The Top 8 Content Strategies To Get Customers (2026)

Most businesses are still using the same old content strategies that worked for them 5 years ago, and yet they're confused as to why it's no longer bringing new customers. I've spent 16 years helping brands drive millions of dollars of revenue from content. From building startups from scratch through to scaling global brands, content is the most important marketing lever that you have in your business. Right now, I'm watching 99% of companies get their content strategy wrong, and the gap between who's winning and who's wasting their budget has never been clearer. In this video, I'm going to give you 8 content strategies that will drive attention, get customers, and revenue. So let's start with the one that most businesses get wrong because it's the most fundamental, which is problem matching. This is a content strategy where you talk about a painful problem that your audience is facing. Then you position your product or your service as the obvious practical solution. But the thing that most people get wrong about problem matching content is they don't start with a clear problem statement. Website homepages usually start with things like, we've been in business for 15 years. Or trusted by thousands of clients, or even things like award-winning consultancy. And on paper, that does sound impressive, but to someone that is visiting your website, it feels really disconnected from their problem because they didn't show up necessarily to learn about you. They showed up because something in their world isn't working and they're looking for a specific solution to that problem. Now imagine a completely different opening for the website. Instead of introducing the company, it might start, your sales pipeline has slowed down. Deals that used to close quickly now drag on for months. Your team is busier than ever, but the revenue hasn't moved. Now that is the same company. It is the same service, but suddenly the reader is thinking, that's exactly what's happening right now in my business. And that question came directly from this process. So here is a 3-step process that you can follow right now. To create your problem statement. Step 1 is conduct 20 problem interviews. You're going to set up 20 to 30 minute calls with your audience, and your job is to discover as much as you can about them. Use AI to help you build a list of questions that will guide that conversation. Don't try to test your solution or validate an idea you already have. Your role as a founder is to listen. Try and probe into what customers' biggest challenges, what they've already tried and why it didn't work. You can also ask about how they would describe it to their customers. And this information will give you an incredible understanding of what your customers really think and importantly, the language they're using to describe your offer. Honestly, this is the most important step and the hard work that most founders avoid. Step 2: Create your problem map. So once you've gathered insights from your customers, the next step is to map those problems across your different stages of the funnel. So I want you to start at the top of your funnel. These are the people who don't really know you yet. They may not even fully understand their problem or the desired solution. So you have to ask yourself, What are they experiencing right now? How do they describe the situation that they're in? What frustrations do they talk about before they start looking for solutions? Next, move to the middle of the funnel. These people know they have a problem and have probably tried to fix it already. So at this stage, you wanna be looking for deeper signals. What solutions have these people already tried? What's frustrating them about these solutions? And what do they believe the real problem is that's underlying it? Then continue mapping further down the funnel. Where people are actively comparing options and considering different approaches. So at each stage, you should be capturing the exact language that customers use to describe their problem. So finally, as a quick tip, use AI to help you turn those insights into clear problem statements for each stage of the discovery. And these statements will become the foundation for your messaging, for your content, your positioning, and ensuring that when someone enters your brand ecosystem, they immediately feel understood. Step 3 is the problem statement test. Find 5 prospects and test the messaging with them. If they come back and say, you know what, that's exactly what I've been struggling with, then you've nailed it. And this is critical. Now, when you begin creating content based on the exact phrases and questions that your customers are actually using, it will show you really understand what they're up against and position your solution as the obvious answer to their problem. So once you've got this right, it will become the foundation for everything else. but this next one every founder should be able to answer. The next content strategy is called blank for blank positioning, and it's slightly different to the problem statement. So if you can't describe what your business does in one sentence, you really don't have a hope of winning serious clients. I've used this for every business that I've started, and the idea is to connect your offer to something that your ideal customer already needs. For example, when I started my agency, we always referred to ourselves as a digital marketing agency, never a marketing agency, and never a creative agency. Digital marketing is what we did. And back then, being a digital marketing agency was a novel thing. Digital marketing had just begun in earnest. And so we were differentiating ourselves specifically with the first part of our positioning. So that first part is what you do, whereas the second part of the problem statement is specifically who you do it for. So the trick here is to be very specific. So we were a digital marketing agency for luxury brands. And so you knew exactly what we did and exactly who we did it for. So when you write down narrow positioning, don't think about it as limiting your market size. Think about it as it will allow you to dominate a specific niche. So the clearer you are about who you serve, the faster you can win. So to test whether you've done it right, ask people, can someone immediately know if they're your customer? If they hesitate, the chances are that your positioning is too broad, so you need to narrow it down further. So the final step is to deploy this everywhere. Spread it across your homepage, your bio, LinkedIn, even your email signature. This sentence is what you will be known for, so make it impossible to miss and impossible to misunderstand. So the third content strategy to focus on is agitating the problem. See, once you've identified a problem, the biggest mistake you can make is jumping straight to your solution. Your audience isn't ready for that yet. They need to feel the weight of the problem first. So the aim is to make them realize what impact this problem could have if they ignore it and what their business or life looks like 3, 6, 12 months from now if they keep ignoring or downplaying this issue. So we call this agitating the problem. The aim is to create a force that you can fight against and then show them what they're actually losing every day that they don't solve this problem. So let me give you a very clear example. When I first set up Searchable, instead of focusing on how we help brands appear in AI search, we would encourage people to ask ChatGPT about their sector and their industry and watch as it pulled up issues with their own brand and also showed their competitors ahead of them. We'd then do it again with Perplexity and the same thing would happen. Then we would do the same thing with Gemini and the same thing would happen. They would see their customers above themselves. So to go a step further, we built a free visibility tool which showed exactly how many times people were being cited, but also showed 9 out of 10 times their competitors were outranking them. Then we just let that sink in and suddenly the problem of appearing in AI search felt urgent and our customers didn't necessarily know how to fix that. So not showing up in AI search was the force we were agitating. So now here's how you're gonna apply this to your business. So step 1 is about making the problem feel urgent and making it feel measurable. So don't talk about what they might lose someday. Show them what the problem is costing them specifically right now. So for example, chaotic project management is wasting 20 hours a week. That would become 80 hours a month, nearly 1,000 hours a year. Make the cost visible so the problem feels impossible to ignore for a founder. Step 2 is show the cost of doing nothing. Connect the problem to what they actually care about in their own terms. That is, for all founders, revenue, team stability, and time. So those wasted hours might mean that your best engineer leaves, your roadmap for your product stalls, or your growth and acquisition slows. Then show them two futures: one where the problem gets solved and one where the problem doesn't get solved. So immediately you've made the problem urgent. Now you need a communication strategy that works wherever customers find you. This next strategy is going to go against pretty much everything that you've been taught so far, and that's message matching. You see, traditional funnels are split into 3 phases: top of funnel for awareness, middle of funnel for consideration, and bottom of funnel for conversion. But the problem with this method specifically is that very, very rarely do people join that journey perfectly. Think about it. Your ideal customer might land on your pricing page having come from Google, but if all of your best brand awareness messaging is hidden on a different page, page, how are they going to know that you have the perfect offer for them? Or you might have a case study on Instagram. If that case study doesn't explain what you do and who for, people will just read it and move on. And that's where message matching comes in and why it's so important to you. So to help you implement message matching, there are only really two things that you need to understand. Number one, keep the core message consistent everywhere. So message matching means every piece of content carries your business's core message, but it's adapted to the platform it sits on. So start by clearly stating the problem in your customer's own words and acknowledge why the typical solutions that they've tried haven't worked. So this shows that you understand their situation before you are introducing your own perspective. Step 2, show the approach, the proof, and the next step. So once the problem is clear, explain what makes your approach different. Not the features necessarily, but the philosophy behind how you solve it. Then support it with proof, whether that's results, case studies, or testimonials. And finally, give a clear next step like subscribing, downloading something, or learning more. And every piece of content should move the audience somewhere. So when executed correctly, someone can land on any piece of content and understand what problem you solve, who you help, and why you're different. So what can you deliver and what to do next? So if you do this correctly, it will mean that your blog post should work as well as a landing page. Your YouTube video should work as well as an initial sales call. By the way, if you've been taking notes so far, don't worry because I've already put this together into cheat sheet, which you can download using the link in the description. Now you need to start distributing content. And in 2026, the only moat that competitors can't copy is personal brand. Look, and here is the harsh reality. Whatever you're building right now, someone with more money can often replicate what you're building if they really want to. The only thing they can't absolutely copy is you. So your insights, your personality, your distribution, and your authority becomes the glue that holds your business together. It's your job as the founder to build that now. Over the last 10 years, we've seen a real shift, and that is towards founder-led marketing. In 2011, when I started my first company, Verb, I had no presence, no personal brand, and effectively no leverage. Every client conversation I had in those early days was very cold. I had to prove myself from nothing every single time, and it was super tiring. If we fast forward 10 years, When I started my second company, Lottie, I'd been posting on LinkedIn for about 18 months. So when I announced our launch, we suddenly had people coming in, knowing our story, why we were building, trusting our approach, and were ready to work with us before the call. And then most recently, with Searchable, I'd been building in public for 4 years, and when we launched the brand for the first time, I got inbound requests from founders who have watched hours of my content. They arrive on a call pre-sold on using our service. it was honestly such a stark difference at the early part of my career. And each business has been easier to launch because I've had a personal brand alongside it. And that is the compounding effect of your personal brand. Every post, every video, every piece of content builds equity that makes your next business or your next product much easier. So if you're ready to take the next step into developing personality-driven content, you need to understand the 3 layers of the personal brand system. Layer 1 is credibility. You need to be actively building something or doing something worth recognition. In my experience, it's not enough to just be theorizing. You want to build from experience, and that is why people will follow you. So posts like, I've tested 3 acquisition channels last week and here are the results that I got— very useful. People can see that you've done the work. Or I've helped 50 businesses optimize their adverts over the last year. Again, it's showing you've done the thing that someone can follow, and that's the kind of credibility that you need to build a personal brand that people will to because you're doing it. You're not just talking about it. So if you aren't actively building, what you can do is generate a level of interest and credibility by documenting the process you're going through and what you're up against day by day. Layer 2 is having a point of view. So everyone can share tips, but not everyone has a unique perspective on how the industry should work, and that is where you can add unique value. So part of delivering unique value is often found in having a different or contrarian take on a common strategy. So having that contrarian take makes people stop and think. It earns you attention, and if you repeat it often enough, it will become an immediate point of recognition that others can't own. So right now I'm building Searchable, and every SEO guru is claiming that SEO is dead. My point is, it's definitely not dying, but it is evolving very quickly. And if you're still just optimizing for Google in the same way as you did 5 years ago, you are wasting your time and you are missing out on the opportunity. And that is a point of view. It's contrarian and it's defensible because I've got access to a wealth of data because I'm building actively in the space. And that brings us on to layer 3, which is strategic distribution. So the aim isn't to be everywhere, it's to dominate one platform. So if you're in software right now, X, Twitter might be the best point of call. If you're in teaching, maybe it's YouTube. But for most people looking to win clients, Honestly, LinkedIn is going to be your number one platform. So your task is to pick one channel and post at least 3 times a week minimum. Make sure to engage for the first 30 minutes to drive some early engagement and then stay consistent. So if you want to build on LinkedIn, you can check out my full deep dive linked at the end of this video. So a quick thing before we continue. This channel is brand new and 82% of you watching aren't subscribed. So I'm committed to making the most practical channel for entrepreneurs on YouTube. So if you're finding this useful, Please subscribe. So now we've made it to the halfway point of this video. That's content strategies to help you get ahead on social media. But this next strategy has been the biggest growth driver of my channels over the last 5 years, and that is education content. So most people create content to get attention, but the smartest business operators are creating content that delivers real tangible value. And that is where this education content comes in. So attention content can get you a lot of views, whereas authority content gives you credibility and drives followers and customers. So when you teach your market how to think about their problem, you can shape the buying criteria in your favor. So most founders are scared to give away their best insights because they're worried that other people will copy them. Or if you give them everything, why would they pay you for it? However, by teaching your audience, they are far more likely to follow you, far more likely to buy into your way of delivering the service. And when they come to need it, they come to you. So real companies with real budgets look for experts to deliver their service. I shared every detail about how luxury brands connect with high net worth individuals in my first company, Verb, and over 80% of our inbound inquiries were companies saying they had seen our content on LinkedIn, they loved our point of view, and they wanted to implement that for their own company. So education is creating demand, real demand. The trick to creating educational content is to package complex ideas into really easy to understand formats. So if you're an accountant, and you can distill something as complex as corporate tax into one easy-to-understand cheat sheet that signals to customers that you have a deep expertise in the topic that you are sharing. The other important distinction to make is that not every piece of content needs to be a net new idea. In fact, if you can spot an idea that has performed incredibly well elsewhere, understand the things that resonated most with customers about that content and repackage it into your own posts with your own intellectual property, you will find it much easier to generate high-performing content ideas. So next up, I need to tell you about the single biggest change to content strategy over the past decade, and that is answer engine optimization. Most people haven't realized this yet, but the way that people search for information has fundamentally changed. More and more people now are choosing not to use Google. They're opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or other AI assistants and asking questions directly about their business and about their life. Questions like, what's the best CRM for my business? Where can I go for a local haircut? Which marketing agency should I hire? And that means that if you're visible within those answers to those questions, your business is going to get no customers and no traffic for those queries. So in those examples, you effectively won't exist for your customers. So when someone tells me, I've been posting content for a year and nothing has happened, I ask them a slightly different question. I ask, are you creating content that is fundamentally answering your customers' questions? Can ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, can they give an answer that is based on the content on your website? And most people will often say they're creating content on company updates, motivational posts, product announcements. However, you need to create content that is high quality enough and deep enough that it specifically answers the questions your audience are asking. AI systems are generating their answers by pulling from the content that already explains these things clearly. So if someone asks a question about your industry and you've never created content answering that question, you have no chance of being in that answer. You simply just won't exist in the ether. However, if you have clear explanations, structured answers, and useful guidance around those questions, your ideas are far more likely to show up, which is why the smartest businesses today are shifting how they create content. So the first step is to identify what your customers are typing in to ChatGPT, to Gemini, to the other platforms about your product or service. If you then get a list of those prompts, so you can see all the individual questions and queries that your customers have about your sector, if you can get those together, your job then is to create content that specifically answers those questions. So in future, when a customer asks ChatGPT a specific question, ChatGPT and the other tools will pull upon your content to create an answer for them, and your business will get mentioned and cited because of that. And the companies that do this consistently become the ones that people, and increasingly the AI systems, turn to first when they're looking for help. So the last content strategy is about creating conversion content specifically. I constantly see founders building massive audiences and really struggling to monetize. That's because it doesn't matter where you're creating the content, whether it's LinkedIn, YouTube, whether you're creating for AI, if you don't have conversion content or lead magnets, you're very rarely going to be able to pull people off online and social media to become subscribers and interested in your business. I've seen people with 50, 60, or even 100,000 followers, and yet they can't drive any worthwhile traffic to their business. So to me, the problem is something called the value exchange. You want to create a really high-value resource, and you might hear these referred to as lead magnets, and they act exactly like that. Once you deploy these to warm audiences, prospects will be giving their email address to you because they want to get access to the resource and the lead magnet you have created. I actually have a formula for this, which is incredibly simple. So when I ran a luxury marketing agency, we created a report called The State of Luxury. When I ran Lottie, which was a care home marketplace, we had a report called The State of Care. The Creator Accelerator, we had a report called The State of LinkedIn. And now I run Searchable and we have a report called The State of Search. The one thing that all of these have in common other than the name is the fact that they full of firsthand data and advice on how to conquer your sector. So when you use firsthand data like this, you guarantee that no one else in the world has this data, and that is inherently valuable to people that are looking for a solution to a problem that you can offer. So as well as firsthand data, we package it up with real strategic advice that people can take away and implement right away. And this makes it really shareable and really valuable as a resource considering that it's free. The benefit to us really comes when we get access to their email because we're able to put them into a sales funnel and we're able to send them more value over time and convert them to being someone that's interested in our business and our product. So for both businesses and prospects, this is a real win-win. They feel like they're walking away with an incredible amount of free value, and you obviously get the ability to market to them in the future. Now, there are a couple of other types of conversion content that you should also really understand. One is case studies. Case studies are proven to deliver actual results. Your case study should be very specific and show how you helped Company X, which is, say, a B2B SaaS company who was doing $3 million, increased their pipeline by $400,000 in 6 months using your system. And then you talk through the process of how you actually did it. So on a side note, I have a bit of a pet peeve with people who put down a case study and don't have an actual way of seeing who the person was and how you helped them. So make sure that you include their full name, maybe even a testimonial and a link to their website so people know it's an authentic case study. These 8 strategies aren't random. They're a system designed to work together. Most founders tend to pick one one or two things to focus on and wonder why nothing's happening. If you implement all 8 in a systemized fashion, I promise you will outperform your competitors. If there's one thing I want you to do today, it's to go back to Strategy 1 and run those 20 problem interviews. Everything else builds from there. And if you want to go deeper specifically on how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn, watch this next video.