What changes for you
Content that earns the time that goes into it
Expert time goes where it counts.
Your experts only give time to pieces the evidence says people are looking for.
A plan you can take to the board.
Every piece in it comes with the evidence behind it: who's asking, how often, and who answers them today.
Quick wins from what you already have.
Pages that exist but are hard to find get fixed first, which is usually faster than writing new ones.
A before and after for every page.
You can see how each piece is found and read compared with before, and use that to decide what comes next.
Why it matters
Plenty of content, not much to show for it
Most professional services organisations publish steadily: articles, insights, updates, each one taking hours of an expert's time. Ask what it has done for the business and it's hard to say. At the same time, AI assistants increasingly answer the questions your pages were written for, so fewer people click through to read them.
The cause is usually the same. The content starts with what the organisation wants to say, not with a question someone is actually asking. And every piece now has three readers: the people it was written for, the search engines that decide whether those people find it, and the AI assistants that increasingly answer their questions on your behalf.
People
The buyers and influencers it was written for. They read, compare and decide whether to get in touch.
Measured with Google AnalyticsSearch engines
Decide whether those people find you, and for which questions.
Measured with Search ConsoleAI assistants
Read your pages and increasingly answer on your behalf, often without a click.
Measured with your server logs
All three reward the same three things:
Written for one reader
01
Not everyone who might buy from you. One reader, at one stage of the job they're trying to get done.
Built around one question
02
A page that covers a whole service answers none of the specific questions well. The pieces that rank, get read and get cited answer one, at the moment someone is asking it.
Carrying something only you know
03
Examples, opinions and detail nobody else can provide. It's what makes a reader trust you, and what search engines and AI assistants look for when choosing a source.
So we reverse the usual order. Most content plans start with a list of services, or a list of topics, and work outwards to who might want them. We map the jobs your ideal clients are trying to get done and the questions they ask along the way, check every question against the evidence, and only then decide what to write.
Our approach
Pick a job, not a persona
A persona tells you who someone is: a finance director at a mid-sized business, say. But a finance director has fifty problems at once, and each needs a different answer.
A job has a beginning, a middle and an end, and different people get involved along the way. "Advising owner-managed businesses" isn't a job; it's a description of a service. "A founder preparing to sell their business" is: it starts with a decision about timing, ends with the proceeds, and has a different person asking a different question at each stage.
A good job has three things:
- A clear start and finish. A business sale, a funding round or a product launch all work. "Growing the business" doesn't, because it never ends.
- Context. Launching a product in pharmaceuticals is different from launching one in any other sector, and that difference is where your specialist knowledge comes through.
- Commercial value. Ask your leadership which project, for which client, they'd most like to win next year, and start there.
Reading across, the person changes as the job moves: the founder at the start wants to know whether it's worth doing, the finance director wants to know what's involved, and the management team wants to know what it means for them. It's the same job seen by different people, and each of them needs different content.
Which audience first? Be honest about priority
The first sprint begins by listing every audience you actually serve. That isn't always what the website says: the evidence is usually scattered across people pages, case studies, the topics you write about and the industry bodies you belong to, and a lot of it sits in pitch documents that never went online.
We bring it together and group the audiences into three tiers. The tier is a decision about where content effort goes over the next two to three years, not a ranking of how valuable the work is.
The audiences you're actively building the business around
Grow
What it gets: Main navigation, the home page, an active content plan with campaigns
Established and profitable, but not the growth focus
Defend
What it gets: Main navigation, a content plan without campaigns
You serve them well, usually on referral, but aren't prioritising them
Maintain
What it gets: Reached through the services listing; content as and when
What each sprint delivers
One job, taken from start to finish
Each sprint delivers four things:
01 - Job map
Who's involved, and what they ask.
The job, stage by stage: who gets involved, what they're trying to get done in their own words, and the questions they ask, whether they put them to a colleague, to Google or to an AI assistant. Your existing content sits against each stage, so every question ends up answered well, answered but thin or hard to find, or not answered at all.
02 - Content plan
Gaps first, weak pages second.
The validated map combined with your data on all three audiences: Google Analytics for what visitors read and do next, Search Console for what people search for and where you appear, and your server logs for what the AI assistants read. It sets out what to create and what to rework, and the right format for each: an article, a service or how-we-help page, a campaign page, a case study, or an FAQ added to a page you already have.
03 - Briefs
Briefs built on evidence.
One for each priority piece. Before anyone writes, the brief settles what the question is, who's asking it, how often, who answers it today, and what it will take to be the answer. Your expert supplies the part nobody else can. What's inside a brief.
04 - Content
The finished content.
New and reworked pages, written in your tone of voice from your expert's own answers, and approved by them before anything is published.
A before and after you can take to the board. Every piece exists to answer a specific question, so that's what we measure: whether it's found when people search for that question, and whether AI assistants are reading it. That shows what each sprint has changed, and decides where the next one goes. It won't tell you which page won a client, and we won't pretend it does.
Inside a brief
Nothing gets written on a hunch
A brief is a page or two your expert can read in ten minutes, and it settles every question except the one only they can answer.
The demand
How many people search for this question each month, the terms they use, and how that demand is changing. If nobody is asking, we don't write it.
The competition
Who ranks for it today, what their page covers, and where it's thin. That's the gap yours fills.
Where you stand
Where you already appear for the question, the pages of yours people read on the way to it, and what they do next.
What the AI assistants already read
Which of your pages the AI assistants fetch on this subject, so the new piece builds on what they already trust.
The audience
Who they are, what they're trying to get done, and the stage they've reached.
The structure
The format (article, service page, campaign page, case study or FAQ), the section order, the internal links, the length, and the schema the page should carry.
The ten questions
The interview questions for your expert. Their answers are the examples, opinions and detail that no competitor and no AI can produce, and they're what turn the evidence into a piece worth citing.
How it works
What happens in each sprint
Once the tiers are agreed, every sprint follows the same five steps, one job at a time. We do the research, the data work and the drafting. What we need from you is access to your experts, and someone to coordinate their time.
We've written up the whole method, step by step, in How we build an audience-centric content strategy.
Book a 30-minute intro callStep 1
Pick the job.
Usually the one your leadership most wants to win next year, from a Grow audience. Send us anything that's easy to share: case studies, pitch documents, proposals.
Step 2
We draft the map.
We build the first draft before anyone enters the room, from everything already written about the job: your website and offline material, what your competitors publish, and the trade publications and research your audience reads. That gets us about 80 per cent of the way without taking any of your experts' time.
Step 3
Your experts pull it apart.
A draft built from the outside in shows what you and your market say about the work, not how it actually happens. In one working session, your experts correct the stages, add the questions clients ask in meetings, and take out what isn't relevant. Every map we've built has changed in that session, and it's the step not to skip.
Step 4
We check the evidence and write the briefs.
Every question is tested against four things: how many people search for it, who already answers it well, where you currently rank, and which of your pages AI assistants already read. What survives becomes the plan, and each priority piece gets a brief. The data decides what gets written. Your expert decides what it says.
Step 5
We write, publish and measure.
Each brief includes around ten questions for your expert, and their answers make the content yours. Once it's live, we compare how each page is found and read with how it was before, and that decides where the next sprint goes.
Drafting
Three ways to get your expert's answers
You can choose a different route for each expert. Whichever you choose, your expert approves every word before anything is published.
We interview, we draft.
Least expert time
A recorded video call, working through the questions in the brief. We write the draft in your tone of voice and share it for sign-off. It usually produces the best material, because people give better examples when they're talking than when they're writing.
They answer in writing, we draft.
Suits busy diaries
Your expert answers the questions in their own time. Bullet points or a voice note are fine. We draft from their answers and share it for sign-off. Written answers tend to be shorter, so we may come back with a few follow-up questions.
They write it, we review.
Most expert time
We hand over the brief and your expert writes the piece, following its structure and recommendations. We check the draft against the brief before it's published. It suits experts who enjoy writing, but it's usually the slowest route.
What it costs
Priced per sprint, from £2,500
A sprint covers one job from start to finish: the map, the plan, and the briefs and content for the priority gaps. What that adds up to depends on what the map shows: it might be a rewritten service page and a campaign page, or a series of articles and a rework of pages you already have. We agree the scope with you before we start. If you have a Service Pack with us, it runs from your existing hours.
Each sprint is agreed on its own, so you can see what the first one does before committing to the next. We keep you updated on hours as we go, so there are no surprises.
Start with one job
Which job do you most want to win next year?
Tell us, and on a 30-minute call we'll talk you through how we'd map it and what your first sprint would deliver.
Book a 30-minute intro callWhere it fits
The map doesn't just drive content
Audience mapping is the Understand stage of our Lean Innovation Framework. Once the audiences, jobs and questions exist in a structured form, every other piece of digital work can be prioritised against them: the navigation, the service pages, your pitches, and the tools and calculators worth building.
If you use Second Site, our content intelligence platform, the map becomes its context. It holds the audiences, jobs and questions alongside the site itself, records when each page goes live, and puts the search and AI reading data next to it.
If you'd rather start with an outside view, our free Second Opinion is a version of the first step: you pick one audience, and we show you who your website says you help and what the AI assistants make of it.
FAQ
The practical questions
Time, data, results and approvals.
An SEO agency usually starts with keywords, and a content agency with a calendar of topics. We start with the job your ideal clients are trying to get done, and use the search and AI data to decide which of their questions are worth answering. The keyword research is still there, inside every brief, but it's the evidence, not the starting point. And the map is useful beyond content: it shapes navigation, service pages and pitches too.
The first version, yes. You can build the tiers from your own site and pick a job from your leadership's priorities. Drafting the map by hand from everything written about the job takes a long time, though, and the session where your experts pull it apart is the step most organisations skip because it costs senior time. Those, and the evidence check, are what we bring.
One working session to pull the map apart, then a short interview for each piece, or their own time if they'd rather answer in writing. The research, the data work and the drafting are ours. Getting the time is easier when you're asking for less of it: the draft map is around 80 per cent there before anyone is in the room, and every brief shows the evidence that people are asking the question, so your experts know their time is going on something that will be read.
Each piece has a before and after: whether it's found for the question it answers, and whether AI assistants are reading it, from Search Console and your server logs. Across a sprint, that shows which gaps you've closed. If you use Second Site, it records when each page went live, so the change is easy to see. It won't credit a single page with a won client, and we don't claim it does.
For the reading. AI takes in everything relevant that's already been written about the job and cross-references it, which is what gets the first draft of the map to 80 per cent before anyone is in the room. It runs on our own systems. What it doesn't do is make the decisions: which audiences to grow, where a job's stages start and stop, and which questions matter are calls for the people who know your organisation.
An audience is a group you serve, such as owner-managed businesses. A persona describes a typical person within it. A job is the specific thing they're trying to get done, with a start, a finish and a context, such as a founder selling their business. We map jobs, because a job breaks into stages and questions that can each be written for, and a persona doesn't.
Yes. Existing audience research, pitch documents and case studies all go into the first draft. If your research is organised around who people are rather than what they're trying to get done, we'll use what's useful and map the job on top.
Read-only access to Google Analytics 4 and Search Console, and your server logs if you keep them. If you don't, we can help you switch log retention on at the start.
Yes. We draft in your tone of voice, from your expert's own answers, and your expert approves every word before it's published.
Yes. Content written for one reader and built around one question is what ranks, what people read and what AI assistants cite. The evidence check shows which of the three matters most for each gap, and the plan follows that.
Tell us the job you most want to win.
Tell us about your organisation and the work you'd most like to win next year. We'll come back within two working days to arrange a 30-minute intro call.