Marketing: Templates
Four working templates: the content brief, the editorial checklist, the claim verification record and the quarterly decay review.
Markdown. No sign-up, no email.
1. Content brief#
Nothing is drafted without one.
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Working title | |
| Who is this for | [A specific role with a specific problem. "Anyone interested in AI" is not an audience] |
| What they can do afterwards | [A capability, not a feeling. "Understand AI" is not an outcome] |
| What we know that they cannot get elsewhere | [If this is blank, stop. No article] |
| Evidence | [Our measurement, our delivery experience, or a citable source] |
| Search demand | [Term, volume, difficulty. Or "none, published for a different reason", stated honestly] |
| Existing page this overlaps | [If one exists, the default is to improve that page instead] |
| Owner | |
| Review date | [Every piece gets one. Undated content becomes wrong content] |
The third row kills most ideas. That is its job. Cheap production means the constraint has moved from writing to deciding what deserves to exist.
2. Editorial checklist#
Completed by a person before publishing.
| Check | Pass |
|---|---|
| A reader who knows the basics learns something | ⬜ |
| Every number has a source or is our own measurement | ⬜ |
| No claim about a customer, capability or result we cannot evidence | ⬜ |
| No competitor named | ⬜ |
| Reads as written by a person. No em dashes, no emoji, no marketing filler | ⬜ |
| Would not be better as a section of an existing page | ⬜ |
| Date, owner and review date set | ⬜ |
| Published by | [A name. Nothing publishes automatically] |
3. Claim verification record#
One row per factual claim about us. Kept, because the claim that gets checked is the one that was never verified.
| Claim | Type | Verified against | By whom | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Customer / result / capability / comparison] | [Written permission, measurement with method, delivery confirmation, public source] |
| Rule | |
|---|---|
| Naming a customer | Written permission. Includes logos |
| Quoting a result | The measurement, its method and its date |
| Claiming a capability | Delivery confirms we can do it now |
| Any comparison | Public, checkable, and never naming a competitor |
4. Quarterly decay review#
The highest-return work in the function and the first thing dropped when the calendar is busy.
| Page | Published | Traffic then | Traffic now | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Update / Merge / Remove / Leave] |
| Summary | |
|---|---|
| Pages that ranked and no longer do | [Update these first. A refresh usually beats a new piece] |
| Pages that never earned a visitor | [Improve or remove. Keeping them costs domain quality] |
| Pages now out of date | [Dated, technical or regulatory. A wrong page is worse than no page] |
| Pages on page two of results | [The cheapest wins available] |
| Thin-content share | [Rising quarter on quarter means stop publishing and start pruning] |
Using these together#
The charter sets out what marketing owns, the SOPs say when each is produced, the KPIs define what the decay review feeds, and the workflows name who receives each output. A brief with a blank "what we know that they cannot get elsewhere" row should never reach a draft.