📋 Steal My 12-Step Plan for Building a Content Function

Audit the existing situation. How's the company currently positioned? What do they actually offer? What tone do they use? Which channels have they tried, which ones work, where are ICPs hanging out that the company isn't showing up. And where is the company spending resources that ICPs don't even care about.

Refine or build the ICP profile. Dive into Reddit, social comments, relevant communities, sales calls, support tickets, and client emails. Document the actual pain points and the solutions people are searching for in your niche. This is the foundation everything else sits on later on.

Set goals and pick your metrics. Before touching a content calendar, what does "working" even look like? Pipeline, traffic, signups, retention? Pick 2-3 numbers you're accountable to, or you'll be creating content with no way to know if it's doing its job.

Build SOPs and writing guides. You might know what good looks like, but if anyone else (like writers, editors) touches this content, they need standards to work from.

Decide on channels and cadence. This step highly depends on the company resources. For example, if the content team is tiny and the company has little to no existing content, I’d start with 2-4 high-quality long-form articles a month, repurposed into 3-5 social posts a week and 1-2 newsletters. If the company has a well-established content flow with multiple writers and editors creating content, these numbers would naturally go up accordingly.

Map content pillars. Take what you learned from the audit and ICP work and turn it into 3-5 core themes — the buckets everything you publish should fall into.

Sort your tech stack. What are you writing in, publishing on, tracking performance with? Doesn't need to be fancy on day one, but you need to know your pipeline end to end.

Build a 30-day content calendar. Select the questions/keywords you’d like to address with your content to contribute to your goals. Map out which pillar each piece supports, who’s writing it, when it’s due, and where it’s going after publish (social posts, newsletters).

Engineer the workflows in AirOps. I’m really impressed with AirOps because it lets you build repeatable, semi-automated content pipelines. It saves a ton of time on mundane tasks and content production doesn’t feel like reinventing the wheel every single time.

Interview the experts. Always talk to the people who actually know the topic before writing the long-form piece.

Build (semi)-automated repurposing workflows. Blog to social, blog to newsletter, blog to short-form video scripts. I’d do this in AirOps too.

Constantly refresh existing content. AI prioritizes what's fresh. Things change fast — brands ship new features, drop old ones, some stats go out of date fast. And most teams either forget this or just don't have the bandwidth for proper refreshes. This is another one I'd build into AirOps: a semi-automated system that flags aging content and points out what we need to refresh in each one, instead of relying on someone remembering to go back and check.