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You ask AI to write this week’s blog article, and what comes back could’ve been written by any competitor. So you scrap it, stare at the blank doc, and either publish something random anyway or skip the week. Either way, you’re burned out from doing this every single week, frustrated that nothing seems to land, and the leads who do show up still don’t know what you actually do.
Lee Densmer has cleaned up content programs at 22 different companies and wrote a book about what she found. She asserts that most B2B teams don’t actually have a content problem. They have a topics and themes problem: no customer research behind the topics, no cap on how many themes are in play–so people end up publishing whatever feels interesting that week, or handing the blank page to AI and hoping it guesses right.
The fix is building your content pillars: three or four themes, grounded in what buyers are actually asking, that tell you exactly what blog article to write next instead of starting from zero.
Why it works
Lee has watched teams build entire content plans in an echo chamber: topics picked because someone on the team found them interesting that day, but disconnected from what buyers actually ask about. When you narrow to three or four themes and repeat them your audience will know exactly what your business stands for, which is what actually lets you differentiate through content.
Results
- Sharper brand recognition, since the same three or four themes show up every time someone runs into your content
- Better lead quality, since people already understand what the business does before the first call
- Less time thinking up topics and writing the piece, because you know these themes well
How you can do it
What you can knock out on your lunch hour
- Find the people to help you choose your pillars.
- On a team? Your top salesperson, your account manager, and your customer service lead.
- Solo? Pull up transcripts from your own last few months of client calls, emails, or DMs instead. You’re already playing all the roles, so the information’s sitting right there.
- Ask them, or look for, what’s keeping clients up at night. What are customers actually worried about, stuck on, or asking for? Whatever AI tool you already use can help here too whether to pull info from transcripts, or tell you via a prompt what people online are saying about problems in your space. That’s a shortcut to the same insight.
When you have more time, here’s where it goes next:
3. Turn the patterns into three or four pillars. If your buyers are always asking about how hard it is to switch vendors, then you have a pillar about ‘onboarding’. You can cover how you get started, how you transfer knowledge from an incumbent, why and when switching is the right thing to do. A pillar has to be broad enough to hold that many topics and narrow enough that people know exactly what you’re about.
4. Set a frequency you can actually keep. Two blogs or newsletters a month is plenty for most solos or small teams. Each one becomes your core piece, and can then be reposted directly as a LinkedIn newsletter. LLMs are currently surfacing long-form content at 11%. (Talk about high ROI for a low lift.)
5. Say no to randomness. If it doesn’t fit a pillar, park the idea. Just because something’s on your mind, or the CEO wants a piece because a competitor covered something doesn’t mean it’s strategic. Choosing pillars is as much about what NOT to write about, as it is about what to cover.
Tip: you can also use this framework to cull old content that may be hurting you. Many businesses already have months, or years, of content out there. Lee had one client with over 500 blog posts going back more than a decade, most with nothing to do with what the business does today. The move was simple: keep what fits a pillar, let the rest go.
Tools
- Lee suggests using a project management tool (Asana, ClickUp) to track your content topics. If you tag them by pillar you can see if you’re covering them equally. If you can’t tag it with a pillar, then it’s a no go!
- A simple questions list built around what’s keeping clients up at night (no fancy template needed)
Once you’ve got pillars in place, the natural next question is how far one blog article can actually stretch. Adriana’s answering exactly that on Day 5, when she covers repurposing.
See you tomorrow,
Stacy
P.S. Lee Densmer is a content marketing strategist, writer, and author of Content, Simplified: The Biggest B2B Content Marketing Mistakes and How to Fix Them. Subscribe to her newsletter at leedensmer.com/newsletter, or find her on LinkedIn.
