How we build an audience-centric content strategy

Most content strategies start with a list. Sometimes it's the list of services, sometimes it's the people who've said they'd be willing to write something, and sometimes it's a set of topics that came up in a planning meeting and felt current at the time.

The problem is where that list starts. It begins with what the organisation does and works outwards to who might want it, rather than starting with what its audiences are actually trying to get done.

That's an important difference, because it affects not just what gets written, but which audiences the organisation reaches and where its content effort goes.

We start with who, work out what they're trying to get done, and only then decide what to write.

This article explains how that works in practice, where it gets difficult, and which parts you can do yourselves.

 

Audience mapping is a way of working out who your content is for before you decide what to write. You list the audiences the organisation actually serves, decide how much effort each one deserves, and then, for those that matter most, work out what they're trying to get done and the questions they ask along the way.

The result is a map that provides the basis for your content plan, rather than starting with a list of services.

This isn't a new idea, or one we came up with ourselves. The thinking behind it draws on "jobs to be done", an approach associated with Clayton Christensen and Tony Ulwick.

The principle is simple: people don't buy a product or service for its own sake; they hire it to help them get something done. Our approach applies that same thinking to content.

A job isn't a single moment. It's a journey that happens in stages, and different people may be involved at each stage, asking different questions. Mapping that journey means you can plan content that meets people at each point, from their first question through to the point where they're ready to talk to someone.

This matters even more now because content has three audiences: the people it was written for, the search engines that help them find it, and the AI assistants that increasingly answer their questions.

They don't all assess content in the same way, but clear, specific answers supported by genuine expertise give you a stronger foundation for reaching all three.

The first version of a map can be built from what's already been written, by the organisation and about its market. That's a useful start, but it only becomes reliable when the people who do the work review it, challenge it and fill in what's missing. We'll come back to that in step 3.

 

Audience mapping starts by listing every audience the organisation actually serves. This doesn't always align with the sectors and services listed on the website; often those lists mix the work it does with the work it would like to be doing.

The evidence for who it really serves nearly always exists already, just not in the obvious places. Most expert-led websites are organised by service line, with little or no audience layer, so the information is scattered across people pages, case studies, named clients, articles and industry body memberships. A lot of it never makes it onto the website at all, sitting in pitch documents, proposals and credentials written for individual clients and then filed away.

Rather than reading everything page by page, we've built a process that brings together what the organisation has written, including offline documents where clients are able to share them, and identifies the audiences it actually works with.

The next step is to group those audiences into three tiers, based on where the organisation wants to focus its content and marketing effort over the next two to three years.
 

To make that concrete, here's how it played out for an advisory organisation we worked with, described in general terms. Its website listed twelve services and no audiences at all.

Bringing together the biographies, case studies and a set of past proposals produced eleven audiences. A conversation with the marketing team saw them grouped like this:

• Grow: Owner-managed businesses preparing for a sale or succession, and technology companies raising their second or third round of funding. Both were where the organisation had won its best recent work, had senior people with visible track records, and wanted to be known in three years' time.
• Defend: Private landlords with sizeable portfolios, and family businesses with complex ownership. Long-standing, profitable audiences, well served by experienced people, but not where the marketing team wanted to put new effort because the relationships were mostly inherited rather than won.
• Maintain: Charities, sole traders, international clients with a UK footprint, and four others. Real capability and revenue in some cases, but served through referrals and the services listing rather than actively targeted.

The tiers are about focus, not how valuable the work is. In this example, family businesses were among the organisation's most profitable audiences, but stayed in Defend because the relationships were already there and the team was at capacity.

There are two things to watch out for, and both involve people rather than analysis.

The first is that a senior person whose area lands in Maintain won't enjoy reading it. The tiers need to be presented as a decision about where to focus effort, not a ranking of value.

The second is that this exercise often reveals a gap between how the organisation sees itself and how it presents itself online. In the example, the technology audience had two strong people profiles and some good work behind it, but nothing on the website that a technology founder would be likely to find. If the organisation wanted to grow that audience, it first needed to become visible to it.

That's an easier conversation to have with stakeholders because the gap can be demonstrated with evidence.

With the tiers agreed and a priority audience chosen, the next step is to decide what, specifically, to map.

 

A persona tells you who someone is, such as a finance director at a mid-sized business. But that finance director probably has fifty problems at once, each requiring a different solution.

A job, by contrast, has a beginning, a middle and an end. Different people get involved along the way, so it gives you something you can map stage by stage, and something an expert will recognise as the work they actually do.

The difference is easiest to see with a good job and a bad one side by side.

• "Advising owner-managed businesses" isn't a job. It has no start, no finish and no particular question in it; it's a description of a service.
• "A founder preparing to sell their business" is a job. It begins with a decision about timing, ends with the proceeds being dealt with, involves the founder, a finance director, a management team and several advisers at different points, and raises different questions along the way.

A good job has three things going for it:

1. A clear start and finish: A business sale, a funding round or a product launch all work because you know where the content begins and ends. "Growing the business" doesn't, because it never ends.
2. Context: Launching a product in pharmaceuticals is different from launching one in another sector, and that difference is where an organisation's specialist knowledge comes through. A job without context produces content anyone could have written.
3. Commercial value: The simplest way to find the first job is to ask the leadership which project, for which client, they would most like to win next year, and start there.

Within a Grow audience, there are usually two or three jobs worth mapping. For the owner-managed-business audience in our example, they were the sale itself, succession to the next generation, and a management buyout.

The sale went first because it was the one the leadership most wanted to win more of. It's worth taking these jobs one at a time rather than trying to map the whole audience at once.

With a job chosen, the next step is to break it into the stages the client actually goes through.

 

Once you have a job, you break it into stages and work out who's involved at each one and what they're trying to find out. That understanding of the journey is what the content plan is built on.

It's also the part of the method that often shows the organisation something it hasn't seen before: the whole journey laid out from the client's perspective, rather than from the services it provides.

A job usually breaks into five or so stages. Here's a high-level version of the 'founder preparing for sale' example mentioned earlier:

Reading across, stage one is the founder alone, before anyone else knows, asking a private question about value and tax. They're not looking for an adviser yet; they're looking for a number. Content about the organisation's transaction experience is unlikely to reach them at this point.

By stage two, the finance director is involved and the questions have become practical, particularly around what a buyer will look at. These are questions an adviser can answer with real detail from real deals.

At stage three, the organisation's credentials become particularly important, and the question is specific: have you worked with businesses in our sector, of our size?

Stage four belongs to the management team and is about running the business through the disruption. It's a question advisers might overlook because it falls outside what they'd traditionally consider legal or financial work.

And stage five is the founder again, with a new question about what to do with the money, which is often where the next relationship begins.

Reading the map this way shows two things that make it worth building.

The person changes as the job moves. The founder at stage one wants to know whether it's worth doing, the finance director at stage two wants to know what's involved, and the management team at stage four wants to know what it means for them. It's the same job seen by different people, each needing different content.

The questions are specific enough to write for. "What will a buyer's due diligence look at first?" is a question a finance director might search for, whereas "corporate transactions" is a service line. Only one directly addresses what that person is trying to find out.

For each stage, we also record which of the organisation's services serve it, which of its people are already named on the relevant pages and which should be, based on their recent work. We record the best recent examples of that work and, where it differs from stage to stage, who the organisation is competing against.

The result is a single view of the whole job, from the first stage to the last, showing the organisation's current content and proposition at every point.

How the first draft gets built: 

We create the first draft before anyone enters the room. The same process we use in step 1 does the groundwork, this time reading well beyond the organisation's own material, and gets us about 80% of the way to a finished map without taking any of the experts' time.

Where the experts come in:

This step matters more than any other. However much material goes into it, a draft map built from the outside in reflects what the organisation and its market say about the work, not necessarily how the work actually happens.

It only becomes reliable when the people who do the work sit down with it and pull it apart.

Because they're starting from a draft rather than a blank whiteboard, the session is shorter and more focused. We're asking them to add the expertise only they have, point out what we've missed, and take out what isn't relevant.

Every map we've built has changed in that session, usually at the stage boundaries and the questions, and sometimes in which audience is actually the priority.

In the sale example, the experts split stage two into two sub-stages because getting the business ready and deciding on the structure of the deal turned out to be different conversations with different people.

 

Building the map

Most of it is already written down. The rest is in your experts' heads.

Already written down

About 80%

Read and cross-referenced before anyone is in the room

• ✓Your website
• ✓Pitch documents and proposals
• ✓Competitors' sites
• ✓Trade publications
• ✓Research your audience reads

In your experts' heads

The other 20%

Added in one focused session with the people who do the work

• +Where the stages really start and stop
• +The questions clients ask in meetings, not in search engines
• −Stages and questions that look right on paper but don't happen
• +Which audience really matters

In the sale example, the experts split stage two in two: getting the business ready and agreeing the deal structure turned out to be different conversations with different people. Nothing written down would have shown that.

The draft gets you most of the way. Only your experts can make it accurate.

Until it's been through that session, the map is really a best guess. A content plan built on a best guess risks producing content for stages and questions that don't exist as the client experiences them, however plausible they looked on paper.

That session is the core of our audience mapping service, and if you do the rest yourselves, it's the step not to skip.

 

The content plan comes after the map, and it's built from the questions on it, checked against the evidence, before any expert spends a minute writing.

That order matters because it's the difference between a plan that produces content people are looking for and one that produces content people would like to have written.

The check is straightforward to describe, if not to do. Take every question from every stage and test it against four things: how many people are searching for it, who already answers it well, where the organisation currently ranks for it, and which pages AI crawlers are accessing, which I cover in How we read AI crawler data.

Then look at what the organisation already has, so that each question ends up in one of three states. Using the sale example again:

• Answered well on the site: "What is my business worth?" has a good valuation guide behind it already, written two years earlier and still accurate. It doesn't need rewriting, just linking from the stages that need it.
• Answered, but thin or hard to find: "What will a buyer's due diligence look at first?" is covered in two paragraphs halfway down a service page that someone searching for the question would be unlikely to find. The answer needs reworking as a page of its own rather than writing again from scratch.
• Not answered at all: "When do we tell staff and customers, and what do we say?" isn't answered anywhere on the site, or on most competitors' sites either, making it a priority for new content.

Example: a founder selling their business, mapped stage by stage:

Stage 1

Trigger

Stage 2

Working out the options

Stage 3

Choosing who to use

Stage 4

Doing the work

Stage 5

Handing back

Who's involved

Founder

Finance director

Founder

Management team

Founder

What they're asking

“What is my business worth, and what will I keep after tax?”

“What will a buyer's due diligence look at first?”

“Who has advised on a sale in our sector, at our size?”

“When do we tell staff and customers, and what do we say?”

“How should I structure the proceeds for my family?”

Services

ValuationsPersonal tax

Due diligenceTransaction support

Corporate finance

Transaction supportEmployment

Wealth planningPersonal tax

People

Corporate finance partner

Private client tax director

Transaction services director

Corporate finance partner

Transaction services director

Private client tax director

Articles

What is my business worth? How buyers value a company

Selling your business: the tax you'll pay and the reliefs you can claim

Vendor due diligence explained (2019)

Five questions to ask before you appoint a corporate finance adviser

Nothing yet

Nothing yet

Proof

“They gave us a clear number and a clear plan”Testimonial

Vendor due diligence for a logistics groupCase study

Sale of a software business to a US buyerCase study

“They'd done this in our sector before”Testimonial

Nothing yet

“They helped us plan for the next generation”Testimonial

Content today

✓Answered well

~Thin or hard to find

✓Answered well

✕Not answered

✕Not answered

Gaps first, weak pages second: the map becomes the plan

That sorting is the plan. Gaps first, weak pages second, Grow audiences before Defend, and one job at a time.

Each piece is written for one reader at one stage, around one question, and carries something only the organisation knows, whether that's an example, an opinion or a detail from real work.

That last part is increasingly important. It's what makes a reader trust the page and helps distinguish it from the many other pages covering the same subject, both in search and when AI systems are looking for information.

The thing to watch for at this step is the temptation to skip the evidence check because an expert has a topic they want to write about, it feels current, and it goes straight onto the plan.

Sometimes that's right, but often it's a question nobody is asking, or one that three larger organisations already answer better. The expert's time might be worth more on a stage-four question with no good answer anywhere.

Once the plan exists, the way you run the content calendar changes too, which is the next step.

 

A content calendar built this way stops asking "what shall we publish this month?" and starts asking "which job are we finishing this quarter?"

That's a bigger shift than it sounds. Rather than planning around months, you plan around jobs. A sprint takes one job from map to published content, with new pages where there are gaps, reworked pages where existing answers are hard to find, and nothing at all for stages that are already well served.

For the sale example, the sprint ran to about six weeks and produced eight new pages, two reworked ones, and three questions deliberately left alone because the existing content already answered them.

The experts' time went into ten pieces of content rather than the twelve on the original topic list, and every one could be traced to a stage, a person and a question.

That's usually how it goes: less writing than people expected, and considerably more useful. Because every piece is tied to a stage of a job for a Grow audience, you can say exactly why it exists.

Measuring what it's done

Because every piece exists to answer a specific question at a specific stage, you can judge it against that question rather than relying on page views alone.

Two useful measures are whether the page is being found when people search for the question, using Search Console, and whether AI crawlers are accessing it, using server logs (more on that in How we read AI crawler data).

Neither tells you that a page won a client, and we don't claim it does. What they give you is a before and after: record when a page goes live, compare its search visibility and AI crawler activity over the following weeks, and use that evidence to decide where the next sprint should focus.

Second Site, our content intelligence platform, is where we keep that record. It holds the audiences, jobs and questions from the map alongside the site itself, records when each page goes live, and puts the search and AI crawler data next to it.

That means the comparison is there to look at, rather than something someone has to remember to pull together.
 

There are three things worth keeping in mind, because they'll trip you up if you're not expecting them.

The politics

The tiers are a decision about where content effort goes, but they'll be read as a ranking of people's areas however carefully they're framed.

Build the first version from the evidence before anyone senior sees it, present it as what the evidence says rather than what you think, and expect to be corrected. The corrections are often where the useful information is.

The validation

A map built from what's already been written is a first draft, however much material went into it. It will feel finished long before it is.

The session where your experts argue with it is what turns it into something you can plan against. It's tempting to skip because it takes up senior people's time, but if there's only one part of this you do properly, make it this one.

The evidence check

An expert with a topic they want to write about is often the most persuasive person in a content meeting, but that doesn't mean it's what the audience is looking for.

Check the questions against search demand, existing answers and what AI crawlers are accessing before anyone starts writing. Be prepared for the evidence to remove a good proportion of the list.

We run this as a service, one job per sprint, with your experts adding what only they know. The process we've built for producing the first draft is what keeps it quick, because their time goes into correcting a map rather than drawing one from scratch.

The structure isn't a secret, though. An organisation that builds its own tiers, picks one job and gets its experts to challenge the map will already have a better starting point than a list of topics.