Stop asking what to write about. Ask what your buyer can't decide.

Most content plans start in the exact same place: a spreadsheet, a list of topics, and a column of dates. Someone suggests "AI trends," someone else suggests "a case study," and the calendar fills up.

By Margarita Sánchez

· 6 min read

Three months later, the calendar is still full, but nobody can say what any of it did.

The trouble is not the ideas. It is the starting point.

A topic is something you want to talk about. What moves a sale is something your buyer needs to understand before they can decide.

In practice, those two lists overlap far less than you think.

Table of Contents

Your buyer doesn't lack information

It is tempting to think buyers need more content. They do not.

Gartner surveyed more than 1,000 B2B customers and concluded that "this abundance of quality information is hindering customer decisions" [1]. When buyers ran into contradictory information, they were 153% more likely to settle for a smaller, less disruptive purchase than they had originally planned [1].

Read that again from the seller's side.

More content, even good content, can make the buyer shrink the deal or stall. What helps is content that removes a specific doubt.

Most of what buyers see does not do that. In Edelman and LinkedIn's study of 3,500 B2B decision-makers, only 15% rated the quality of the thought leadership they consume as very good or excellent [2].

What they valued most was content that helped them understand their own business challenges and opportunities [2]. Not your industry trends, but their situation.

Start with three things, in this order

Before writing anything, we answer three baseline questions. This is the first step of the method this series is about, and we call it Know.

  1. Who is deciding? Not "SMBs" or "marketing leaders." The specific person, with their role, their pressure, and what they will be judged on if the decision goes wrong. A managing partner choosing a new engineering software vendor is in a very different position from the project lead who will use it.

  2. What situation are they in? Something happened that put this decision on the table: a lost bid, a new hire, a client complaint, or a growth target. The situation shapes what they are afraid of.

  3. What can't they decide yet? This is the distinction that matters most. Not what they want to know about, but what doubt keeps them from moving forward. It is usually narrower and more uncomfortable than a topic: "Will this take more of my time than I have?" "Will it sound like us?" "What if we've already tried this and it failed?"

The third answer is the brief. If you cannot write it as a question your buyer would actually say out loud, you do not have it yet.

Where to find those questions

You already have most of them; they are simply scattered across conversations.

  • The first ten minutes of sales calls. What do people ask before they are interested in your answer? (This is the subject of Why does every sales call start from zero?)

  • The proposals you lost. Not the ones where you lost on price, but the ones where they "went another direction." What did they doubt?

  • Emails before the first meeting. The questions people ask in writing are often the ones they were embarrassed to ask live.

  • Your competitors' FAQ pages and forums. Not to copy them, but to see which questions everyone gets and nobody answers well.

When we ran this on ourselves, the questions our buyers ask before hiring a content partner were not about content at all. They were about time ("how much of mine will this take?"), AI ("who actually writes this?"), voice ("will it sound like us or like everyone in our sector?"), and expertise ("you don't know my industry").

Almost none of that showed up on our own website. That gap became our plan.

The honest objection: some questions have no search volume

There is a fair argument against this. If nobody searches for the question, nobody will find the answer.

Ahrefs looked at roughly 14 billion pages and estimated that 96.55% of them get zero traffic from Google, with the most common reason being that nobody searches for the topic [3].

That is true, and it matters if search traffic is the goal. But for a consultancy, it usually is not the only one.

Many of the most valuable questions are asked by a few dozen people a year, and those few dozen are exactly the ones about to buy. They will find the answer through a link in a LinkedIn post, a forwarded email, or your own sales team sending it before a call.

A question with almost no search volume and a clear buyer behind it is often worth more than a popular topic with no buyer at all.

So use keyword data as a tiebreaker, not as the starting point. When two questions matter equally to your buyer, write first the one people also search for.

What changes when you start here

The calendar stops being a list of things to fill and becomes a list of doubts to remove.

Each piece has a clear job, which makes it easier to write and easier to judge. You can ask, "Did this answer the question?" instead of, "Did this get likes?" (We will come back to that in Likes won't tell you if your content works. Three signals will.)

It also changes what you write next. Once you know the doubt, the next step is answering it in a way that actually helps, which is harder than it sounds and the subject of How to explain without pitching in every paragraph.

If you want to see what this looks like with your own buyers, our content map takes your website, industry and market, and returns three questions your buyers ask before choosing, where they come from, and whether anyone in your market answers them well.

Sources

Questions this piece answers

How do I create a content strategy that actually helps convert buyers?

A topic is something you want to talk about. What moves a sale is something your buyer needs to understand before they can decide. In practice, those two lists overlap far less than you think.

What questions should I answer in my company's content?

Before writing anything, we answer three baseline questions. This is the first step of the method this series is about, and we call it Know. Who is deciding? What situation are they in? What can't they decide yet? This is the distinction that matters most. Not what they want to know about, but what doubt keeps them from moving forward.

How can I find out what questions my potential customers have?

You already have most of them; they are simply scattered across conversations. The first ten minutes of sales calls. What do people ask before they are interested in your answer? The proposals you lost. Not the ones where you lost on price, but the ones where they "went another direction." What did they doubt? Emails before the first meeting. The questions people ask in writing are often the ones they were embarrassed to ask live. Your competitors' FAQ pages and forums. Not to copy them, but to see which questions everyone gets and nobody answers well.

Should I create content about questions that have no search volume?

Many of the most valuable questions are asked by a few dozen people a year, and those few dozen are exactly the ones about to buy. They will find the answer through a link in a LinkedIn post, a forwarded email, or your own sales team sending it before a call. A question with almost no search volume and a clear buyer behind it is often worth more than a popular topic with no buyer at all. So use keyword data as a tiebreaker, not as the starting point.

How do I measure whether my content is working?

Each piece has a clear job, which makes it easier to write and easier to judge. You can ask, "Did this answer the question?" instead of, "Did this get likes?"

Want your buyers to find you like this?

Start a conversation Or start with your content map

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