B2B content marketing strategy: a 90-day plan for new marketing hires

You took the job. The team is small or non-existent. The existing content is whatever an SEO agency shipped in 2023. Leadership wants to see "a strategy" by month two, and you are supposed to also be publishing. Here is the plan that works.

Days 1–14: audit, do not ship

The single most expensive mistake new content hires make is publishing in week one. Spend two weeks doing nothing public and an enormous amount internal.

• Read every customer-facing thing from the last 12 months. Every. Single. Thing.
• Pull the analytics of the top 20 posts. Find the through-line.
• Interview 8–10 customers. Ask what they searched for the week before they bought.
• Interview your top 3 reps. Ask which content actually shortened a deal.
• Map every distribution channel and its current cost per influenced opportunity.

Days 15–30: write the doc, kill the dead weight

Now write a 4-page (no longer) strategy doc that includes: the ICP slice you are writing for, the 3 content pillars, the cadence per pillar, the channels in priority order, and explicitly: what you are stopping. Most content programs die from accumulation; the doc that names what to stop is the most valuable artifact.

Get it signed off by the head of marketing, the head of sales, and one customer. Yes, a customer.

Days 31–60: ship a tested cadence

Pick 2–3 channels, not 6. Ship at a cadence that matches your real capacity (be honest). Use the patterns the audit surfaced — do not invent. Measure save rate, comment-to-like, branded search, and pipeline influence weekly.

You are running an experiment with N=12 posts per channel. That is your real signal. Anything less is anecdote.

Days 61–90: double down and prune

You will now have ~36 posts of real data. The pattern will be obvious: usually 2 of your 3 pillars work, and 1 limps. Kill the laggard, double the winner, and propose a 6-month plan that names the budget, the headcount needed, and the expected pipeline contribution.

Present this plan in week 12 to your CFO equivalent — not your CMO. Content programs survive long-term when finance understands their economics, not when marketing leadership likes their tone.

The three deliverables every new content lead should produce

1. A 4-page strategy doc that names what to stop.
2. A weekly metrics dashboard with 6 metrics, not 26.
3. A 6-month plan with budget, headcount, and a pipeline number defended to finance.