Feb 2, 2025

Principles for building content systems

All of our pursuits are guided by a few core principles:

  • An authoritative content library is worth the investment
  • Your work is valuable, and you can prove it
  • Effective content marketing means building a system
  • Build your library brick by brick
  • Good SEO makes all of your marketing better

We stitch these together into content systems that acquire customers for our clients.

An authoritative content library is worth the investment

A content library is a powerful and enduring asset. Visitors remember, and go back to, content that helped them. So does Google.

Unlike any other channel, high-quality content continues to generate traffic and leads for you without constant maintenance or spend. And the more content you have, the easier it is to reuse, repurpose, and expand to generate even more.

Your work is valuable, and you can prove it

A content system takes a long time to build, and doesn’t always convert people right away.

But we have the tools to show us what’s working, and what isn’t, and whether we’re headed in the right direction. Learning to use these tools isn’t easy, but with the right training, you can (and should!) get the data that proves your contribution to the business.

Content marketing means building a system

Content marketers don’t just write articles – they build and run content systems. A well-running system is constantly improving, and requires people, process, resources, analytical, and technical skills to make it work.

A content system lets you get efficiently from an idea to a published article that generates traffic and leads. It also extensively re-uses, re-imagines and builds on the content you already have to get to the content your customers need.

Build your library brick by brick

Every bit of content you have can be mashed up, combined, remixed, and reused to produce brand new assets, and to promote and distribute across all your channels.

Content creation doesn’t mean writing masterpieces. It means publishing what you can, finding the good stuff, and building more and more of that in an iterative process. Iterate on what’s working, look for positive signals, go back to your metrics, and use them to know what people want to hear more about.

Good SEO makes all of your marketing better

Looking for an excuse to do great marketing?

Good SEO means you have to:

  • Build a content strategy that speaks to your customers’ jobs to be done and paint points – and your brand’s value prop, features, and differentiators
  • Write consistently, clearly, and thoughtfully for humans and machines.
  • Reuse and repurpose so that you cover all the angles your customers care about.
  • Know your audience, and distribute your content to the places they’ll find it.
  • Focus your website on user experience.
  • Provide clear paths forward to conversion and use of your product.

We’re *actually* here to help

We’re marketers who love spreadsheets, algorithms, code, and data. And we love helping other marketers with interesting challenges. Tackling the hard stuff together is what we like to do.

We don’t just show you the way—we’re in this with you too.

Background image of a red ball in a hole.