When you run a business, it’s not enough to do your job well. You have to make that matter to someone else.
That’s where content comes in.
Content is how the best parts of your business—your experience, your perspective, your solutions—reach a real person and meet a real need. When that happens, the work feels useful. When it doesn’t, even strong content can fall flat.
Craft matters, of course. Structure, voice, and proof all play a role. But they are not the starting point. Before content can do its job, there has to be alignment.
I think about that alignment in a simple formula:
Business Intent × User Intent × Context = Momentum
When those three forces work together, content has somewhere to go. When one is missing or misjudged, the result weakens.
Business intent is the outcome the piece needs to produce. Not vaguely. Specifically. What is this content supposed to help the business do?
User intent is what the other person is trying to solve, decide, or understand. They are not arriving empty-handed. They come with questions, needs, and pressures of their own.
Context is where those two meet. A search result, a newsletter, a landing page, and an onboarding screen all create different expectations. They also catch people at different levels of readiness.
Alignment means those three factors are working in the same direction. What the business needs, what the user needs, and what this moment can support all line up.
When they do, content can move something forward.
When they don’t, you can make something polished and still miss the mark.
I use a simple brief to keep that alignment in view. Not a long formal document. Just a few lines to hold the whole equation in one place:
We are here: [Where this lives and the reader’s mindset. Aka, channel + stage.]
We need them to: [Specific action], measured by [metric].
They need to: [Solve a problem] so they can [outcome].
Take a few minutes to fill in those lines before you start, and the piece gets a compass. You get clearer on what belongs, what does not, and what success should look like.
And if a piece is not performing the way you hoped, come back to those three lines.
The gap is usually there.
