A content strategy template for B2B organizations

New year, new approach.

For many content teams, a main goal is to develop a newsroom and regularly publish content to stay online and top-of-mind. While there’s some validity to this thinking, the reality is when you’re scrambling to meet an arbitrary goal of content cadence, an unintended consequence can be producing content that doesn’t add a lot of value.

Here’s what to do instead.

1) Pause your content development. It’s time to do research instead.

2) Investigate what’s really going on. Talk to Sales. Find out top customer questions. Talk to Customer Service. Find out top challenges.

3) Find out or refresh your knowledge of your organizations growth goals. While you’re there, talk to Product. Find out what the roadmap and vision is.

4) Remind yourself about what your unique positioning is. Then, make sure you understand how your product or service solves a challenge for your customers. You can also think about their “Jobs to be Done” and how you support their needs.

5) Next, choose 3-4 content themes or pillars to focus on based on customers’ biggest pain points along with corporate aspirations for growth. You might not find these in tools that share SEO keywords. You want your themes to be something that you can talk about for a long time, in many ways.

6) Then, using your themes, start to build out topics based on those buckets. You’ll know if you did a good job selecting them if you have plenty to talk about (see #5).

7) Audit your blog and hide, delete, or de-prioritize anything that doesn’t align with those buckets. Identify the posts that do align and review them for any necessary updates that need to be made.

8) Write new content to fill in any gaps and refresh old content if needed. While you’re doing this, make sure to link back to other content that already exists when it makes sense. This helps a user self-educate.

When you follow this template, you re-focus on what the customer needs and you’re better able to address their questions.