms did this to us. Algorithm changes punished brands that posted inconsistently. The rise of short-form video meant every piece of content had a shorter shelf life. And the "always on" mentality became gospel - if you're not posting, you're disappearing.
So brands staffed up. They hired social media managers, videographers, and copywriters. They outsourced to agencies. They built content calendars that would make a newspaper editor weep. And most of them have no idea what's working.
The real cost isn't money - it's attention
Yes, £20-30k a month on content production is painful. But the bigger cost is what it does to your team. When your marketing lead is spending 80% of their time managing content production, they're not thinking about strategy. They're not analysing what converts. They're not building the brand.
I've seen founding teams where every meeting is about content deadlines. Product development stalls. Retail relationships get neglected. The business becomes a content factory that happens to sell skincare.
Volume without insight is just noise
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most beauty brands are producing five times more content than they need, and none of it is informed by performance data.
They post a Reel. It gets 12,000 views. They call it a success. But did anyone buy? Did it drive email signups? Did it shift brand perception in any measurable way? Usually, nobody knows.
Meanwhile, the post that got 800 views might have driven 40 purchases - but it's buried in the feed and never repeated because it "underperformed."
What the smart brands are doing instead
The brands getting off this treadmill share three habits:
They test before they invest. Instead of producing one polished piece, they create 10-15 rough variations and test them with small spend. The winner gets the production budget.
They repurpose ruthlessly. One hero shoot becomes 30+ assets - stills, carousels, short clips, quote cards, email banners. Not through lazy cropping, but through intentional planning at the shoot stage.
They automate the repeatable. Product-on-white imagery, ingredient callouts, review roundups, restock announcements - these don't need a creative director. They need a system.
The path forward
Getting off the treadmill doesn't mean posting less. It means producing smarter. It means knowing which of your 60 weekly posts actually matter, and building systems so the rest don't consume your team's energy.
Your team shouldn't be burning out to feed an algorithm. They should be building a brand.