Before You Write a Word of Content, Answer These Five Questions

There is a version of content strategy that begins with a content calendar. With slots to fill and topics to assign and deadlines to meet. This version is common, and it produces a predictable result: a lot of content that is not doing very much.

The version that works begins somewhere else. It begins with questions — five of them, in particular — that most brands have either never asked or have answered too quickly, in a room, with a whiteboard, without enough honesty.

These are not complicated questions. They are, in some cases, uncomfortably simple. But the answers, arrived at carefully, become the foundation on which everything else is built. Skip them, and you are building on sand.

1. Who, specifically, are you talking to?

Not your target demographic. Not “business owners aged 35 to 54.” A person. What do they think about when they’re not thinking about work? What are they trying to achieve, and what keeps getting in the way? What have they read or heard recently that felt exactly right, and what made them roll their eyes?

The more specific your answer, the more useful it is. A piece of content written for a specific person will almost always outperform content written for a demographic category, because specificity creates recognition, and recognition creates trust.

2. What do you want them to feel?

Not think. Feel. Thinking follows feeling in almost every meaningful decision a person makes, including decisions about which brands to trust and hire and recommend. Before you decide what information your content should convey, decide what emotional experience it should create.

Should your reader feel understood? Energized? Reassured? Challenged? Curious? The answer shapes everything — the tone, the structure, the examples you choose, the sentence you end on. Content that does not know what it is trying to make people feel tends to make them feel nothing.

3. What do you believe that your competitors don’t say?

This is the question that produces the most valuable content, and the one brands are most reluctant to answer honestly. It requires knowing your competitive landscape well enough to identify not just what you do differently but what you think differently.

Your content should express a point of view — an actual position on how things should work, what matters, and what the conventional wisdom gets wrong. This is what makes content worth reading: not information, which is everywhere, but perspective, which is rare.

“The most valuable content does not simply inform. It takes a position. It says something that someone, somewhere, will agree with strongly enough to share.”

4. What does success look like for the reader?

Good content is generous. It gives the reader something real — a new way of thinking about a problem, a practical tool, a piece of information they didn’t have before. Before you write anything, ask: what will the person who reads this be able to do, think, or feel that they couldn’t before?

If the honest answer is “nothing much,” the content is not ready to be written. Go back to the question and find a more useful answer. The discipline of demanding genuine value from your content is the discipline that separates the brands with loyal audiences from the ones publishing into silence.

5. Why are you the right voice for this?

This is the credibility question, and it matters more than most brands realize. Readers have endless options for information and perspective. What they are actually looking for is a voice they trust — one that has earned the right to speak on a given subject through experience, expertise, or a demonstrated way of thinking that they find consistently valuable.

Before you write a piece of content, ask what gives you the right to say it. Not in a defensive sense, but in a clarifying one. The answer will shape how you write it: what you lead with, what evidence you offer, what you can assert and what you should question. Content written from a place of clear authority feels different from content that is simply occupying space. Readers feel the difference immediately.

Then, and Only Then

When you have honest answers to all five questions, sit down and write. You will find that the writing goes faster and the result is stronger — not because the questions have made writing easier, but because they have made thinking easier. The content knows what it is for.

A content calendar full of topics is not a strategy. A strategy is a clear understanding of who you are talking to, what they need to feel, what you uniquely believe, what value you are offering, and why you are the right voice to offer it. Everything else follows from that.

Start with the questions. The content will take care of itself.