Smart Content Prioritisation

Choosing Topics That Deliver Real Value (Or, Why You Should Stop Writing Rubbish)

☕ The Bloody Nightmare of Content Overload

Look at that content calendar… the vast, staring, empty fields of white. It’s not a helpful roadmap; it’s an indictment. There’s the relentless drumming from the management types (who rarely lift a pen themselves) demanding ‘consistency’, and somewhere in your skull, a panicked, squawking bird is sitting on a mountain of topic ideas. This mountain is, naturally, growing faster than you can manage to make a decent cup of tea, let alone a well-crafted article.

The true problem, then, isn’t a lack of brilliance… it’s an absolute glut of choice.

Every passing industry fad feels like a ‘must-cover’. Every competitor’s post sends a tiny, irritating spike of FOMO straight into your content plan. And team meetings… oh, the team meetings. They are simply idea factories churning out three new ‘must-create’ topics that somehow need to be shoehorned into an already over-stuffed schedule. It’s an unsustainable mess.

The result? You end up creating content that simply checks the boxes but doesn’t so much as twitch a needle.

• Blog posts published with a quiet sigh, barely read.
• Social media updates that garner polite, distant engagement, and zero actual leads.
• Video content that consumed hours of your life, only to be scrolled past in a blink because, let’s be honest, it was probably a bit dull.

This happens because most people approach content creation arse-backwards. They frantically ask, “What should we chuck out next?” instead of the far more sensible question: “What will actually matter to our audience and our business?” They measure success by the sheer volume of output, rather than the quality of the outcome.

The real challenge, the one that deserves your finest creative energy, is choosing which content deserves your limited time, budget, and sanity. Every piece you create is a bet. You are wagering that this specific topic will genuinely resonate, drive the necessary action, and justify the hours you spent hammering it out in, say, a Spanish cave.

Most of those bets lose. Not because the writing is terrible… but because the topic itself was never worth creating in the first place. It was never aligned with what your audience genuinely gives a toss about. It was just more noise, adding to the digital din.

Map Your Audience Pain Points (The “What Keeps Them Up at Night?” Bit)

Your audience doesn’t wake up thinking about your content calendar; they wake up with a burning sense of problems that need solving and goals they are trying to reach. If your content doesn’t connect directly to that immediate existential dread, it doesn’t matter how beautifully crafted or darkly humorous it is… it’s irrelevant.

Understanding this requires getting far deeper than surface-level demographics. Knowing your audience is “Marketing Managers aged 30-45” is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

You need to know what truly plagues them. What pressure their boss is applying. What exact metrics they are accountable for this week. What specific, hideous obstacle is blocking their path to success.

Here’s where the real digging starts:

• The Complaints: Head to the digital watering holes—LinkedIn comments, industry forums—and listen to the genuine complaints. Pay attention to what makes people say, “Same here” or share their own struggles. These recurring, festering themes are pure gold for planning.
• The Money-Motivated Moments: Customer support tickets and sales call transcripts reveal pain points they’re willing to invest to solve. When someone takes the time to call or submit a ticket, they are highlighting a point of intense friction. Look for patterns and, critically, track the language they use. That should be the vocabulary your content speaks.
• The Unfiltered Truth: Review sites, especially the one and two-star critiques of competing products, are a brutal feast of honesty. What did people expect but didn’t receive? These gaps are the gaping wounds you can fill with valuable content.
• The Direct Approach: Nothing beats an actual conversation. Ask customers or ideal prospects about their biggest challenges right now. Not hypothetically… right now. What would make their life significantly less of a grind this week?

The cardinal mistake? Identifying a pain point and immediately rushing to create content about it. Not all pain points are created equal. Some are urgent, expensive crises; others are just minor annoyances. Smart prioritization is the discipline of distinguishing the truly terrifying crises from the mild inconveniences.

The Crucial Assessment: Topic Value vs. Effort (The “Is it Worth the Candle?” Test)

Every idea carries two vital metrics: the potential value it could deliver and the sheer, brutal effort required to drag it into existence. Too many content creators chase high-value ideas without the resources to execute them properly, or they default to easy topics that deliver minimal impact. Both are equally useless.

You must look at both, simultaneously, and with cold realism.

A topic that promises colossal value but requires six months and a ludicrous budget might not be your best move today. Equally, a piece you could knock out in an afternoon that delivers zero discernible value is just busy work disguised as productivity.

The Value/Effort Matrix is the simple truth serum here:

When assessing effort, be utterly ruthless and honest. A 2,000-word piece isn’t just writing time; it’s research, outlining, drafting, editing, designing, SEO optimisation, promoting, and monitoring performance. Don’t forget the hidden costs: custom graphics, legal review, and coordinating with subject matter experts. A topic that seems simple on the surface can quickly balloon into a monster.

Align Topics With Strategic Objectives (The “Show Me the Money” Bit)

Content that doesn’t connect to a tangible business goal is just noise… enjoyable, perhaps, but ultimately noise. If it’s not moving your organisation toward a specific outcome, you’re spending your limited resources on vanity metrics instead of actual, measurable value.

Every single piece of content should serve a clear strategic purpose. You should be able to draw a straight line from any given topic to a meaningful business objective. If you can’t, it doesn’t belong in your calendar, simple as that.

• Define Your North Star: Identify your specific business priorities: “Generate 500 qualified leads” or “Reduce customer churn by 15%,” not the vague, comforting aspiration of “grow our audience.”
• Map the Connection: Can a topic on advanced features support customer retention? Yes. Can a comparison guide support lead generation? Absolutely. Content that hits multiple objectives is a fantastic compound return on your investment.
• Address the Friction: Look at your sales process. Where are prospects getting stuck? What objections come up repeatedly? Content that directly addresses these friction points has immediate, clear strategic value because it supports revenue generation.

Be prepared to give the strategic Veto to trendy or interesting topics that don’t align. Every hour spent on off-strategy content is an hour you didn’t spend creating something that actually moves the business forward. This is called strategic discipline, and it’s the hallmark of a successful content operation.

Score and Rank Content Ideas (Taking the Guesswork Out)

Gut feeling and strong opinions have their place, but a structured scoring system brings blessed objectivity and consistency to your decisions. Stop arguing; start scoring.

The RICE scoring system is a solid framework: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

$$\text{RICE Score} = \frac{(\text{Reach} \times \text{Impact} \times \text{Confidence})}{\text{Effort}}$$

1. Reach: How many people in your target audience will actually be affected? (A niche topic reaching 500 ideal prospects is far more valuable than a broad one reaching 5,000 random visitors.)
2. Impact: How much will this move the needle on your goals? (Will it drive sign-ups? Influence purchase decisions?)
3. Confidence: How certain are you about your Reach and Impact estimates? (Low if you’re guessing wildly; high if you have data.)
4. Effort: The all-in workload (in person-hours/days, including research, review, design, promotion, etc.).

RICE gives you a single, objective number for ranking. A topic that reaches masses but requires Herculean effort might score lower than a solid, medium-impact idea that can be executed swiftly. This prevents you from over-prioritising based on optimistic, unfounded assumptions.

The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts. Your scoring system needs to be laser-focused on identifying those high-performing, vital 20% topics. Find the common traits in your past winners and use those insights to inform your scores for new ideas.

Refine, Test, and Iterate (The Never-Ending Story)

Content prioritization isn’t a single, finished job. It’s an ongoing practice because, let’s face it, your audience and your market are forever shifting like a restless sleep.

• Backlog Refinement: Borrow this glorious concept from software development. Set a regular cadence (monthly is good) to review your existing backlog. Reassess priorities based on new data and circumstances.
• Kill Your Darlings (The Dull Ones): Don’t be precious. Content ideas can expire. If you keep pushing a topic down the priority list quarter after quarter, it’s probably dead and needs to be formally removed from the calendar.
• Test Before You Commit: Before you throw six weeks and a large budget at a project, test the waters. Create a smaller, simpler version first—a quick post, a short video—and see how it performs. Use that data to decide if the full-scale project deserves the elevated priority.
• Build Feedback Loops: Salespeople hear objections that reveal content gaps. Customer success teams know which topics would reduce support burden. Create formal channels for this intelligence to flow back into your planning.

The goal isn’t perfection… you’ll never achieve that. The goal is making better decisions more consistently. Getting it right more often than not. Creating a higher percentage of valuable content than you did before.

Smart content prioritization turns content creation from a frantic guessing game into a repeatable, strategic practice. It stops you from wasting your time on content nobody needs. It ensures you have a clear, justifiable answer when someone asks why you’re working on this topic instead of that one.

It gives you the ultimate peace of mind: confidence in your choices.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham