I'm a really big fan of the pillar-post strategy, where you build a few pillars—I think three is generally a good number; in my experience, it’s better to start small and then expand—and build the content on top of those. In the pillars, which are often as long as 10,000+ words, you’d explain things like the service, the product approach, and any key differentiators that your product has, things like frameworks, specific methodologies, etc. And from there you’ll be able to link back and forth into particular articles that go in depth on those subtopics. So for example, let’s say that you’re at a firm that’s working on content strategy. One of the big topics would be keyword research, and then that could link to posts on personas, SEO, etc., which would also all be linked back to the pillar post and, where possible, be cross-linked with one another. Your pillar post would be based around the biggest, most general keyword that you’re hoping to get ranked in Google, and having the supporting material from all the other content will help you show Google that this keyword is very frequently used and that it’s something that is visible on your website and blog, so that you get a better chance at being able to rank higher for that keyword.

The level of detail might seem a little overwhelming here, but over the years I’ve worked with a lot of companies, both early-stage and more established, that were looking for help when it came to their marketing and growth, and what I’ve learned is that it ultimately boils down to: Who is the end user? What kind of value are we delivering? And how do we communicate that value so that they understand? So in other words, the content strategy will reverse engineer it by looking back into who the user is: How are we able to picture that persona in our minds? Of course, it's like a model. You're never going to be 100%, right? But at least you have something to work toward, some kind of understanding of who you are speaking to and the value that your product can provide. Going through this process can help early-stage companies get more clarity on things like their value prop, positioning, and the channels they’ll be running on.

So in this example, which came from my time at Ladder, we had four personas: a founder, a head of marketing or growth, a product manager, and a funder. And based on that, we were able to understand what kind of decision making process they already had going: First, they’re researching what they really need help with, and then they’re looking to understand who can deliver that help, whether it’s a freelancer, an in-house employee, or agency. They’re comparing and contrasting the pros and cons of each approach, and looking to understand how to work with one—what the overhead would be, what kind of speed or velocity the relationship would have. We wanted to be able to literally answer any questions that we might hear from our customers or prospects during our sales process by saying, “I’m glad you brought that up, because we actually wrote a blog post on it.” This shows them that you’re very proactive, you’ve already been to where they need to get and you have that expertise. It gives people a clear perception that you really know what they’re talking about, which is very important in a B2B setting.

Each column represents a different persona or personas that we're going to be speaking to, and what kind of jobs they commonly have to do. And each row represents the next job to be done, because different roles have multiple different jobs that have to be done. As a founder, you're wearing so many hats that the list is going to be almost infinite. The more specialized you are, the shorter the list. You need to be able to get into their shoes and really understand what needs to be done. Once you have that knowledge in place, it can be really cool to plug it into a tool like ChatGPT and see what kind of patterns start to emerge. Those patterns are going to help you in understanding which of the topics and sub-topics are going to be useful for you to write about.

People are often a little confused by the difference between “problems” and “frustrations.” To me, the problem is something you are working toward solving and the frustrations are the obstacles that you're stumbling over along the way in order to solve that problem. You can think about it using OKRs as an analogy. The objective would be the problem and the key results would be the different frustrations that you need to overcome along the way in order to solve that problem.

It took me a while to really see that personas should change over time in line with your understanding of them. This should be a living and breathing document based on the better understanding you get as you go further into the market. So that means the jobs to be done should be updated regularly as well, and while the pillars should be quite stable, the different ideas and different articles that you would be adding to them should also be updated over time, so that you’re able to accommodate the changes in the personas and jobs to be done. So I think this is something to start with for the first several months, maybe a year, in order to build out your content strategy. And then over time, you need to keep iterating as you get more feedback from the market, whether that's qualitative or quantitative data, along with feedback from your sales and product teams as they gain a deeper understanding of what is actually being done over time in terms of improving your offering. Being able to accommodate that within your content strategy is the one key element that should not be forgotten, because like with all things in growth, this is something that's never going to be done. It's just something that's got to be worked on constantly in order to make sure you're on the right trajectory.

Having your pillars in place lets you dissect the entire relationship into different phases. Having these in place is very useful in driving the relationship, because then we know the underlying goal behind the KPIs we're responsible for. But overall, these seven pillars are basically our understanding of growth, how growth teams work, how growth teams collaborate with others, how it's all measured, and how to take care of the growth team, because the agency should not be somebody who's going to be there forever. Our goal over time is to help establish the right practices and processes, and build up the internal team that's going to be able to take over, because the natural life cycle of a relationship between an agency and a company isn’t that long.

Having a clear idea of the different keywords that would be used, and whether they are being searched for at all or not, is going to be useful when you’re deciding how to structure those pillar posts. You want to apply those longer-tail keywords within the text and then build standalone content on those long-term keywords that you are seeing, which might even have low search volume, but still have at least some. For example, let's say “product marketing” is going to be a very short and very popular keyword, but when you extend it to “product marketing and Web3 startups,” it's going to be a much different story. So by being able to encapsulate that into one paragraph in the pillar post, which then links to a standalone post that talks about that topic, you’ll be able to show Google, or any content-discovery algorithm, that you have written more content about it.

Tomek Duda

It can be hard to know where to start when building a content marketing strategy from the ground up. This approach will ensure you have all the pieces in place to position your org as a thought leader and drive reliable search traffic.

Content Marketing Strategy Template by Tomek Duda

Content Strategy Template

Personas

Jobs to be done

Pillars

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