Content Strategy: What's the Right Go-To First Step?

TL;DR

The first step in creating a content strategy is not defining goals or researching your audience. It is writing a one-sentence content problem statement anchored to a specific business outcome — a plain answer to the question, "What is content failing to do for our business right now?" The standard checklist first steps ("set goals," "build a persona," "run an audit") feel productive, but they produce strategies that are internally tidy and disconnected from the business, because they start from activity instead of from a gap. Anchor to the outcome first, and every later decision — audience, topics, channels, cadence — has something concrete to be tested against. Skip it, and you get traffic that grows without moving anything that matters. Below: why the checklist misfires, how to write the problem statement, and the small set of inputs it needs.

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Ask most guides for the first step in building a content strategy and you get one of two answers: "define your goals" or "know your audience." It sounds unarguable. It is what nearly every ranking article says. And it is where a surprising number of strategies quietly go wrong.

Not because goals and audiences do not matter — they do. But because starting there skips the one decision that gives goals and audiences their meaning. Teams that start with the checklist tend to end up with strategies that look complete on paper and drift in practice: the calendar fills, posts ship, traffic rises, and nobody can draw a straight line from any of it to the business. The plan was never wrong. It was just never anchored to anything.

Why isn't "define your goals" the right first step?

The checklist is comforting because it promises order. Strategy becomes a puzzle you solve by assembling pieces in sequence: goals give direction, audience gives focus, the audit gives insight. It is project-planning-friendly. You can put it in a kickoff meeting, assign owners, slot it into a Gantt chart. That is exactly why it spreads — it is easy to teach and easy to manage.

The problem is that a goal set in isolation is almost always a proxy. "Increase organic traffic 20%." "Grow the email list." "Publish twice a week." Each is measurable, each feels like progress, and none of them tells you whether the content is doing anything the business needed. A team can hit every one of those numbers while the thing that actually pays for the content team — pipeline, activated users, fewer support tickets, retained customers — sits flat. When that happens, the strategy did not fail at execution. It succeeded at the wrong objective, because the objective was chosen before anyone asked what was broken.

The same trap sits inside "know your audience." Define the audience by who uses the product and you can build a beautiful persona that points your content at the wrong person entirely — the end user instead of the person who approves the purchase, the curious beginner instead of the evaluator comparing vendors. The persona is not wrong. It is just unanchored, so nothing catches the mismatch until months of content has already been aimed the wrong way.

This is the distinction we keep coming back to across our writing on strategy versus production: the failure is rarely in making the content. It is in the decision the checklist tells you to make too fast.

The first step is anchoring to a business outcome

So here is the reframe. The go-to first step is not to plan. It is to diagnose — to name, in one sentence, the specific business outcome your content is currently failing to produce. Everything the checklist calls "step one" comes after that, and gets sharper because of it.

The difference is easiest to see side by side:

Standard first step	Outcome-anchored first step	What actually changes
"Set a SMART goal."	"Name the business gap content must close."	You start from a problem, not an activity target
"Build a buyer persona."	"Identify whose decision content has to move."	You target the decision-maker, not just the user
"Audit your content."	"Audit business outcomes, then content."	You measure impact before inventory
Output: a strategy document	Output: a one-sentence problem statement	Purpose before plan

The right-hand column is not more work. It is the same work in a different order — and the order is the whole point. Anchor to the outcome first and the audit has a question to answer, the goal has something real to be a proxy for, and the persona has a job to do. Skip it and each of those steps floats free, internally consistent and collectively pointed at nothing.

There is even evidence that the anchoring, once written down, is what separates the strategies that work. Marketers who report having a documented strategy are far more likely to report success than those who wing it — CoSchedule's roundup puts the gap at 414% more likely. The number is often quoted as proof that you should write a strategy document. We read it differently: what makes a documented strategy powerful is that writing it down forces you to commit to an outcome. A document that never names the business gap is just a longer version of the checklist.

What a bad first step looks like in practice

Picture a common failure mode. A B2B software team has a blog pulling healthy traffic — tens of thousands of monthly visits — and a content goal of "grow traffic another 20%." Their persona is well built. Their audit spreadsheet is thorough. Every box on the checklist is ticked.

Sales, meanwhile, keeps saying the leads are low quality. If you trace it back, the disconnect is not in the execution — it is in the missing first step. The traffic-winning content answers beginner questions ("what is X"), which pulls in students and junior staff. The content sales actually needs is deep, technical comparison material for the manager evaluating vendors. Nobody diagnosed that gap up front, so the goal ("more traffic") and the audience ("people who use this category") were both set to optimize the wrong thing. The team did everything the playbook asked and still missed, because the playbook told them to plan before they diagnosed.

Rewind that same team to the real first step and the whole strategy changes shape. Their problem statement becomes: "Our content attracts early-stage learners, but sales needs material that helps late-stage evaluators compare us on technical capability." Suddenly the goal is not "20% more traffic" — it is "move evaluators," which is measurable in a completely different way. The audience is not "category users" — it is "the person deciding between us and two competitors." The audit stops counting posts and starts asking which ones touch that decision. One sentence, written first, redirects everything downstream.

How to write the problem statement

The statement itself is short. Arriving at it honestly is the work, and it is not a solo exercise. It needs three inputs.

1. Business signal. Talk to the people who touch revenue. What objections do sales hear over and over? Where in the funnel do deals stall? What do customer-success and support conversations keep surfacing? These recurring, in-their-own-words problems are the highest-signal source you own — the same reason customer-conversation mining ranks so high in our content ideation process. The gap you are looking for usually shows up here before it shows up in analytics.

2. Content signal. Audit for intent alignment and conversion, not volume and rankings. Which existing pieces attract the right person and actually move them toward a decision — and which just accumulate impressions? A page that ranks and converts nobody is not a win; it is a clue. This is also where you catch the demand problem early: when we audited our own early posts, 43% of the keywords we had first targeted turned out to have no measurable search volume. Content aimed at an audience that does not exist is the purest version of an unanchored first step.

3. Market signal. What are competitors' pages not saying? Where is the conversation your buyers are having going unanswered? Gaps in the market are where an anchored strategy finds room to matter rather than adding one more voice to a crowded consensus.

Synthesize those three, and the gap you name almost always falls into one of four shapes:

• Awareness gap — the right people do not know you exist for their specific problem.
• Consideration gap — they know you, but do not yet believe you are the best fit for their particular situation.
• Conversion gap — they are interested, but something in the content-to-sale handoff is broken.
• Efficiency gap — you are producing too much of the wrong content, exhausting the team for little return.

Naming the shape is what turns a vague "our content should do better" into a testable direction. A consideration gap and an awareness gap call for almost opposite content; picking the wrong one is exactly the mistake the checklist can't catch because the checklist never asks the question.

What changes once the outcome is the anchor

The problem statement becomes the thing every later decision gets tested against. Choosing a topic? Does it help close this gap. Setting a goal? It should measure movement on this outcome, not a proxy for it. Picking a channel, a cadence, a format — same test. This is how a content strategy stops being a marketing activity and becomes a business intervention: not because the tactics are fancier, but because they all point at one named target.

It also makes the uncomfortable calls easier. An anchored first step will sometimes invalidate work you have already planned — the way naming the real gap can send a team back to redraw an audience or scrap a quarter of queued posts. That resistance to neat forward momentum is a feature. A checklist never tells you to stop and redo; a diagnosis does, which is precisely why it protects you from shipping months in the wrong direction. We wrote about running exactly this kind of honest, cut-things-early process on ourselves in how we planned this blog.

None of this requires more tooling than a shared doc and a few real conversations. Tools help you execute an anchored strategy faster — and yes, ours does, once you know what you are aiming at (that is the point of a platform like Writesy). But the first step is deliberately low-tech. It is a sentence. The value is in refusing to write the rest of the plan until that sentence is true.

The bottom line: the checklist is not wrong so much as out of order. Define goals, define audience, run the audit — all of it belongs in a content strategy. Just not first. First, name the business outcome your content is failing to produce. Everything else is downstream of that one sentence.

FAQ

What is the first step in creating a content strategy?

The first step is to write a one-sentence content problem statement anchored to a business outcome — a direct answer to "What is content failing to do for our business right now?" It comes before setting goals or defining an audience, because goals and personas set in isolation tend to optimize proxies (traffic, list size, publishing cadence) instead of the outcome the business actually needs. Naming the gap first — usually an awareness, consideration, conversion, or efficiency gap — gives every later decision something concrete to be tested against.

What are the steps of a content strategy?

In order: (1) Diagnose — name the business outcome content is failing to produce, in one sentence. (2) Define the audience the anchored outcome requires, which is often the decision-maker rather than the everyday user. (3) Set goals that measure movement on that outcome, not vanity proxies. (4) Choose the topics and clusters you will own to close the gap. (5) Plan production and cadence against real capacity. (6) Measure and revisit on a regular cadence. The common mistake is running steps 2 and 3 first; they only work once step 1 has anchored them.

Isn't "know your audience" the first step in content strategy?

It is usually taught as the first step, but it works better as the second. Defining the audience before you have diagnosed the business gap risks building a precise persona pointed at the wrong person — for example, the user of a product rather than the person who approves buying it. Diagnose the outcome first, and the audience question answers itself: you target whoever's decision the content has to move.

How do I know if my content strategy is anchored to a business outcome?

Ask whether you can complete this sentence for every major piece: "This exists to help close [specific business gap]." If the honest answer for most of your content is "to publish something this week" or "to rank for a keyword," the strategy is running on activity, not outcomes. Anchored strategies also change what you measure — you track movement on the named gap (qualified leads, activated users, reduced tickets) rather than traffic alone.

Do small teams and solo creators need this first step too?

Yes, and it is often faster for them. A brand-new site with no content has an obvious diagnosis — a top-of-funnel awareness gap — and the first step might take five minutes. The step matters most for established teams with existing content and middling results, where the real problem is rarely "we need more" and almost always "our content is working on the wrong thing." Naming that, in one sentence, is the cheapest high-leverage move available either way.

Further Reading

• What Does "Content Strategy" Really Mean?
• What Does a Content Strategist Actually Do?
• How to Decide What Content to Create (Without Guessing)