{ "thesis": "A content strategy should start with what your buyer needs to understand before they can decide, specifically the doubts preventing them from moving forward, rather than with topics you want to talk about.", "claims": [ { "text": "Most content plans begin with a list of topics and publication dates rather than buyer decision needs.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "Most content plans start in the exact same place: a spreadsheet, a list of topics, and a column of dates." }, { "text": "Content calendars can remain full for months without anyone being able to identify their impact.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "Three months later, the calendar is still full, but nobody can say what any of it did." }, { "text": "A topic is something a company wants to discuss, whereas content that moves a sale helps buyers understand something they need before making a decision.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "A topic is something you want to talk about. What moves a sale is something your buyer needs to understand before they can decide." }, { "text": "The topics companies want to discuss and the information buyers need to make decisions overlap less than commonly assumed.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "In practice, those two lists overlap far less than you think." }, { "text": "B2B buyers do not necessarily need more content or information.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "It is tempting to think buyers need more content. They do not." }, { "text": "Gartner concluded that an abundance of quality information hinders customer decisions.", "type": "factual", "source": "Gartner", "source_span": "Gartner surveyed more than 1,000 B2B customers and concluded that \"this abundance of quality information is hindering customer decisions\" [1]." }, { "text": "When buyers encountered contradictory information, they were 153% more likely to settle for a smaller, less disruptive purchase than originally planned.", "type": "factual", "source": "Gartner", "source_span": "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]." }, { "text": "More content, including good content, can cause buyers to reduce the size of a purchase or delay their decision.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "More content, even good content, can make the buyer shrink the deal or stall." }, { "text": "Content that removes a specific doubt is more helpful to buyers.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "What helps is content that removes a specific doubt." }, { "text": "Only 15% of the 3,500 B2B decision-makers in Edelman and LinkedIn's study rated the thought leadership they consume as very good or excellent.", "type": "factual", "source": "Edelman and LinkedIn", "source_span": "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]." }, { "text": "B2B decision-makers value content that helps them understand their own business challenges and opportunities.", "type": "factual", "source": "Edelman and LinkedIn", "source_span": "What they valued most was content that helped them understand their own business challenges and opportunities [2]." }, { "text": "Content should address the buyer's specific situation rather than generic industry trends.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "Not your industry trends, but their situation." }, { "text": "The Know method begins by answering three questions: who is deciding, what situation they are in, and what they cannot yet decide.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "Before writing anything, we answer three baseline questions. This is the first step of [the method](https://wearedeiji.com/method/) this series is about, and we call it *Know*." }, { "text": "Identifying the specific decision-maker requires understanding their role, pressures, and how they will be judged if the decision goes wrong.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "The specific person, with their role, their pressure, and what they will be judged on if the decision goes wrong." }, { "text": "Different stakeholders involved in the same purchasing decision can have substantially different positions and concerns.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "A managing partner choosing a new engineering software vendor is in a very different position from the project lead who will use it." }, { "text": "The situation that brings a decision onto the table shapes what the buyer fears.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "The situation shapes what they are afraid of." }, { "text": "The most important question is what doubt prevents the buyer from moving forward, not what topic they want to learn about.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "**Not what they want to know about, but what doubt keeps them from moving forward.**" }, { "text": "The buyer's unresolved doubt is usually narrower and more uncomfortable than a general content topic.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "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?\"" }, { "text": "The buyer's unresolved question should become the content brief, and it should be phrased as a question the buyer would genuinely say aloud.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "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." }, { "text": "Companies can find many of their buyers' questions in existing conversations.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "You already have most of them; they are simply scattered across conversations." }, { "text": "The first ten minutes of sales calls can reveal what prospects ask before they become interested in the seller's answer.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "What do people ask before they are interested in your answer?" }, { "text": "Lost proposals, particularly those where the prospect chose another direction rather than explicitly rejecting the price, can reveal buyer doubts.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "Not the ones where you lost on price, but the ones where they \"went another direction.\" What did they doubt?" }, { "text": "Questions asked in emails before the first meeting can reveal concerns buyers may be embarrassed to raise during a live conversation.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "The questions people ask in writing are often the ones they were embarrassed to ask live." }, { "text": "Competitors' FAQ pages and forums can reveal common questions that nobody answers well.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "Not to copy them, but to see which questions everyone gets and nobody answers well." }, { "text": "Deiji's own prospective buyers raised concerns about time, AI authorship, brand voice, and industry expertise rather than content itself.", "type": "factual", "source": "", "source_span": "When we ran this on ourselves, the questions our buyers ask before hiring a content partner were not about content at all." }, { "text": "Those buyer concerns were largely absent from Deiji's own website, and that gap became its content plan.", "type": "factual", "source": "", "source_span": "Almost none of that showed up on our own website. That gap became our plan." }, { "text": "Some valuable buyer questions have little or no search volume.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "There is a fair argument against this. If nobody searches for the question, nobody will find the answer." }, { "text": "Ahrefs estimated that 96.55% of roughly 14 billion pages receive zero traffic from Google, with the most common reason being that nobody searches for the topic.", "type": "factual", "source": "Ahrefs", "source_span": "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]." }, { "text": "The lack of search volume matters when search traffic is the goal, but search traffic is not usually the only goal for a consultancy.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "That is true, and it matters if search traffic is the goal. But for a consultancy, it usually is not the only one." }, { "text": "Some of the most valuable buyer questions are asked by only a few dozen people annually, and those people may be close to making a purchase.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "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." }, { "text": "Buyers can discover answers through LinkedIn posts, forwarded emails, or sales teams sharing content before calls.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "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." }, { "text": "A question with little search volume but a clearly identifiable buyer can be more valuable than a popular topic with no buyer behind it.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "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." }, { "text": "Keyword data should be used as a tiebreaker rather than as the starting point for content planning.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "So use keyword data as a tiebreaker, not as the starting point." }, { "text": "When two questions matter equally to the buyer, the one people also search for should be written first.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "When two questions matter equally to your buyer, write first the one people also search for." }, { "text": "Starting with buyer doubts transforms the content calendar from a list of topics into a list of doubts to remove.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "The calendar stops being a list of things to fill and becomes a list of doubts to remove." }, { "text": "Giving each piece of content a clear job makes it easier to write and evaluate.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "Each piece has a clear job, which makes it easier to write and easier to judge." }, { "text": "Content effectiveness should be evaluated by whether it answers the buyer's question rather than whether it receives likes.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "You can ask, \"Did this answer the question?\" instead of, \"Did this get likes?\"" }, { "text": "Once the buyer's doubt is understood, the next step is to answer it in a genuinely helpful way.", "type": "argument", "source": "", "source_span": "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*." }, { "text": "Deiji's free diagnosis tool uses a company's website, industry, and market to return three buyer questions, their origins, and whether competitors answer them well.", "type": "factual", "source": "", "source_span": "If you want to see what this looks like with your own buyers, our [free diagnosis](https://wearedeiji.com/tools/buyer-questions/) 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." } ], "entities_discussed": [ "Gartner", "Edelman", "LinkedIn", "Ahrefs", "B2B buyers", "B2B decision-makers", "Know method", "Buyer questions", "Content strategy", "Content calendar", "Thought leadership", "Keyword data", "Search volume", "Sales calls", "Lost proposals", "Competitors' FAQ pages and forums", "Deiji" ], "cites": [ { "name": "Gartner", "detail": "A survey of more than 1,000 B2B customers examining how an abundance of quality and contradictory information affects customer decisions. The article attributes the finding that contradictory information made buyers 153% more likely to settle for a smaller, less disruptive purchase to this research. [1]" }, { "name": "Edelman and LinkedIn", "detail": "A study of 3,500 B2B decision-makers examining the quality and value of thought leadership. The article reports that only 15% rated consumed thought leadership as very good or excellent and that buyers valued content helping them understand their business challenges and opportunities. [2]" }, { "name": "Ahrefs", "detail": "An analysis of roughly 14 billion pages estimating that 96.55% receive zero Google traffic, most commonly because nobody searches for the topic. [3]" } ], "author_stance": "The author argues that effective B2B content should be built around the specific doubts preventing buyers from making decisions, using real buyer conversations as the starting point and keyword data only as a secondary prioritization tool." }