How I find the idea behind a content campaign

There is a point in most new projects where my notes look slightly unhinged.

A client might have given me a perfectly sensible brief. Meanwhile, I've got a page covered in references to gardens, inheritance, memory, mud, and poetry.

But fear not. This is usually a good sign.

Because before I start thinking about posts, articles or campaign assets, I'm looking for something bigger: the world the content belongs to.

I don't start with the content calendar

When you're trying to create consistent content, it's tempting to start with outputs.

• We need three posts a week.
• We need a blog…
• We should probably make some Reels!
• What are our content pillars?

Those notions have their place. But focus on the form too early and you can end up with plenty of things to publish without much to say.

When I'm developing a campaign or editorial series, I start by looking for connections.

• What is already interesting here?
• What does this product, person or business touch culturally, emotionally or historically?
• What does it remind me of?
• Where's the tension?
• Why should people care?
• And, crucially, how many different stories could grow from the central idea before we exhaust it?

Find a world, not a theme

I once worked on a concept involving rare books and an historic English garden.

The obvious territory was beauty: beautiful books in a beautiful place.

But "books and gardens" is a theme. It isn't yet a world.

So I started digging.

Gardens naturally lead to ideas about place. Place can involve questions of ownership and inheritance. That opened questions about gender and who historically had the right to inherit land. Gardens also meant cultivation, labour, ecology, and the tension between something appearing effortless and the enormous amount of work required to keep it alive.

Books had their own parallels: memory, ownership, marginalia, preservation, physical beauty and the marks left behind by previous lives.

Suddenly there wasn't one story.

There were dozens.

That is the point I'm looking for.

Then I try to ruin the beautiful idea

Once I've found a strong creative territory, I try to find what's wrong with it.

• Too polished? Put the dirt back in.
• Too nostalgic? Find the contemporary question.
• Too serious? Where's the wit?
• Too romantic? What did that romance cost?
• Too broad? Find the tiny physical detail that makes it real.

For that particular piece of thinking, I kept coming back to the difference between looking at a garden and tending one.

It's easy to photograph flowers.

It's more interesting to remember the dirt under someone's fingernails, boots on wet stone and weeds being pulled from the earth.

The same applied to the books. Instead of treating them only as pristine precious objects, I became interested in foxing, inscriptions, marginalia and ink marks: evidence that somebody had actually held them and thought with them.

Those imperfections made the central idea stronger.

A campaign idea needs to survive contact with an audience

Only then do I start asking what the idea becomes in practice. The same creative world shouldn't be presented identically to everyone.

One person might enter through history. Someone else through aesthetics, identity, expertise, rebellion, usefulness or sheer curiosity.

And different formats do different jobs.

• A long-form article can follow an idea somewhere complicated.
• A social post might capture one irresistible detail.
• A newsletter can make connections between several things.
• A video can make an object or process tactile.

That's when a content strategy starts to feel coherent to me.

Not because everything looks the same or repeats the same three messages, but because everything feels as though it grew from the same soil.

That's the bit of content strategy I love

I write copy. But quite often, writing the final words isn't the first problem I'm solving.

My job might start much earlier. It's in listening to someone talk, following an unexpected thread, researching my way around, finding the contradictions, and eventually saying:

There. That's the world this takes place in.

Once we know what that is, the writing becomes much easier.

The campaign has somewhere to live.

So instead of staring at next month's content calendar wondering what on earth you're going to talk about, we have a world of stories to explore together.