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6 min read

Yourbestcontentisalreadywritten.Itisinthesalesinbox.

Content planning usually starts with a keyword tool. It should start with the sent folder.

Two colleagues talking over a laptop at a wooden table
Two colleagues talking over a laptop at a wooden table

Somewhere in your business, a salesperson or a founder has written the same careful explanation forty times. What the lead time actually depends on. Why the cheaper option costs more within two years. What happens if the measurements are wrong. Each version was written to one person, sent once, and then lost.

That material is better than anything a content brief will produce, for a simple reason: it was written to persuade somebody real, by somebody who knew the answer and had something at stake in getting it right.

How to get at it

The mechanism is unremarkable. Ask two or three people to forward you any reply longer than five sentences for a fortnight. Do not brief them, do not explain the content strategy, just collect. Twenty emails is plenty.

Then read them looking for repetition. The same objection appearing in six replies is a page. The same clarification appearing in ten is probably a section of the product page that is currently missing.

Why it outperforms

Pages built this way tend to rank, because they answer the question people actually asked rather than the phrasing a tool suggested. They tend to convert, because they were already tested on buyers one at a time. And they tend to survive, because they contain specifics that a generated page cannot invent.

There is a secondary benefit that is easy to miss. Publishing these answers shortens the sales cycle. The explanation that used to take a personal email now happens before anyone gets in touch, which means the conversations you do have start further along.

The part people skip

Editing. A sent email is raw material, not a page. It needs a structure, an honest heading and the removal of everything specific to that one customer. What must not be removed is the specificity of the argument itself, which is exactly what a nervous editing pass tends to sand off.

If the published version could have been written by a competitor, go back to the original and put the sharp parts back in.

If this describes a situation you are responsible for, a second opinion is the quickest way to find out how much of it applies. Ask us for one.

Keep reading

Where to start

Find out how much of it you actually own.

Tell us what you have and we will send back an independent read: which parts would still be working if the advertising stopped, which would not, and what we would build first. No obligation attached to any of it.

Ask for a second opinionsupport@stakeconsultingltd.com