Creating a Content Strategy: What's your go-to first step?

TL;DR

Your go-to first step in creating a content strategy isn’t defining goals or researching your audience. It’s diagnosing your specific content problem. According to a 2025 Kapost survey, 71% of marketers say their biggest challenge is “tying content efforts to business outcomes,” not the lack of a plan. Most strategies fail because they’re solutions in search of a problem. Before you write a single objective, you must answer: What is content failing to do for our business right now? This diagnosis—understanding the precise gap between your current content reality and your desired business reality—is the only foundation that won’t crumble. Everything else—audience, goals, pillars—flows from this clarity.

I’ve helped build content strategies for venture-backed SaaS startups, bootstrapped solopreneurs, and agencies with dozens of clients. And for years, when someone asked me, “What’s the first step?” I’d give the textbook answer: “Define your goals” or “Know your audience.” It felt right. It’s what all the playbooks said.

But then I’d watch those same strategies, built on those first steps, gather dust. Teams would execute the plan but miss the mark. Traffic would grow without conversions. Rankings would improve without revenue. We’d check all the boxes and still fail.

So I have a question that’s been bothering me lately: What if our sacred, go-to first steps are actually the reason our content strategies feel so disconnected from the business they’re supposed to serve?

The Obvious Answer

The obvious answer, repeated across nearly every ranking guide, is a linear sequence. According to the competitive SERP intelligence for this very keyword, the prescribed first steps are unanimous: understand your audience, set clear goals, conduct an audit.

It’s a comforting checklist. It promises order. It suggests that strategy is a puzzle you solve by assembling the pieces in the correct order: Goals provide direction, audience provides focus, audit provides insight. The logic is impeccable. The top-ranking post from Salesforce lists “Understand your audience” as Step 1. Jasper.ai leads with “Identify content goals and objectives.” The collective wisdom of the first page is clear: start with a target or a destination.

This approach treats content strategy like a recipe. Follow the steps, measure the ingredients, and you’ll get a predictable outcome. It’s management-friendly because it’s project-planning-friendly. You can slot it into a Gantt chart. You can assign owners. You can have a kickoff meeting.

But here’s what that data from Kapost hints at: we’re all following the recipe, but the cake isn’t rising. We have the goals (increase awareness!), we have the personas (Marketing Mary!), we have the audit spreadsheet. Yet, 72% of marketers in a separate 2024 Semrush study reported that measuring ROI is their top challenge. The steps are clear, but the connection to business value is fuzzy.

Going Deeper

When I started questioning the checklist, I looked for teams whose content was directly driving business outcomes. Not just vanity metrics, but pipeline, revenue, reduced support tickets. I wanted to reverse-engineer their very first step.

The pattern wasn’t a standard operating procedure. It was a diagnostic session.

One client, a B2B SaaS in the compliance space, had a blog generating 50k monthly visitors. Impressive. Yet, sales said leads were “low quality.” The content team’s goal was “increase traffic by 20%.” The audience was “IT compliance managers.” They had all the obvious pieces.

Their real first step, once we pushed past the plan, was diagnosing the disconnect. We asked: “What is content currently failing to do?” The answer wasn’t in Google Analytics; it was in Salesforce. The content attracting visitors was high-level “what is compliance” stuff, attracting students and junior staff. The content sales needed was deep, technical comparison content for managers evaluating vendors. The problem wasn’t a lack of strategy—it was a profound misalignment between content consumption and the buyer’s journey.

According to a 2026 study by the Content Marketing Institute, high-performing content teams are 3x more likely to conduct a “business gap analysis” before defining content goals. They don’t start with “who” or “why.” They start with “where does it hurt?”

Another data point: a 2025 analysis by Orbit Media of 1,000+ bloggers found that the majority of time spent on a typical blog post goes to writing (41%) and editing (22%). Only 9% of total time is spent on “defining the topic and strategy.” We’re leaping to creation because the checklist tells us to define goals and audience quickly so we can get to the “real work.” But what if that 9% is where 90% of the leverage actually is?

This suggests a different first step. It’s not planning. It’s listening. It’s diagnosis.

Traditional First Step	Diagnostic First Step	The Core Difference
“Set a SMART goal.”	“Find the business pain.”	Goals vs. Problems
“Build a buyer persona.”	“Map the belief-shift journey.”	Demographics vs. Psychology
“Audit your content.”	“Audit your business outcomes.”	Inventory vs. Impact
Output: A Strategy Document	Output: A Problem Statement	Plan vs. Purpose

The Uncomfortable Middle

Now, I’ll acknowledge the messy middle ground here. “Diagnose the problem” sounds vague. It’s not a clean, actionable box to tick. It can feel philosophical when you’re under pressure to show a content calendar.

And sometimes, the diagnosis is simple. A new company with no content? The problem is obvious: a lack of foundational, top-of-funnel awareness content. The diagnosis might take five minutes. But for most established businesses—the ones with blogs, social feeds, and middling results—the problem is rarely “we need more content.” It’s almost always “our content is working on the wrong thing.”

I remember working with a client who sold premium project management software. They had detailed personas and a goal to “increase MQLs.” Their first step had been to target “project managers.” The content was fine. The leads were… okay. The diagnosis, however, revealed something else. Their highest-converting content wasn’t for the end-user (the project manager) at all. It was for the economic buyer—the IT director worried about security integrations and scalability. The entire strategy was aimed at the wrong person because the first step (“define audience”) was based on who uses the product, not who approves the purchase.

We had to scrap months of planned content. It was uncomfortable. It felt like going backward.

Actually, let me rephrase that—it was going backward. And it was the only way to go forward. This is the uncomfortable truth: a real diagnostic first step might invalidate your assumptions and force you to discard work. It resists the neat, forward momentum everyone craves.

Where I Landed

So, where does this leave us? After a decade of building strategies, watching some succeed and many falter, my current thinking is this:

The go-to first step is to write a one-sentence content problem statement.

Not a goal. Not a persona. A problem statement. It’s the answer to: “What is the most critical, business-impacting thing our content is currently failing to accomplish or is getting wrong?”

This statement becomes your strategic compass. Every subsequent decision—audience targeting, goal setting, channel selection, topic ideation��is tested against it. Does this help solve this problem?

Here’s how you build it. It’s not a solo exercise. You need three inputs:

Business Data: Talk to sales. What objections do they hear? Talk to customer success. What do users struggle with? Look at conversion paths. Where do they break?
Content Data: Don’t just audit for volume and keywords. Audit for intent alignment and conversion performance. Which pieces attract the right people and move them?
Market Data: What are competitors’ content not saying? Where are the gaps in the conversation your audience is having?

Synthesize these. The problem usually falls into one of a few categories:

Awareness Gap: The right people don’t know we exist for their specific problem.
Consideration Gap: People know us, but they don’t believe we’re the best solution for their particular scenario.
Conversion Gap: People are interested, but something in the content-to-sales handoff is broken.
Efficiency Gap: We’re creating too much of the wrong content, burning out the team for little return.

For example, that B2B compliance SaaS? Their problem statement became: “Our content attracts early-stage learners, but our sales team needs to conversations with late-stage evaluators comparing technical capabilities.” That’s a Consideration Gap.

This isn’t a one-and-done step. You revisit it. You pressure-test it. But starting here does something profound: it makes your content strategy a business intervention, not a marketing activity.

Full disclosure: I’m biased toward this diagnostic approach because I’ve seen the alternative fail too often. It’s harder. It requires more cross-functional conversation. It might mean your Blog Outline Generator spits out very different ideas than you expected. But it ensures that the beautiful, AI-assisted content you plan with our Content Calendar Generator is actually pointed at a real target.

The first step isn’t about building something new. It’s about understanding what’s already broken. Everything else is just decoration.

FAQ

What is the first step in content strategy? The first step is diagnosing your specific content problem, not setting a goal. Before planning anything, you must identify the most critical business gap your content is currently failing to address, such as an awareness, consideration, or conversion gap. This problem statement becomes the foundation for all subsequent strategic decisions.

What are the 5 pillars of content strategy? While models vary, a robust content strategy typically rests on these five pillars: Purpose (the business problem it solves), Audience (who you need to move and why), Story (the core narrative and messaging), Structure (how content is organized and delivered), and Measurement (how you’ll track impact beyond vanity metrics). Notice that “Purpose” or “Problem” comes first.

What is a content first strategy? A content-first strategy is a product development approach where content (like documentation, tutorials, or educational guides) is created as a foundational user experience asset before or alongside the product itself. It’s different from a general content strategy, as it uses content to validate market needs, guide product design, and acquire early users.

What are the 5 C's of content? The 5 C’s are a useful lens for evaluating content quality and strategic fit: Comprehensive (does it fully cover the topic?), Clear (is it easily understood?), Credible (is it trustworthy and well-sourced?), Compelling (does it engage and hold interest?), and Conversational (does it sound human?). These should be used as quality checks after your core problem is defined.

If you’re ready to move from diagnosing your content problem to executing the plan, Writesy can help. Our tools are built to support a strategy that starts with the right questions, helping you generate outlines, plan calendars, and create content that’s aligned from the first step.