Why I Approach Content Marketing Strategy Like a Marketer AND a Philosopher

A useful content marketing strategy starts with diagnosis. Before you bust a gut churning out Amazon warehouse quantities of content (with the help of AI or not) we need to understand why your current content isn’t getting the results you want.

That’s what my content marketing assessment is designed to uncover for B2B business owners and consultants. I look beyond a traditional content audit to identify the underlying issues affecting your results, then create a custom content strategy based on your business, audience, capacity, and goals.

The aim is not to turn you into a full-time content creator. It’s to help you produce more effective content, use AI to save time without losing your voice, and focus your effort where it’s most likely to generate inbound leads.

What is a content marketing assessment?

When I create a content marketing strategy for a client, the process starts with an assessment call that lasts about an hour. You might expect a content marketing assessment to be a checklist: On Facebook? Check. TikTok? Nope. Post on social once a week? Check. Enticing hooks? Nope. Have an email list? Check. Send emails to your list every week? Nope. And yadda yadda on. That’s a typical content audit.

And then maybe you get a score out of 10 and you’re told to post more on social, write more blog posts, send more emails… all the usual stuff you’re sick of hearing. You don’t own a business or consultancy because you want to add “content creator” to your resumé, right?

This kind of generic content marketing audit assumes everyone’s problem is the same and so the solution is the same: that they need to attract more eyeballs and so they need to publish more content. This is the kind of cookie cutter advice you can get by watching a YouTube video that a million other business owners and consultants watched. But to get the results you want for your business, content strategy needs to be specific to you and your business.

A traditional content audit looks at what you’ve published. My assessment also examines the business foundations and conversion logic underlying it. It doesn’t rely on assumptions about what businesses in general should be doing.

Why philosophy helps with content marketing strategy

For me, questioning assumptions is like breathing. When I talk with a business owner or consultant, I want to know whether they do in fact need to attract more traffic. Is that actually their problem? Would getting more traffic help their business right now? So, that’s where we start: By questioning all assumptions. It might sound odd to bring a philosophy PhD to content marketing, but it makes perfect sense. Questioning assumptions is what philosophers do. Evaluating the logical structure of an argument easily translates into evaluating the logical structure of a marketing funnel. Uncovering hidden premises turns into spotting the fundamental causes of your content’s lack of success. (This also makes us royal buttock pains to watch political debates with.)

By questioning assumptions, examining the logical flow of your marketing funnel, and looking for underlying causes, I’m able to diagnose what’s really going on with your content marketing. For example, posting more on social media isn’t going to help you get more traffic to your website if your Instagram followers don’t know you have a website. It’s definitely not going to help if your Instagram followers aren’t even prospective clients. And getting more traffic to your website isn’t going to help your business if that traffic bounces away without doing anything. And sending more emails to your list isn’t going to help you make more sales if those emails are landing in spam. And all content is limited in its ability to help if you’re not clear on your brand positioning, what makes you different from your competitors, exactly who your customers are, what questions they’re asking, and so on.

Before coming up with a content marketing strategy that’s specific to your business, we need to dig into a whole bunch of business fundamentals first. It’s not just a matter of seeing if your Facebook posts have good hooks or your emails have CTAs. Evaluating those details is like a structural engineer checking a building’s paint job. The fundamentals have to be evaluated first.

The five dimensions of a content marketing assessment

So I can create your custom content strategy, the questions I ask you during a content marketing assessment call fall into five main categories:

Foundation & clarity: Who is your ideal customer? What’s your positioning? Brand voice? The core problem with content is often in this category. Business owners and consultants produce content — or get AI to do it — but because they’re missing the foundation, their content can’t do the work it should. The generic advice to create more content means you just spin your wheels faster, without you getting anywhere.

Content workflow: How does content currently get made, by whom, and how often? If you have trouble creating content, why is that? The blank-screen problem, depending on only one person (probably you!), reinventing the wheel every time, lack of time, feeling overwhelmed, not knowing where to start or focus, suspecting it’s all a waste of time anyway?

AI usage & quality: How (if at all) are you using AI for content creation? Does it sound generic and are you leaning on it without judgment? Are there ways you could use it to gain efficiency so you don’t feel creating content is a second job?

Conversion logic: Is the content and copy actually converting? Is social media content generating DMs or website traffic or email sign-ups? What’s your website conversion rate? How much traffic is it getting and what happens when it arrives? Are leads being captured? We need to know the shape of your marketing funnel and where it’s leaking to know where it makes sense to focus your content marketing efforts (and where to back off), and whether there are broken elements that that need to be fixed first. Hopping on the content treadmill with two broken legs is neither a fun nor efficient use of your time.

Consistency & sustainability: What’s your capacity for creating content and posting it? How much time flexibility do you have? Are images easier to create than text or vice versa? How about video? Only by understanding the realities of your time and capacity can a realistic recommendation for content creation be made.

When I talk with clients, I sometimes see them uncover their own hidden assumptions right on the call. Just by talking these thing through, they recognize the flaws in their own reasoning about their customers’ behaviour or their lead generation efforts. The latent philosophy teacher in me loves these moments 🧡

How to use AI for content creation

AI is a helpful tool, if you use it in the right way. The wrong way can lead to generic AI slop. Generic content doesn’t help your business because if you sound the same as your competitors and say the same things, your business just blends in instead of standing out. AI writing is the average of the internet. You don’t want to be average. You need to have interesting, useful things to say — and a distinctive voice to say it with — so your prospects can see how you’re different. This is more than editing out em-dashes and rocket emojis 🚀

Not only is generic AI-generated content unhelpful, it can actively harm your business because it erodes trust. If a reader believes a robot wrote your LinkedIn article, they have less reason to trust that you actually know what you’re talking about.

But AI can help you save time. It can help prevent blank page paralysis. I can show you ways to use it in ways that preserve your unique point of view and your distinctive voice.

I’m a copywriter, content writer, and journalist. I’ve always been a writer of one kind or another (including fiction and academic writing), and I’ve been running a freelance writing business since 2018, publishing scores of articles, blog posts, white papers, customer stories… Writing comes naturally to me and I’ve honed my writing skills and judgment over many years. Please believe me when I say that you write well enough to use AI as a helpful content creation partner and that your written content is not improved by letting AI take over.

Why people often go wrong with AI content creation

In the course of running my business, I’ve talked with a lot of small business owners, CEOs, consultants, and other experts. Super smart people with tons of expertise. And I’ve learned that, no matter how much they know and how much valuable experience they’ve had, many experts nevertheless lack confidence in their writing abilities.

I suspect that a lot of what’s going on right now is that many experts are being misled by their lack of writing confidence into thinking AI can do a better job of writing than they can. AI writing is smooth and fluent. It’s always confident. And AI’s confident smoothness persuades too many people that it’s a substitute for their own voice. It’s not. (When I taught philosophy, there were always some verbally fluent and uber-confident students who were totally full of shit. I’m sure you know the type too.)

If you have expertise in your domain, you have valuable things to say — and you shouldn’t let AI speak for you. Use it as a helpful partner, sure. Your Custom Content Marketing Plan will show you how it can help you create content that gets better business results, with less time spent.

Using AI for content creation is a genuine boon for busy business owners and consultants. The trick is to take advantage of the efficiencies it offers while avoiding generic AI content that’s potentially harmful to your business.

What’s in a Custom Content Marketing Plan?

So, the content marketing assessments I do aren’t simple checklists or content audits that generate boilerplate advice. They’re deep explorations into your specific business and situation. The Custom Content Marketing Plan I create for you after the assessment call will give you quick wins you can implement the same week. These are ranked by how easy they are to do and how much benefit you stand to gain. These could be little things like putting up-to-date photos your Google Business Profile or adding your LinkedIn recommendations to your website.

Then, I show you the prioritized bigger moves. These are things that, admittedly, aren’t necessarily quick or easy — but the rewards can be significant. For some, that might be hooking up an email service provider (ESP) to their website to capture inbound leads’ email addresses. For others, it might be a complete website overhaul.

The strategy also takes into account where you’re at. There’s no point recommending running A/B tests with your email subject lines if you don’t have an ESP (like Mailchimp or Kit) set up yet. There’s no point recommending that you build an AI agent in Claude Code if you just started a couple of weeks ago with the free version of ChatGPT. Wherever you’re starting from, there are steps you can take to improve the effectiveness of your content and make creating it more efficient.

Every piece of advice in your Custom Content Marketing Plan is explained and supported by strategy that’s specific to you and your business.

PS

If you’re tired of lacklustre results from your content and you’d like to see more inbound leads, get a proper diagnosis before a prescription and book your assessment call today.

PPS

How I used AI for this article: I told Claude what I wanted to write about (to explain what my content marketing assessments are and how my philosophy background is relevant to it). I also asked it to generate an outline. I tweaked the outline and wrote the first draft. Pretty old school. Not even any dictation with this one. I gave the draft to ChatGPT and asked it to do some keyword research with DataForSEO. I worked in some of the keyword suggestions and improved the draft. I got feedback from Claude on that draft. Took some of its advice, ignored the rest of it. Did another round of feedback with Claude, always using my own judgment for what to accept and what to reject. Did final edits when posting to my website.