An ounce of strategy is worth a pound of undirected work.

User intent is the elephant in the room. Why did a user land on your website? Why would they open your email? If you don’t know where the user is at, or what brings them to their interaction with your brand, you can’t possibly meet their needs.

When you don’t meet their needs, you get zeros. 0 conversions, 0:00 interaction times, 0 opens.

0 sales, too.

Any time I look at a content opportunity or touchpoint, I ask what the user is looking for. Do they want to buy something? Or are they just trying to learn something?

If they’re just learning, what’s the right content offer, for that medium, to move them one step farther down the funnel?

These considerations are essential to driving pipeline from content marketing.

Any agency can figure out your top keywords. Yet few agencies have the time or patience to drill deep into multidimensional keyword analysis. If you need to rank for “X services,” chances are, a thousand other companies are already ahead of you. How are you going to compete with them?

Multidimensional analysis looks at more than just the obvious stuff. We need to consider keyword difficulty (how stiff or flabby the competition is); search intent; CPC in AdWords (which is an indication of buy intent); and expanded keywords that are more specialized than the basic, overly competitive ones. For example, “X services” may be too hard to rank for, but “X services for regional banks” could be a goldmine. It’s specialized enough that the big boys aren’t aware of it, but the search intent still aligns with your offerings.

I run this type of analysis to determine which keywords and content should be “easy wins,” and which are so difficult that they should be deprioritized. We can tackle these things in descending order of difficulty, which means your organization sees results faster and doesn’t waste time and money.

We can always tackle the hard stuff later, when inbound marketing is doing gangbusters.

Every content idea that the organization produces needs to be evaluated. Does the idea fit our content strategy? What business value will it provide? Is it “one and done,” meaning it serves a single purpose with an expiration date? Or does it have potential for “evergreen” value, meaning it keeps on giving back to the organization in terms of leads—with minimal additional investment?

I enjoy evaluating content ideas, communicating with contributors, and determining which ideas hold the most value for the organization. These are the ideas that I pursue. I’m comfortable communicating that a given idea shouldn’t be prioritized right now, but that we’ve added it to the idea backlog.

It takes a creative mind to sculpt and organize the marketing rhetoric for your offerings. It’s unlikely that stakeholders from sales or customer success know how to translate technical knowledge or value props into a properly-structured marketing message. Doing so requires deep knowledge of the essential elements of a great pitch.

Speaking of which, here are the elements I typically work with:

• Problem mirroring (explicit and implicit)
• Coming from inside the customer’s perspective (not the organization’s perspective)
• Positioning your organization as an expert guide
• Casting a vision of how great life will be with your product/service
• Including a little fear of potential failure if they don’t act
• Giving them clear steps for doing business with you (and for solving their problem)
• Telling them what to do now (the call to action)

When I work on product/service messaging (or advise on it), I’m looking to see if each element is present (assuming there is space for each element); how each element is treated; whether it has the proper emphasis; whether the elements are in the right order for this particular message; whether to cut some elements due to space constraints; and whether the tone is right for the market.

Not every idea is a winner, and your audience doesn’t need fluff. Every content piece must justify its existence by checking several key boxes:

• Does the title promise real value?
• Does the content match the expectations set up by the title?
• Is this particular focus right for this topic?
• Does the content offer real, applied insights into solving a concrete problem which the audience faces in their job?
• Does the problem that the content discusses relate to the same job function in which the audience needs your products/services?
• Will the audience walk away having learned something valuable?
• If the content contains a sales pitch, is it 1) not annoying, and 2) in the right spot?
• Is the content the very best treatment of this topic on the internet?

Whether it’s my own idea, or one from a contributor, I enjoy taking that rough clay and molding it into something that can offer business value. My strategic discernment lies at the heart of all I do, and it’s what makes content strategy so much fun.