There is a piece of marketing advice I’ve never forgotten.
Marketing should be the eyes and ears of the customer in the room.
It sounds simple. It isn’t. Because most businesses, especially founder-led ones, produce content that centres the business rather than the customer. They talk about what they do, how long they’ve been doing it, and why they’re great at it. The customer reads it and thinks: so what?
A content strategy built around your personal brand or your business brand only works when it starts and ends with one question: what does my customer actually care about?
Here’s how to build one that answers it.
Before you touch a post, a blog, or a video brief, you need to know exactly who you’re talking to.
Build your ideal client profile (ICP). This is a detailed picture of the person or business you most want to attract: what industry they work in, what keeps them up at night, what a good day looks like for them, what they’ve already tried and why it didn’t work.
Your boss might say, “We can work with anyone.” They’re wrong, or at least, they’re not thinking like a marketer. You can work with anyone, but you can only speak meaningfully to someone. The moment you try to write content for everyone, it resonates with no one.
Your ICP gives you focus. It tells you what topics to write about, what language to use, and where to show up.
A practical example: if you work in a candidate-short market like tech, your ideal clients are hiring managers and founders who are struggling to find and retain good people. They are not interested in how many years you’ve been in business. They want to know how to find qualified candidates in a competitive market, what those candidates actually expect from an employer right now, and why their usual approach isn’t working. Write to that every time.
You don’t have to guess what your ICP cares about. The information already exists inside your business.
Your consultants speak to clients and candidates every day. They hear the objections, the frustrations, the questions that come up again and again. That is gold, and most businesses leave it sitting in call notes that no one ever reads.
Make it a habit to:
Those insights become your content. Not a cleaned-up, corporate version of them; the actual thing, written in a way that makes a client think, “That’s exactly my problem.”
Once you know your ICP and what they care about, organise your content around three pillars.
Three is deliberate. More than that, and your audience won’t know what you stand for. Fewer, and your content becomes too narrow to sustain.
Each pillar should map to a different dimension of your customer’s world. For a recruitment business, that might look like:
Every piece of content you produce should sit comfortably inside one of those pillars. If it doesn’t, ask yourself whether it needs to be created at all.
LinkedIn is not right for every business. It is, however, where most professional buyers and decision-makers spend time, and it has become increasingly useful for something beyond social media: discoverability.
Search engines and AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude now scan LinkedIn profiles and company pages to answer questions about businesses and the problems they solve. A well-written LinkedIn presence is no longer just a social strategy; it’s a search and AI visibility strategy too.
That said, if your ideal clients live somewhere else, go there. If they’re on Facebook groups, show up in those groups. If they respond to email, build a newsletter. The channel is secondary to the audience. Follow the customer.
Your consultants are an underused asset. A recruiter who has been placing candidates for five or more years and knows how to build a network can have up to 10,000 connections on LinkedIn. That is a significant audience.
Make it easy for them to share your content. Better still, create content specifically for them.
Use their testimonials and client wins (anonymised where needed). Turn their candidate stories into case studies. Ask them to share industry observations. When consultants post content that feels genuinely theirs, it lands differently to a company page broadcast. It’s personal and trusted, and it converts.
In most recruitment businesses, the founder or MD is the most credible voice in the room. They have opinions, relationships, and a track record. That is the raw material of a thought leadership strategy.
You don’t need them to write their own posts. You need to extract their thinking and turn it into content. Book a monthly conversation. Record it. Take their best observations and shape them into LinkedIn posts, blog articles, and short-form commentary.
Content that comes from a real person with a real point of view will always outperform content that sounds like a brand speaking. The business grows when the person behind it becomes known.
The biggest content strategy mistake is starting fast and burning out. A daily posting schedule that collapses after three weeks does more damage than a modest cadence you can actually sustain.
Decide on a realistic rhythm. Three LinkedIn posts a week and one longer-form piece a month is achievable for most small marketing teams. Once that cadence is embedded and working, you can build from it.
Consistency builds trust. Your audience starts to expect you. That expectation is what turns a follower into an enquiry.
Small teams cannot afford to create from scratch every time. One long-form article should become three LinkedIn posts, a newsletter section, a short video script, and a carousel. The idea does the work once; the formats extend its reach.
Build a repurposing step into your content workflow. Every time a piece of content goes live, ask: where else can this live, and in what form?
Reach and impressions are easy to look at and easy to be misled by. A post that reaches 5,000 people and generates no enquiries has done less work than one that reaches 500 and prompts four direct messages.
The signals that matter are:
Check these regularly. Adjust based on what they’re telling you. The content strategy that works is the one that evolves.
All marketing starts and ends with the customer. Every piece of content is either earning their attention or wasting it.
The businesses that build effective content strategies are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most polished output. They are the ones that understand their customer well enough to say something genuinely useful, consistently, over time.
Start there. Everything else follows.
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