Where is your content marketing at? A 20-question quiz

You are reading contentfolks—a fortnightly blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio

Hey 👋

A few weeks ago, I found a 20-question quiz whose answers reveal how much you know about your local environment. Take it, if you like—it includes things like:

• How many days ‘til the moon is full?
• Where does your garbage go?
• From where you’re reading this, point north.

As I tried (and failed) to answer all 20 questions, I started thinking it would be useful to have a comparable content marketing quiz—one whose answers could reveal how much we know about our work and help us identify and fill major knowledge gaps.

So I went and asked some content folks for their thoughts, collected a lot of potential questions,*** and re-organised them into the list you find below.

***I am forever a fan of crowdsourcing opinions & expertise. A lot of people shared their thoughts with me for this piece (thank you!), and I ended up having more than 50 questions to start from! Take a look →

💡 Where are you at? A content marketing quiz 💡

These questions start wide and get progressively narrower. They can be split into 3 groups: business overview (1-6), content strategy & tactics (7-16), individual content assets (17-20).

Business overview

What are the business’ annual and quarterly goals?
Who are our ideal customers?
What are the 3 most common customer journeys?
Who are we competing with, product- and content-wise?
What are the key business problems we’re solving with content?
What is our annual content marketing budget?

Content strategy & tactics

What are our content goals?
How do we measure success?
How does our content marketing strategy impact business metrics (e.g. number of leads, conversion rates, revenue)?
Who is our target audience?
What content resonates the most with them?
What stage(s) in the buyer journey are we creating content for?
What content format(s) do we use?
What are our main distribution channels?
Which of our channels/pages/keywords/assets are the most successful?
Who are the influencers and amplifiers in our space?

Individual content assets

Who is this content piece for?
Where in the customer journey should the audience encounter it?
What audience question or problem are we addressing with it?
What do we expect our audience to do after they interact with it?

Scoring

If you work in a Director or Senior strategic role, you should have an answer ready off the top of your head for questions 1-6, know most of the answers to questions 7-16, and be able to articulate one for questions 17-20 when you look at anything your team is producing.
If you work in a mid-level strategic and/or content marketer role, you should have a solid understanding of questions 1-6, know answers 7-16 off the top of your head, and be able to articulate one for questions 17-20 when you look at or work on an individual asset.
If you work in a writing role (both in house and as a freelance writer), answering questions 17-20 for everything you work on is a must, while being curious and proactive about finding answers to the other 15 questions will turn you into a valuable content partner.

Like all lists, this one is both incomplete and biased. It’s a good starting point, but probably the first of a few versions that will follow—do you have any advice on how to improve it?

PS: the good content folks at The Juice 🧃 are launching their creator pages today, which are awesome-looking and really handy aggregators of content from individual practitioners. I am one of the creators who got featured!, and they made me this nice banner to help you get there, have a look, and maybe follow me and a few others if what we do is relevant to you: