How consultants can (finally!) decide which marketing content to focus on

You know you should be creating marketing content — especially “thought leadership” — but you don’t know where to even start. Should you be blogging? Starting a YouTube channel? Posting on LinkedIn? Sending an email newsletter? Launching a podcast? Writing on Substack?

In this blog post, I’ll give you three strategies to help you stop feeling like you’re cluelessly faffing around, figure out what you should be doing, and come up with a useful content marketing plan:

1. Think about how each piece of content fits into your marketing funnel.

2. Aim for manageable, long-term consistency (instead of short-term, heroic effort that fizzles out).

3. Prioritize by effort and impact.

The fundamental problem is: how do you know which content creation will actually help you get leads and be worth spending time on?

It’s intensely irritating. And overwhelming because there are so many things you could be doing.

You know marketing matters, but you also really don’t want to spend hours creating content that disappears into the void without bringing you any closer to new clients.

So instead, you might find yourself throwing up your hands and doing practically no content marketing at all. Or you start enthusiastically, then stop. An abandoned blog. Three YouTube episodes. Two weeks of daily posting on LinkedIn before client work got busy and your enthusiasm waned.

As one of my clients, Sandy Morris, put it:

“For someone like me who’s not literate in marketing stuff, the problem is not knowing what to write. And then I end up not writing anything.”

Maybe you’ve ended up paying for ads instead. Or relied almost entirely on referrals. (Referrals are great and I’m not suggesting you should stop trying to get them. Good content marketing can actually make your referrals work better. More on this later.) 

Part of the problem is that there’s simply so much marketing advice out there.

One expert says you must post on LinkedIn every day. Someone else says you need a podcast. Another guru tells you long-form content is dead. Then somebody pops up insisting every consultant needs a YouTube channel.

You probably don’t have the time or inclination to investigate every claim and separate the useful advice from the noise.

There’s a better way.

When you have a clear content marketing plan, you know where to spend your time and why. Your marketing starts to feel much more deliberate, and considerably less overwhelming.

Before you start digging in the weeds and asking questions like “Which content marketing channels should I use?” or “Should I start a podcast?” or “How often should I post?” I’d encourage you to first think a little differently, at a high level. This kind of thinking will help you come up with a sustainable content marketing plan, so you’ll feel less at sea and more confident about what you’re doing (and what you’re not doing).

Here are three strategies that will help you stop committing random acts of content, get clearer about what deserves your attention, and spend your marketing time more efficiently.

Let’s get going…

1. Think about your whole marketing funnel

One of the simplest ways to make content marketing feel less random is to understand the job each piece of content is doing.

I use a very simple ABC framework: Attract → Build trust → Convert

You need ways for the right people to discover you. That’s the Attract part.

You need ways for those people to get to know you, understand your expertise, and trust you. That’s Build trust.

And, for people who are ready, you need clear ways for them to say yes to working with you. That’s Convert.

In this simple framework, the Convert with a capital C is when prospects actually become clients. But on the journey from complete stranger to paying client, there are many smaller conversions — with a lower case c — along the way. A complete stranger sees a LinkedIn post and starts following you. That’s a conversion that brings them a tiny step closer to becoming a client. Someone who met you at an industry convention joined your email list. That’s a conversion. You need to keep in mind both lower-case conversions and the big enchilada Conversion.

Once you look at your marketing with this framework in mind, the question changes from:

“Should I start a podcast or post on LinkedIn?”

to:

“What do I need to help people find me, trust me, and eventually become clients?” 

In other words, what do you need for the Attract → Build trust → Convert framework?

That’s a much more useful question to start with. And the answer will differ depending on your industry, the details of your business, your skills, and what you’re already doing.

You need to attract the right people

SEO [search engine optimization] can help people discover your website through online search (both old-fashioned Google and new-fangled AI-search). A LinkedIn post can introduce someone to your ideas. So can giving a presentation or participating in a panel at an industry event.

You might appear on somebody else’s podcast, write a guest article, run a webinar, publish an e-book, get mentioned in the media, use paid advertising, or meet people at networking events.

There are plenty of possibilities. But, importantly, you don’t have to use all of them. The point is simply to have at least one or two reliable ways for new people to enter your world. (You can always add more methods later.)

And remember that “attracting” people doesn’t have to mean attracting thousands of strangers online. A good B2B content marketing strategy doesn't require you to reach enormous numbers of people.

For many B2B service businesses, growing a smaller professional network of the right people can be far more valuable than chasing huge audience numbers. You don’t need to become a social media influencer to reach potential clients.

Then, you need to give those people reasons to trust you

This is the stage I’ve noticed it’s surprisingly easy for people to skip.

Imagine you meet a prospective client at a conference. They like you. You have a good conversation and, a few days later, they Google you to find out more about your work, your ideas, your process.

What do they find?

...... 😬

This is one reason I’m a big fan of useful, authoritative blog content. Even though SEO can take time to produce results, and website traffic for many blogs has dropped because of AI-overviews, blogs aren’t valuable only because somebody might discover them through online searches. They also have value for the person who already knows you exist and wants to find out whether you know your stuff and if you’re the right person to help them.

Similarly, referrals are gold — and content helps them become even more valuable. Suppose a past client tells someone new about you. This new person looks you up, and they find useful content that helps them better understand what you do, why you’re good at it, and whether you’re a good fit for them. That brings them closer to working with you.

The same thing can happen on LinkedIn. Someone discovers you through one of your posts, clicks through to your profile, reads a few more things you’ve written and gradually develops a clearer picture of who you are, what you believe, and how you help clients.

An email newsletter can take that relationship with leads further still. Email may not be sexy, but it’s particularly valuable for expensive or complex services with longer sales cycles. Your lead may not be ready today or next week. It may be six months from now when they need your services. An email newsletter helps you stay top of mind without constantly trying to sell to them.

And, finally, help people Convert

A LinkedIn post, blog article, or email newsletter isn’t supposed to single-handedly carry somebody from stranger to client.

No matter where they are in your funnel, you need to make sure people have clear steps they can take to move them closer to buying from you. These are the small-c conversions. That might mean visiting a service page. Downloading a guide. Reading a case study. Subscribing to your emails. Replying to an email. Meeting for coffee.

Most importantly, leads need to know how to actually work with you. Do they need to book a Zoom call on your calendar? Phone you? Send you an email? Whatever it is, make it abundantly obvious. Just having a generic contact form on your website isn’t clear enough, for example. A button that says “Start your project” and leads to a calendar to book a consultation is much better. A call-to-action at the end of your email newsletter asking subscribers to reply if they’d like to work with you is also very clear.

You might be thinking, “But buyers don’t follow a neat funnel.”

If you’re thinking that the buyer journey isn’t really as tidy as Attract → Build trust → Convert, you’d be right. Real people jump around.

One person might avidly read your email newsletter for a year before they’re ready to reach out. Someone else could discover you through a referral, spend an hour reading your website, and book a call the same afternoon. And a third person might follow you on LinkedIn, forget about you for six months, see you speak at a conference, sign up for your email list, and decide to get in touch after the first email you send.

The ABC framework isn’t meant to suggest that everybody moves through the same three stages in a straightforward, linear way.

It’s a simplifying tool.

Your buyers can “percolate” at different stages and move backwards and forwards, up and down, inside the funnel. But you still need to help them discover you, build their trust in you, and make it obvious how they can work with you.

You need to be sure you’re covering all three stages. Skipping any one of them means your funnel isn’t functional. That’s why the ABC framework is useful. It can sometimes be hard to see where your own funnel breaks down and another pair of eyes looking at your stuff can be helpful.

2. When coming up with your content marketing plan, keep it manageable

Once you understand what your marketing needs to accomplish, there’s another trap waiting for you: Trying to do too much at once.

You may be in trouble if your plan looks like this:

• Blog twice a month

• Post on LinkedIn daily

• Create a Substack newsletter

• Send weekly emails

• Start a YouTube channel

• Launch a podcast

• Host monthly webinars

Six weeks later, you’re exhausted and most of it has stopped.

A more modest plan that you can actually maintain long term is far more useful than an impressive-looking plan you abandon.

Consistency and frequency aren’t the same thing

It’s true that posting more frequently can give you more opportunities to reach more people. Studies and LinkedIn experts have drawn different conclusions on what’s the ideal number of posts per week for increasing engagement and growing your audience. From reading these studies and listening to a bunch of experts, I think posting 3-5 times per week (on weekdays) is a good bet — if you can maintain quality. For a B2B audience, content quality is the most important factor. Don’t post irrelevant memes, or thin, generic content just for the sake of posting something. (AI slop isn’t the only kind of bad content.)

Also, it’s better to post consistently at a lower rate than to post more and peter out. Choose the highest useful frequency you can consistently sustain while still publishing high quality content. Then, after at least six months, evaluate how well it’s working for you.

Two strong LinkedIn posts every week for a year are likely to tell you far more about the effectiveness of LinkedIn for your business than posting every day for a fortnight, disappearing for two months, and starting again.

And posting isn’t the only way to make a difference. Spend some of your time — maybe 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — having useful conversations in the comments on other people’s posts instead. Participating in relevant conversations not only puts you in front of people who matter to your business (potential clients, as well as peers who might refer you), the LinkedIn algorithm pays attention and rewards this kind of activity with more visibility.

Put marketing time in your calendar

Like it or not, marketing is an essential part of running your business. It’s not an optional activity you do when every client project is finished, you’re at inbox zero, your laundry’s all done, you’ve been to the gym, and you somehow find yourself with three spare hours. As you’ve probably noticed, those magical spare hours never materialize.

Entrepreneur and brand strategist, Pia Silva, recommends that 25% of your work hours should be spent on marketing. That may not be realistic for you when you have a heavy client workload. Fine. The more important point is that marketing is a fundamental business activity you need to do consistently, not an optional extra you do on the side.

So give marketing a meaningful chunk of your work week. The exact percentage matters less than this: Take marketing seriously as an essential part of your business, decide what you can commit to for the long haul, and protect that time in your calendar. (Many people find it helpful to team up with an accountability partner — either in person or over Zoom — who also needs to work on some recurring task. The commitment to join each other at the same time each week helps keep you both accountable.)

Spread your effort through your marketing funnel

If you’re starting almost from scratch, I generally wouldn’t recommend spending all your available time on attracting new people while ignoring what happens after they find you.

Imagine that you spend all your marketing time trying to attract website traffic.

People arrive.

And then… nothing.

There are no substantial articles showing how you think.

No email list they can join.

No useful case studies.

No obvious next step.

All your effort is wasted. It’s like a brick and mortar business attracting people to their storefront… but the door’s locked and customers can’t get inside to look around.

Instead, spread your efforts top to bottom through your funnel — A, B, and C — rather than condensing the same amount of effort across one level of the funnel.

This is more doable than it sounds. There’s no need for content marketing for a consultant or B2B service provider to be outrageously complex or demanding. A perfectly sensible starting system might be:

Attract: Monthly in-person networking events and two useful LinkedIn posts a week.

Build trust: One substantial thought leadership blog or LinkedIn article each month, plus an email newsletter based on the same content. Develop a new case study quarterly.

Convert: Clear service pages, and an obvious invitation to book a call.

That might well be enough. You probably don’t also need a podcast, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Substack newsletter.

Of course, where you’re starting from makes a big difference.

If your website already attracts plenty of traffic, you may not need to put a lot of effort into attracting more people right now; just keep doing what you’re already doing (or step off the gas a little if you need to direct energy elsewhere).

You might be better off focusing more on improving conversions. Or if referrals already bring lots of potential clients your way, you may discover that your biggest weakness is trust-building content.

If you’re unsure where to begin, working backwards from Conversion can often be revealing. Start by focusing on what’s closest to the money. Make sure someone who’s already interested in hiring you can easily take the final step to buy from you. Then look at what would help build their trust. Then consider how you’ll attract more of the right people. When I work with content strategy clients, I help them figure out where their funnel’s flawed and where they need to focus their content creation efforts.

Make the most of all the content marketing you do

Re-purposing your content means it goes further and makes keeping up with marketing more doable.

If you give a presentation at a trade event, can the ideas become an article? The slides turn into a LinkedIn carousel? Can the text become several LinkedIn posts? Can one of those posts become part of your email newsletter?

That’s one of the ways I help clients simplify their B2B content marketing strategy: rather than endlessly adding new marketing tasks, we look for ways to make the work they’re already doing go further. I also show them how to use AI more effectively to save time without compromising quality.

Are you wondering how to stand out on a noisy platform like LinkedIn?

LinkedIn has well over a billion members worldwide and a couple of billion visits to the site per month, so standing out on there might seem to be a lost cause. How can you attract people to your content? You’re not about to post videos of yourself skydiving in the nude to get attention, right? 😉

I first want to remind you that you don’t need the attention of that many people. You need the attention of the right people. You’re competing for their attention and the pool of people trying to attract the attention of your ideal client is much smaller than the whole worldwide userbase of LinkedIn. You need to stand out in that way smaller pool.

Second, the vast majority of LinkedIn members read other people’s content, but they don’t create content themselves. They don’t post regularly, they don’t write thought leadership articles, they don’t engage in conversations. If you start posting and engaging in conversations regularly, you’ll already be ahead and more likely to get the attention of your ideal client than those who are on the platform but don’t post. (I’ve repeatedly seen the statistic that only 1% of LinkedIn members regularly post, but haven’t been able to confirm this with a primary source. I’ll update this post if I find it.)

3. Prioritize content by effort and impact

Even after you’ve mapped your funnel and reduced your list to a manageable number of activities with a doable cadence, you still have to decide what to do first. Ask yourself two questions:

How much effort will this take?

and:

How much difference could it make?

Your best starting opportunities are typically those with relatively low effort and high potential impact.

Start with the obvious wins

For example, perhaps you’ve worked with several happy clients but have almost no social proof on your website.

You could contact clients (or colleagues) you know well and ask whether they’d be comfortable giving you a LinkedIn recommendation.

Once those recommendations are published, you can also feature the strongest ones on your website. (Since LinkedIn recommendations are public, I personally don’t feel it’s necessary to ask permission to re-post them on your website. But you do whatever you’re comfortable with.)

One relatively small piece of work strengthens trust in more than one place.

Take a look at your homepage. Does the opening section at the top of the page immediately tell the right potential client what problem you solve or what makes your offer valuable?

Or does it say something vague like:

“The Intersection of Can & Do.”

Yes, that’s a real example I recently came across on a management consultancy website.

It may sound clever. But if I’m a busy prospective client, I now have to work out what it actually means.

Clarity beats cleverness.

Leading your homepage with a specific problem your ideal client recognizes, in language they use (not insider jargon), or a clear statement of the value you provide, will likely have a much bigger effect than spending the same afternoon tweaking minor design details, like fonts and colours.

Then tackle the bigger, high-impact jobs

There’s no denying that some worthwhile improvements require more effort.

Setting up your website so interested visitors can subscribe to your email newsletters, connecting the form properly to your email service provider (such as Mailchimp), creating the welcome sequence, and then sending useful emails consistently is clearly more work than requesting a LinkedIn recommendation or Google review.

But it has considerable long-term value because it gives interested prospects a way to stay connected with you. This is especially useful in the B2B world where people aren’t ready to buy the first day they encounter you.

The danger is choosing low-effort activities forever. At some point, you have to tackle the substantial work too (or pay someone to do it for you).

How can you know what will have the biggest impact, relative to effort?

The truth is you can’t always know in advance. Sadly, there’s no universal chart that says:

“Newsletter = 8/10 impact.”

“Podcast = 6/10.”

“LinkedIn = 9/10.”

It depends on you and your business:

• Who buys from you?

• How do they currently find you?

• How long does your sales process take?

• What are prospects doing before they contact you?

• Where are people currently dropping out?

• Do you have a traffic problem, a trust problem, or a Conversion problem?

• Is your positioning clear?

• Is your offer compelling?

• What content-creation skills do you have, or could you learn?

• Can you effectively use AI to help?

• Do you have a budget to pay for help creating content?

• Do you already have valuable content that isn’t being distributed effectively?

This is exactly why copying somebody else’s content plan rarely works very well. Their business isn’t yours. Their audience isn’t yours. Their resources and skills aren’t yours. And their biggest marketing problem may be completely different from yours.

Expert guidance can help you identify those gaps and make better decisions about what deserves your limited time. And the truth is, you need to experiment and try something for a few months (don’t make the mistake of giving up too soon!) and see what happens. We all want certainty in our businesses, but we can rarely have it in advance. And we all want our marketing efforts to have quick results, but we can rarely have that either.

You need a content marketing system

When content marketing feels overwhelming, the natural response is often to search for The One Right Answer.

Blogging or LinkedIn?

Email or Substack?

Podcast or YouTube?

But usually, the channel isn’t the first decision you need to make.

Instead:

1. Think about your funnel.
Make sure you have sensible ways to Attract → Build trust → Convert, so every piece of content has a job.

2. Keep it manageable.
Choose a level of activity you can sustain long term, give it enough time to learn from the results (a minimum of 6 months), and make your existing marketing efforts go further through re-purposing.

3. Prioritize by effort and impact.
Start with the changes most likely to make a meaningful difference without consuming huge amounts of time—and then work your way through the larger high-impact opportunities.

You don’t need to launch five channels.

You don’t need to follow every marketing guru.

And you certainly don’t need to spend another year starting things, stopping them, and wondering whether you picked the wrong tactic.

What you need is a clear content marketing plan for your business.

With that clarity, your marketing time gets easier to protect because you understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You can stop committing random acts of content and work from your own solid B2B content marketing strategy.

And you can start building a body of content that works together — a genuine content marketing system — which, over time, helps more of the right people find you, trust you, and eventually choose to work with you.

As my client, Sandy, put it:

My plan “breaks everything down and makes it less intimidating and really helps me know where to start. This has definitely helped take some of the intimidation out of [marketing] and given me the push I need.”

Not sure what your content priorities should be?

If you’re looking at your current marketing and still aren’t sure where the gaps are, or which opportunity deserves your attention first, that’s exactly the kind of thing we can figure out together.

We’ll look at what you’re currently doing, where content fits into your Attract → Build trust → Convert funnel, and where your time and effort are most likely to make a meaningful difference.

Especially for you, I create your Custom Content Marketing Roadmap, so you’ll come away with a clear picture of what to focus on next and, just as importantly, what you can stop worrying about.

Book an assessment call.