Top 5 Lessons I've Learned From Moderating a 14K+ Member Slack Community
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Content marketing is harder than ever for a few reasons:
Still, we believe content remains the best way to reach your target customers. There isn’t an untapped channel just waiting to be exploited (at least not as of this writing in May 2025). We’re all working with more or less the same constraints. It’s become vitally important to add value and differentiate. Let’s kick this template off here.
One thing I still believe is that a content strategy should be revealed more than it should be created. The business type and model should mostly dictate what types of content to create. There's plenty of room for creativity within those constraints, but there's also a boilerplate strategy that will work for each business given its GTM motion.
Here’s a visual that I think has held up well over the years:
In general, the less your customers pay you, the more of them you need. Which means you need really strong top of funnel. The opposite is true for enterprise SaaS and agencies—these businesses require a much smaller dose of content to reach the people they want to reach. Where does your business fall on this graph? That will more or less dictate your strategy.
(Image credit: Five ways to build a $100 million business)
Related to business model, I find that most companies have 1-2 main problems that content can solve. For some, it’s creating awareness of their product. For others, it’s converting free users to paid. For others, it’s elevating their brand in a competitive market. And still for others, it’s educating people about something novel that doesn’t have direct competition.
Here are a few examples:
Enterprise SaaS:
PLG SaaS:
Freemium SaaS:
Agencies and other services:
Depending on your business, there are a few other things to consider:
Once you feel that your high-level strategy is going to support the business, it’s time to get into the details of execution.
In his great piece “Strategy should be painful,” Nathan Baschez describes a common scenario he calls “Fuzzy Strategy syndrome.” It’s just what it sounds like—a loose plan that your team mostly agrees on but that doesn’t work very well. In Nathan’s words:
…it’s hard to convince your team that the problem might be Fuzzy Strategy Syndrome, because you probably have a lot of meetings and documents and slide decks talking about your strategy. It doesn’t feel fuzzy! But it all amounts to nothing unless you’re good at saying “no” to enticing opportunities that don’t fit the plan.
Your strategy has to be documented so that everyone agrees on a plan. But also because you have to know what you’ll say no to. Especially nowadays with AI changing so quickly, it’d be very easy to spend all your time tinkering with new AI tools instead of executing your strategy.
It can also be time-boxed. For example, you could create a 2026 content strategy with different goals for each quarter, then plan to update it for 2027. It has to be flexible to business needs. Your 1-2 month plans should be pretty concrete while work 6-12 months out should be up for discussion.
Your strategy can be a slide deck or a doc. The format doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that all stakeholders have a chance to review it, provide input and ultimately, sign off on it. Everyone must agree that this is the right plan, otherwise you’ll constantly be fighting off requests for shiny new objects.
A minimum viable strategy is a one-page strategy document that covers:
If you have this document written and signed off on, you’re way ahead of most teams. Even a basic strategy can work well if you have stakeholder support and enough time to execute.
Your strategy document should be updated at least twice per year. Priorities will change and you’ll want to be sure that your team’s work is aligned.
Within the context of your business model and your overarching strategy, you still have room to choose your own “flavor.” By this, we mean that you can shape the content program to fit your brand and sometimes even you/your team’s personality. Some examples:
Any content strategy needs some ways to address earning attention, introducing the product and encouraging signups. The approaches above are frameworks for thinking about your strategy but all require a full-funnel approach. We recommend picking a flavor as a way to focus your strategy, while still making sure you’re covering all your bases.
We have a great course on reporting available to Superpath Pro members. Here’s a quick summary.
Have your reporting plan ready before you start executing. Starting later is like meal prepping at 6pm with an empty fridge. You’ll end up microwaving a frozen burrito when you could have had a great meal. This is integral to your strategy, so plan for it.
Reporting should be built on four things:
At its core, crafting a narrative means providing the reader with all the necessary context. Never hand over a "report" with a bunch of numbers and charts. Instead, tell the story. What are you trying to accomplish? What have you tried? What worked and what didn't? What have you learned and what will you do differently going forward?
Data is important, but it's secondary to narrative. Choose a few important numbers and measure them carefully. Don't get carried away measuring dozens of metrics. 5-10 is all you need. Use charts and graphs to make numbers easier to comprehend.
10 unique visitors = 😴 but 10 names and faces = 🤩. It's very easy to lose sight of your readers and customers when analyzing data. Always include screenshots and quotes from readers in your reports. It humanizes the data and conveys emotion that numbers just can't.
Content marketing is complex. I suggest you run toward this instead of away from it. Take the time to fill the reader in on what's going on that the data can't explain. Use this space to showcase your thoughtfulness and understanding of the channel. Educate the person on the other end. Oversimplification is dangerous for many reasons, so be careful not to fall prey to binary good/bad reporting. Every number has meaning—share it with the world.
Package up a monthly report using a format like this. (This sample report is old but the format is exactly the same thing I’d recommend using today.)
Distribution is harder than it once was because every platform wants to keep all the engagement for themselves. (I highly recommend reading Amanda Natividad’s piece Zero-Click Content: The Counterintuitive Way to Succeed in a Platform-Native World.)
Distribution is when you share content to people who have opted in to receive it via your social media or a newsletter. As you publish new content, you can share it on the channels where you already have an audience.
Your own channels are either developed or undeveloped. A developed channel is one that you’ve already invested time in. Example: You’ve built a strong following on LinkedIn and have a track record of earning traffic from it. In this case, LinkedIn is a developed channel.
An undeveloped channel is the opposite. It’s one that you haven’t invested time in and therefore has very little potential to send you traffic or generate awareness. Example: You’ve never invested in building an email list, so you have very few people to send your newsletter to.
Think of each channel as an opportunity. You have the opportunity to build each into place where you can distribute content (“here’s the content you were expecting!”) instead of promote content (“please god, someone click this!”).
In general, folks end up…
Promoting is hard, distributing is easy.
By the time you publish a blog post, it’s too late to develop a channel—that takes months or years to do. Your long-term goal is to develop more channels. The more developed channels you have, the more flexibility you have. You can pick the ones that best suit the content and act accordingly. You don’t need to beg for attention and you don’t even need to use every single channel for each piece.
Here’s a quick list of the channels that are available to you:
You can also pay for traffic. This can be very valuable but it looks very different than other channels. Rather than building an audience within the channel, you’re tinkering with copy, CTAs, demographics, ad rates, etc. If you do this—and I’d recommend that you do, especially for gated content—find someone to help who knows what they’re doing.
As you plan for distribution, I’d recommend grading yourself on each channel.
This isn’t free or easy. You’ll need to set aside time and resources. Build this into your strategy so you aren’t publishing more content than you can effectively distribute.
Here’s a sample content strategy that we created for Miro. This is not their actual strategy, but this is the template that we recommend others use as well. Click here to access it.
Content strategy is inherently complex because companies are large and ever-changing, as are the markets they operate in. Be nimble and fast. Write up a strategy doc, iterate on it and plan to update it about twice each year. Make sure it’s easy to find and discussed often.
The exercise will expose you to other parts of the org, which is a great chance to stay aligned with other teams. Your CMO or VP will love it and it’ll help you earn their support.
If you’d like support from peers, consider joining Superpath Pro. Our community of content professionals is here to help. Members get:
You can try it free for 30 days. Learn more here: https://www.superpath.co/
Further recommended reading:
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Jimmy is the cofounder and CEO of Superpath. You can follow him on Twitter here.
