Hey friend,

How’s it going? 🌻

A content strategy without a POV is just a publishing schedule.

You can have the right keywords, the right formats, the right cadence. And still produce content that reads like it could have come from any company in your category.

POV is what makes a reader think "this brand gets it" instead of "this brand publishes a lot."

Here's how to actually build one.

1. Map what your best customers switched from

This one comes from April Dunford's positioning work, and I think it's criminally underused in content strategy.

Your best customers didn't appear out of nowhere. They had a previous way of solving the problem, whether that meant relying on a competitor, using a spreadsheet, or ignoring it entirely. The moment they switched to you, something shifted.

That shift is your POV.

How to do this?

• Talk to 3-5 of your happiest customers (or listen to a sales call recording, which also works).
• Try to find out: what they were doing before, why that stopped working, and what made them believe something else could work?

The answer to that second question is almost always your content's job to say out loud, repeatedly, before the next buyer has to figure it out on their own.

What this looks like in content: Instead of "5 reasons to use [product category]," you write "Why [old approach] works until it suddenly doesn't." That's a POV. And it finds the reader exactly when they're at the edge of their own inflection point.

2. Find the one thing everyone in your niche says that isn't actually true

Every category has its received wisdom. The thing everyone repeats because everyone repeated it first.

Sometimes it's true. Sometimes it's just old. Sometimes it's true for a specific kind of company and completely wrong for yours.

How to do this?

• Read 20 pieces of content from your competitors and your category.
• Write down every claim that repeats across three or more of them.
• Then, for each one, ask: Is this actually true for our buyers? Where does it break down? Where did we see it fail?

You need to look for a disagreement you can back up with something real, a customer story, a pattern from your data, a decision your team made, and why.

What this looks like in content: Not "why [received wisdom] is wrong" clickbait. More like: "We used to believe X. Here's the specific situation where it stopped being true for us, and what we do instead." That's a POV. It's also the kind of content sales teams actually share in deals.

3. Write down what you'd say if you couldn't mention your product

If you had to explain your category, your buyers' problems, and what good actually looks like, without ever naming your product or its features, what would you say?

The answer is your content POV. Because buyers don't start their journey thinking about you. They start thinking about their problem. The brand that names the problem most accurately and most honestly is the one they trust when they're ready to buy.

How to do this?

• Take your last five published pieces.
• Remove every mention of your product, your features, and your company.

What's left? If the answer is "not much," your content is product marketing in disguise, not a POV.

If something real is left, that's your starting point. Build more of that.

This also connects to something I covered in the BOFU e-book: the content that converts isn't always the content that mentions the product most. It's the content that made the buyer feel understood before they ever got to a demo.

🗃️ More resources for content marketers from SaaS Splash Bulletin Archive

• ​What Does Positioning Mean for Long-Form Content?​
• ​What We Can Learn From Postmark’s BOFU Content Strategy​
• ​How to showcase the impact of content on the pipeline based on basic attribution​

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Onwards and upwards,

Sreyashi

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