I just wrapped a content strategy for one of our clients. 60 hours, one month’s work, and now they’re set up for success for the foreseeable future (years, not months), without any ongoing dependence on me.
If you’re lucky, most content strategies amount to little more than a content calendar, a list of keywords/ topics, and a smattering of qualitative judgements on writing and blog design. But a strategy should not look like a to-do list.
Other strategies are designed to be presented to executives. They’re pretty and say buzzy things about thought leadership and ICPs. But the content marketers who do the hands-on-keyboard work struggle to bridge the gap between its lofty concepts and their daily grind. Even if the ideas were good, they often live and die in the deck they’re built into.
Probably because of this, there are a lot of strategy naysayers. And if you’re doing strategy in the ways outlined above, I can see where the naysaying is coming from...
My content strategies are different…
When I work on a strategy it’s neither of those things. The exercise I run is about bringing clarity and focus to marketing, not just content marketing. If you have a team of people with incredible knowledge of their product, ICP, and amazing content instincts, you may be able to get by without my work. But that’s not most content teams. Indeed, that’s not any organization I’ve ever encountered.
In a way, the work I do on content strategy forces my clients to confront their own inconsistencies and gaps that extend beyond content. They see how content could never have been set up for success when they were running around with 20+ personae articulated across disparate decks, or with fundamental disagreements about what the real value prop of their product is.
Content is always an easy team to pick on (everybody thinks they’re a writer!) That makes it a lightning rod when the problems that actually sit outside content show up there. Content is also by its nature horizontal: It is the warp to the weft of other marketing channels. Basically, I’m saying content is easy to pick on. But it’s seldom the problem. And those are the problems I first tackle when I work on a content strategy.
Here’s what I do, step-by-step:
1. Get the right people in the room (not just content folk)
If your content strategy only lives in the hearts and minds of content marketers, it won’t really work for the business. Other teams will always be looking over the fence and (rightly or wrongly) critiquing what the team isn’t doing instead of understanding why they’re doing the things they are.
Depending on the size of the org, I usually get the CEO/CMO in the room. They need to see the incongruities that a content strategy often throws up. I also like to have:
A product marketer/manager
Somebody from the paid performance side
The brand leader, if such a role exists outside the CMO
All content marketers, regardless of level (they need to come on the journey and learn how it’s done)
By the end of the process, my goal is to make myself redundant (unless they want me to stick around and help with execution).
2. Rebuild or reinforce the connective tissue
The foundations of a good content strategy are shared: The dots need to connect between what a company is doing, what marketing is doing, and, therefore, what content will do.
This needs to be established at the outset because it grounds everybody in something outside of their own subjective preferences and vision for content. There’s always that person in the room who wants to quietly whisper vague things about storytelling. But content marketing is not about the stories you want to tell. It’s about what your market needs to hear in order to choose your product.
Three layers of connective tissue need to be laid down simply and clearly for everybody.
Company goals/objectives → Marketing goals/objectives → Content goals/objectives
Basic product positioning: What it is, what the alternatives are, what are the reasons to believe, and what are the objections to overcome?
Who is our market: Not the annoying demographic personae stuff. The real reader personae. Who they are, what they consume, what their needs are, which of those needs do we serve best, which of those needs do we not serve at all
Most of this work sits outside the purview of “content marketing”, but I usually find we spend the most time here. Lots of ah-ha moments happen, like:
The CMO realizes that there are fundamental disagreements between teams on product positioning, or that they’ve failed to reconcile brand positioning with the realities of who’s buying the product
The product marketer realizes their hard work building personae isn’t quite ready/easy to translate to marketing channel tactics
The performance team realizes they’ve been building campaigns that target the wrong needs, intentions, objectives to overcome, and have a hazy understanding of what the product actually does
It may seem insane that a content strategy becomes the forcing function of clarity here, but I don’t mind that. My ‘outside’ position lets me call out the incongruities with objectivity. Most importantly, it helps everybody realize how content cannot be effective unless it is, first and foremost, crisp on who its audience is and how its product serves their needs.
✨AI Note: I know there are all kinds of amazing AI prompts out there to analyze a company’s ICP. They work really well if you want an ‘outside-in’ perspective on a company. But they can be wildly misleading.
This isn’t because the AI is bad at reading signals. It’s because organizations often send profoundly mixed signals. They’ll have legacy content that speaks to multiple personae they’re no longer interested in, and/orweb pages full of weasel-words that confuse AI about their product and target market. So, if you have the opportunity to sit in a room and really wrestle with this step, don’t hand it off to AI.
3. Size up the competition properly
Now that we know our ICP really well (and perhaps in ways that are not well represented on our website or historical blog content), I can size up how well competitors are doing at reaching that customer in the right way.
This focuses my competitive analysis into something much more strategic.
It’s not simply: Is their content good?
It’s: Is their content doing the job we need ours to do?
Most times the answer is a resounding “no.” You would be alarmed how much content marketing out there is also unclear about its audience and product positioning. They might have good writing and a nice-looking blog. But they often fall for the same soft tricks of writing for PVs and chasing KWs that don’t align with who their audience really is, or what their product does well.
This is usually an exciting moment for my clients: They see the huge opportunity to get it right. They see how focus and clarity can help you win.
4. Turn that gaze back on the client
By now, I’m ruthlessly focused, and the client is too. We’ve left most of our soft editorial nitpicking at the door (that comes back later, but it sits more in execution than in strategy).
I’m primed to see clearly where they’ve gone wrong in the past (and the fact that I wasn’t the one doing it helps me see this with crystal clarity).
To be clear: This isn’t about me throwing sincerely hard-working content marketers under the bus. This is about me equipping them with ways of thinking about their work that they weren’t equipped with before, which is an organizational failure more than a them-problem. And we do that by arming them with metrics. The right ones.
For this step, I usually work collaboratively with the content marketer on this stage. We inventory existing content, classify, and measure the following at the piece level:
Persona (our newly articulated ones + ‘other’)
Need (our newly articulated ones + ‘other’)
Funnel stage
Format (blog, case study, gated asset, video, etc.)
Content level (5 levels from informational blog to data/perspective-rich thought leadership)
Two metrics:
Traffic
Conversion
I use this analysis to provide a clearly quantifiable teardown. We often see historical patterns emerge, like:
Wrong persona: There’s usually a lot of existing content for personae that aren’t our target audience. These pieces may drive eyeballs, but they won’t convert (or they’ll quickly churn).
Needs we don’t sell a solution to: Content written for needs we don’t actually sell a solution to, or written for needs that drive PVs rather than ones that drive conversion
Basic blogs: An over-reliance on what I call “Level 1” content (your bog-standard blog posts)
Mixed metrics: Often content marketers have been obsessing over traffic and are loathe to give up content that drives it (even if it is for the entirely wrong audience). By tracking both, I help them see the delta between the content that drives eyeballs and the content that drives revenue. I get them hooked on the latter.
Too much TOFU content, anemic BOFU content: If I could change one thing about content marketers, it would be that they love Case Studies and Product content as much as they love the idea of TOFU handwaving ‘editorial’ ideas.
✨AI Note: While I avoid using AI in Step 2, preferring to immerse myself in the data and discussions, I use it a lot for Steps 3 and 4. This doesn’t mean these are automated steps. I use AI as a research assistant at best, but sometimes just a sophisticated calculator.
5. Establish the new rules of content
This is where we start to transition out of ‘strategy’ and into clear tactics: What should the content team work on that will actually contribute to our shared marketing and company objectives?
Because we grounded ourselves at the very beginning in shared, overarching objectives, everybody in the room is by now laser-focused on the right success metrics (usually as close to revenue as we can get and as far from PVs as we can go). We’ve chased away the ghost of ideas about things we should be doing that were based on fluffier aspirations.
We’re not yet jumping to ideate specific content pieces; we’re focused on the kind of content we need to write to sell the damn product to the people who will grow our business. We talk about what we should do more or/less of with this mindset and how to brainstorm the right kind of ideas, with insights like:
We know this persona/need converts, but we haven’t produced a lot of content for it
We have only written case studies for customers that our sales team has put forward (usually downmarket customers who want to do case studies). We need to put concerted effort into building a library of case studies for each persona/need.
We’ve missed many opportunities to talk about our product clearly. Let’s make sure that product marketing and content have a hand-in-glove relationship, and we’re equipped with real impact metrics rather than relying on weasely product copy
The journey we’ve all taken together helps everybody reach the same conclusions, which is invaluable: A strategy will have a greater likelihood of success when everybody is not just aligned, but feels that its conclusions are also their conclusions.
6. And now we’re finally ready for a calendar and topics
At this stage, I’m usually pulling back, letting the content marketers take the reins. But I’ll swoop in and ensure they focus on the right things if they slip into old habits. I work with them to map out two quarters of activities. We commit to cadences of things like product posts and case studies, gated assets, and big data reports.
We discuss their role in bringing content to life: How they should work with product teams, sales teams and internal SMEs. By the end of this part, they see themselves in that warp/weft relationship and understand their job isn’t to become their own SMEs but to mine their organization for those insights and filter them through a marketing (and content marketing) mindset.
If they want, I also provide mentoring and playbooks on things like best practices for Thought Leadership, GEO/SEO optimization, writing Case Studies, conversion copywriting, etc., and how to use AI to assist and expedite day-to-day production without compromising on quality or integrity of information. But those are optional add-ons.
And then it’s time for me to step back and let them run.
Get ‘er done: Great content marketing lives in the world, not in a deck
Many people skip strategy because it feels like some sort of backslapping project for people who are “deck-builders” (meant as the most derogatory thing you could ever say about a marketer). And I agree with this assessment for most of the content strategies I’ve seen.
This is why I don’t do that.
This process may sound intense. Indeed, it does require a commitment to time and thinking from everybody who comes on the journey. But I run a tight ship: We usually get in and out of the work in under a month. For example, the content strategy I just completed was a complicated one, for an exceptionally nuanced B2B healthtech client. I still got it done in 60 hours.
Great marketing absolutely doesn't live in a strategy deck, but a strategy deck will help point noses in the right direction. And when teams are flailing and objectives aren’t being missed, piling on more tactics, more “look what [other company] is doing, more SEO/GEO reactivity, is not the answer. All it leads to is:
Burnout
Silo-ed mistrust between marketing teams
Marketing and product positioning inconsistencies that stump your audience (and LLMs)
Headcount cuts and programs ending
If you’re at that point, you have to pull back and think at a strategic level.
For me there’s nothing more rewarding than meeting a maligned and overworked content team, wrestling their leaders on their behalf, bringing them on a journey and leaving everybody in the room clear-eyed, empowered and brought together through the process.
If you want to learn more, work with me, or just shoot the shit on my approach, I’d love to hear from you! You can reach me here or here.
🍓 Sweet treats before you go!
If you read one thing…
“The math is simple: as AI generates more content at scale, the surface area for false claims expands exponentially. Without verification systems, you're not just automating content creation, you're automating legal risk.” If you buy one thing…
Okay, unless you’re in the UK (which I’m also not), you can’t buy this. But tell me Salty B*tch Kimchi Salt doesn’t call your name. I bet it’s sooo good on 6-minute eggs. Oh god, my mouth is watering. Alternatively, in Canada, you can try delicious seasonings from Zing (I’m terribly fond of the Ooomami salt.) You’re welcome!
Absolutely appreciate the call out! Thank you! :) Never been referenced alongside Salty B*tch stuff before, but honored! LOL Definitely need to check in back home on the Zing things, too!