There’s no shortage of content.
If you open LinkedIn, you’ll find companies announcing new hires, features, partnerships, awards, and the occasional article highlighting industry changes. If you open Google, you’ll find thousands of blog posts answering one question in essentially the same way. Sometimes, they even use the exact same bullet points. If you open your inbox, there will probably be a newsletter waiting for you from a company you likely don’t remember subscribing to.
With the rise of AI, we’ve gotten very good at posting content, sometimes at the expense of actual substance. Now, a company can decide that it needs a blog, and within seconds, it can consult an AI tool that can build a content calendar, “research” search engine optimization (SEO) keywords, and even create the visuals. It looks productive, and we’ll admit it can be useful. But a publishing schedule isn’t a content strategy.
A content strategy answers:
Who are we trying to reach?
What do they need from us?
What do we want to be known for?
What role should content play in the user journey & buying process?
How does it connect back to the business?
If your content strategy doesn’t answer these questions, then it might be time to reevaluate.
These questions are especially important for technology companies. When you’re selling a complicated, expensive, or unfamiliar product, your customer will need more than a product page before they’re ready to make a decision. They need to understand the problem, understand their options, and understand why your approach is different from your competitors. And eventually, they’ll need to understand why they should trust you.
Good content can help with all of that. But only when there’s a solid strategy backing it.
Start with your business needs
Before you open up ChatGPT to write content, pause and figure out what you’re wanting to accomplish.
No two companies are the same. Some companies might say they want more organic traffic. Another might want to build brand awareness. Another might want more leads. A sales team might want content they can send to prospects during a long sales cycle. All of these are reasonable goals. They just lead to very different content decisions.
Consider a cybersecurity company selling a $150,000 security platform to enterprise IT teams. The company could publish three articles a week about password hygiene, phishing scams, and basic online security. Those topics might bring in plenty of search traffic. But if most of the people reading those articles are individuals looking for advice on protecting their personal Gmail account, the traffic isn’t doing much for the business.
The problem isn’t that the content is bad. It’s that the content is attracting people who aren’t particularly close to the problem the company is actually paid to solve. This is why content goals need to connect to business goals.
Define your target audience
Most companies have an ideal customer profile that generally includes company size, industry, location, revenue, and maybe a few other characteristics. While this is useful, it doesn’t tell you much about the person who is actually sitting down to research your product.
A technology company might sell to a 500-person SaaS company, but the person researching the product could be a marketing director trying to solve an attribution problem, a finance leader trying to understand the cost, or an operations leader trying to figure out whether the software will work with the systems they already have. They’re all part of the same target account, but they aren’t necessarily looking for the same information or entering the buying process for the same reason.
Understanding your audience means figuring out what is happening when someone starts looking for a solution. What problem are they trying to solve? What have they already tried? What are they comparing? What would make them hesitate? And what do they need to understand before they can convince someone else that your product is worth buying?
You usually don’t have to guess at the answers. Talk to your sales team, read customer emails, look at support tickets, and listen to product demos. If your sales team has explained the same concept to fifteen prospects this quarter, there’s a good chance your audience could use a piece of content explaining it too.
Sometimes, the easiest way to find your next ten content ideas is to pay attention to the questions your customers are already asking.
Decide What You Want to Be Known For
Knowing your audience tells you who you’re talking to, but the next question is what you want them to remember about you.
A company can write about almost anything related to its industry, but that doesn’t mean it should. Imagine a company that sells data infrastructure software and publishes articles about artificial intelligence, workplace productivity, cybersecurity, remote work, business leadership, startup culture, and whatever else happens to be getting attention that month.
Some of those articles might perform well, but six months later, what does anyone associate the company with?
Probably not much.
A content strategy should help you decide which subjects are worth consistently talking about because they connect to your expertise, your audience, and the business you’re trying to build. If you want to be known for helping growing SaaS companies solve complex data problems, your content should give people a reason to associate you with that problem, whether you’re writing about data infrastructure itself, explaining common challenges companies run into as they scale, or discussing the decisions teams need to make before choosing a solution.
The individual topics can change over time, but the association you’re building should remain consistent enough that people begin to understand what your company knows and what they can come to you for.
Don’t Let Keywords Decide What Your Company Has to Say
SEO should absolutely be part of your content strategy, but it shouldn’t be the person deciding what your company talks about.
Keyword research can tell you what people are searching for and how they phrase their questions, which is useful, but it can’t tell you whether your company has anything interesting or useful to contribute to the conversation.
A company might find a keyword with a high search volume and decide it needs an article about it. Someone writes the article, another person optimizes it, and eventually the company has a 1,500-word piece sitting on its website. But why that topic, and why your company?
A keyword tells you that someone is looking for information, but it doesn’t automatically tell you that your company should be the one providing it. If you’re going to write about something, you should have a reason for being part of that conversation. Maybe you have original research, maybe your team has worked with customers who deal with the problem every day, maybe you have a different perspective than what’s already out there, or maybe you can simply explain something complicated in a way that makes more sense than the other twenty articles ranking for the same question.
That’s where SEO and good writing can actually work together. You’re creating something useful for the person who searched in the first place, and SEO helps that person find it.
Google’s guidance emphasizes helpful, original, people-first content rather than content created primarily to manipulate search rankings.
SEO should help the right people find your ideas, but it shouldn’t decide whether you have anything worth saying.
Give Your Content a Purpose
Not every piece of content needs to generate a lead, and expecting it to can make your content unnecessarily promotional.
Someone reading your article for the first time may not be anywhere near ready to buy, and they may not even know your company yet. A piece of content might introduce them to a problem, help them understand a complicated concept, help them compare solutions, or give them enough information to start looking at vendors.
The important thing is knowing what you want a particular piece of content to accomplish. A blog post trying to rank in search, generate leads, explain your product, establish thought leadership, answer an objection, and convince someone to buy is probably trying to do too much.
Instead, decide what you want someone to leave with. Maybe they understand the problem better, maybe they know what questions to ask when evaluating vendors, or maybe they now understand why your approach is different.
Content becomes much more useful when it has a clear purpose, even when that purpose isn’t “buy something.”
Think About the Entire Customer Journey
A content strategy should make sense beyond the individual article.
Someone might discover your company through a Google search because they’re trying to understand a problem, read your article, find it useful, and leave. They aren’t a lead, and that’s okay. A few weeks later, they might see one of your posts on LinkedIn and recognize the name, and a month after that, they might receive an email with another useful piece of content. Eventually, the problem they’re researching becomes something the company needs to solve, and now they’re evaluating potential vendors with some familiarity with your brand.
No single piece of content caused that person to become a customer. The collection of experiences helped make your company familiar before the buying decision happened.
This is especially important in B2B technology marketing, where the person who first discovers your company may not be the person who ultimately makes the purchase. One person might be researching the problem, another might be evaluating the financial side of the decision, and someone else might need to review the technical details before the company can move forward.
Your content should support that process rather than assuming every person arrives at your website ready to buy.
Choose Your Channels Based on Your Audience
Once you know what you want to say and who you’re saying it to, you can decide where that content belongs.
This is where companies often work backwards. They decide they need to be on LinkedIn, start a newsletter, invest in SEO, or add video to their strategy before thinking about how their audience actually looks for information and makes decisions.
A channel isn’t a strategy. Someone researching a complicated problem may find your company through Google and spend ten minutes reading an in-depth article, while someone who already knows your company might respond to a LinkedIn post that gives them a new perspective. Someone further along in the buying process might want a case study or comparison guide instead.
The same idea can also take different forms. A detailed blog post can become a LinkedIn post, a useful section from that article can become part of your newsletter, and a framework can become a downloadable resource. You don’t need a completely new idea for every channel. You need to understand what each channel is good at and give the idea the right format.
Build a System You Can Actually Maintain
There’s another part of content strategy that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: someone has to make all of this, and keep making it.
A strategy that requires four blog posts, five social posts, a newsletter, a podcast, three videos, and a downloadable guide every week might look impressive on paper, but it might also collapse the second someone gets busy.
Good content marketing needs a system behind it, which means knowing who is creating the content, who knows the subject well enough to contribute, who reviews it, what can be repurposed, and how often the team can realistically publish without sacrificing quality.
Publishing less often isn’t necessarily a problem if the content is stronger and the team can sustain it. One useful article that continues bringing the right people to your website for a year can be more valuable than twelve rushed posts that disappear the week they’re published.
The goal isn’t to fill a calendar. It’s to build something that gets better over time.
Measure Whether Your Content Is Doing What You Asked It to Do
Eventually, content has to come back to the reason you created it in the first place.
If you want organic visibility, look at whether you’re attracting the right people through search, not just whether traffic went up. If you’re trying to generate demand, look at whether that traffic turns into qualified opportunities. If you’re trying to support sales, ask whether your team is actually using the content and whether it helps move conversations forward.
If you’re trying to build authority, look at whether people are returning to your content, sharing it, linking to it, mentioning your ideas, or beginning to associate your company with the subjects you care about.
The metric should follow the job. A blog post doesn’t automatically become successful because it received 20,000 pageviews. It might be more valuable to have 800 people who actually fit your target audience read the article, explore another page, subscribe to your newsletter, and eventually become part of your pipeline. Or maybe the article doesn’t generate leads at all, but your sales team sends it to prospects every week because it answers a question they hear constantly.
The point isn’t to find one perfect metric for every piece of content. It’s to understand what you’re measuring and why.
Build a Content Strategy, Not Just a Content Calendar
The companies doing content well aren’t necessarily publishing the most. They’re making better decisions about what deserves to exist.
They know what they want to be known for, they understand the questions their customers are actually asking, they know which problems they’re qualified to speak about, and they understand how content fits into the buying process. They use SEO to understand demand without allowing search volume to dictate their entire editorial direction, and they choose channels because those channels make sense for their audience rather than because someone said they were important this year.
Most importantly, they build systems their teams can actually maintain.
That is the difference between having a lot of content and having a content marketing strategy. The first gives you a publishing calendar. The second gives the publishing a reason.
And once you know why you’re creating something, the question changes. Instead of asking, “What should we post this week?” you can ask, “What does our audience need from us next?”
That’s a much better place to start.
Building a content strategy for your next stage of growth?
At Oak House Marketing, we help technology companies identify where their marketing efforts can create the most impact and build focused strategies around those opportunities.
Let’s connect!
