WORKWEEK

Your product marketing team is your #1 input to your content strategy. In fact, at many orgs, content marketing and strategy teams live on product marketing. But even if yours doesn’t, your content strategy needs to align with your product roadmap. 

Marketing’s main job is to create a narrative and tell a story around how, why and for whom something is built. Remaining close to your product roadmap, and partnership roadmap, is one of the best ways to prioritize content creation, build a calendar that addresses all stages of the funnel, and remain aligned to larger company goals.

Here are all the content triggers I use to build a content strategy and determine the priority of batches of assets, and even individual pieces:

1. Product / partner roadmap: Anything that falls on the product or partner roadmap needs audience education if you do not have it already. In addition, these types of pieces have distribution built-in with emails to your customer base or additional promotion through a partner. These are business critical, and should be considered high priority. Governance falls under this, too. You should be regularly updating your content to account for new product features and functionality. 
2. Integrated campaign roadmap: Integrated campaigns are awareness and lead gen driving campaigns that often have content at the center––and that content often needs to span the funnel. Case studies, blogs, press, endemics, social media, etc. These are the second highest priority, and in an ideal world, they are mapped back to product or partner roadmap activities. 
3. SEO gaps & opportunities: SEO is harder now than it’s ever been, but just as if not more impactful when you get it right. SEO is a distribution channel. It is not a type of content. SEO can offer some of the best distribution for your pieces, and therefore, it is an important trigger for updating or creating new pieces of content. Ideally SEO gaps and opportunities align or are mapped back to product, partner or brand roadmap activities. 
4. Aspirational customer highlights: These stories are meant to be aspirational and emotional for your readers. Ideally you have a case study you can link back to, or create this piece of content in coordination with the launch of a case study. It is important to note that this is *not* a case study. 
5. Industry highlights: Whatever your industry is, your company should create content to educate folks on it with your company’s unique point of view. These are critical to becoming a thought leader in your space, and for always-on content campaigns in nurture streams. Once you build a solid foundation of these pieces, priorities 1-4 will nearly always inter-link back to these core topics. In fact, a lot of these pieces should be the SEO gaps or opportunities you look to fill OR integrated campaign content, but they are not always the same. 
6. Trending topics: This is the least priority piece of content to create, and if your team is already strapped, ignore it. You don’t need to create content on a piece of news in your industry just for the sake of it (I swear, if I see one more eBook on tariffs…). But, if you have a large enough team or budget that you can build commentary on trending topics or news in your industry, then by all means, don’t let me stop you. 

Remember: No content team has unlimited resources, and it’s important we understand (and the larger marketing team understands) how content prioritization decisions are made. These factors feed into our prioritization algorithm, and the more factors that a piece has, the higher priority it is. 

How does your team prioritize content creation?