Your content isn’t broken. It’s just buried.
Most teams have good content. They just don’t use it because they don’t know what they have, how it fits together, and why it matters. They don’t have clarity.
The result is duplication, content drift, and general inconsistency.
Most teams don’t fix this, because it feels too big to start. Plus there is, after all, new content to create. And no one has time to go backward.
This universally adaptable framework for content clarity is going to help you unroot yourself from this reactionary stance.
It’s a simple 3-step system that brings order to your content with a foundation you can scale from. And unlike hiring an agency, it won’t cost you months of time or tens of thousands of dollars.
Documenting What, Why, and How… with an AI Assist
Here’s how to do it in 3 steps, using AI for the heavy lifting and your brain for the strategic decisioning.
What: Categorize what you have
With a free tool like Screaming Frog, pull a list of your website’s URLs, their titles, meta descriptions, and headers into a spreadsheet. Feed the file to ChatGPT and ask it to sort your pages into the smallest number of categories and describe each category.
Then tighten up the category descriptions and simplify even more. The goal is fewer categories, not more. Over categorization makes everything more complicated.
How: Document your voice, tone, and style
Switch to Google NotebookLM for the next two steps. Upload a sample of 5 to 10 pieces of content from each category and prompt it to create a communication guide.
Ask for these three sections and coach it on what each should include:
- Voice and tone: How one should write in terms of word choice, rhythm, and style.
- Formatting preferences: General approach to sentence and paragraph length, spacing, etc.
- Inventory of messages: Five or six prominent messages from the sample content.
Notebook LM is quite wordy, so you’ll want to cut this down. But 80% of the work is done for you.
Why: Map problems to content categories
Now, add your list of categories from Step #1 and prompt Notebook LM to list specific pain points or problems covered by each category.
Comb through these pain points, consolidate the duplicates, and clean up AI’s other inevitable excesses. Then resubmit your edited version of the pain-point-to-content-category map.
Prompt Notebook LM to create a guide: “If you’re writing about X, address Y, Z, and/or A.”
Example: If your category is “Content Strategy,” you might focus on: messy websites, lack of clear editorial direction, and/or inefficient repurposing.
Why This Deeply Adaptable, Universally Applicable Framework Works
This framework works because it surfaces all your content and standardizes how it’s categorized, communicated, and connected to your brand. With everything visible and labeled, you can make smarter strategic decisions and create and delegate content more efficiently.
It gets everything out in the open
Before you can organize anything, you need to see what you’re working with.
That’s why this framework starts by pulling all your content into one place and categorizing it. It forces clarity. You stop guessing what’s on your site and start making smart, strategic decisions based on the full picture.
Hat tip to the KonMari method, which also involves laying every item out before deciding what to keep.
It makes standards repeatable
It’s one thing to know your brand voice. It’s another to communicate it to someone else. When you can do that, and when you know what pain points to hit and what topics are in your wheelhouse, it’s easier to create new content and easier to delegate.
You’ve gone from:
- How do we sound? ➤ Here’s how we sound when we talk about this.
- What do we say? ➤ Here’s what we say when we talk about that.
- Why is this relevant? ➤ Here’s why customers care and how it connects to our product.
It sets you up for smarter strategy
Once you sort your content by theme and document pain points, you can start making sharper decisions. You’ll know which topics are overdone, which ones are missing, and which ones drive results.
This makes it easier to plan content by buyer journey stage, buyer type, or business priority because everything’s already labeled and organized.
You can also inject this information straight into your content production workflow.
One way I do that is by taking the pain-point-to-content-category map from Step #2 and organize it by specific product or brand messages to create a resource writers can use to understand what product or brand messages I want to include.
A return to first principles
Overly prescriptive guides and how-to’s for managing content don’t work because they’re brittle, and hard to adapt. This framework is based on first principles: what, how, and why.
It’s applicable at any layer of the production process, from the editorial plan down to the structure of your creative briefs. And it’s adaptable for any content project, from developing a repurposing workflow to building a robust categorization and tagging scheme.
Inject your creativity and customize this framework to optimally suit your needs. Remember, this is less about specific execution and more about reframing the way you think.