Most content strategies fail before they start. Not because the execution is poor. Not because the cadepnce is inconsistent or the distribution is wrong or the production quality is lacking. They fail because the firm never answered the one question that everything else depends on.
What do we actually believe?
Not what do we do. Not what problems do we solve. Not what makes us different from our competitors — a question that almost always produces a list of capabilities rather than a perspective. What do we believe, specifically, about how our market works, what buyers are getting wrong, or what the conventional wisdom is missing?
This is the question that most content strategies never ask. And its absence is why so many content programs produce output without producing authority. You can publish indefinitely without a genuine point of view. You will simply be adding to the noise.
What a Point of View Is Not
Before getting to how to find yours, it is worth being precise about what a point of view is not — because there are several things that get mistaken for one.
A point of view is not a mission statement. “We help businesses grow through better marketing” is a mission. It says nothing about what you believe, what you have observed, or what you know that your buyers do not.
A point of view is not a value proposition. “We deliver measurable ROI through data-driven content programs” is a value proposition. It is a claim about outcomes, not a perspective on the world.
A point of view is not a list of differentiators. “We have proprietary methodology, a team with deep industry experience, and a track record of results” is a capabilities summary. It tells a buyer what you have, not what you think.
A genuine point of view is a specific, defensible claim about how something works — or should work, or is being misunderstood — that your experience and expertise uniquely position you to make. It is specific enough that someone could disagree with it. It is substantive enough that someone who agrees with it would feel that agreement is meaningful. And it is connected closely enough to what you do that demonstrating it over time builds a compelling case for working with you.
The Disagreement Test
The fastest way to evaluate whether you have a genuine point of view is to apply what I call the disagreement test.
State your supposed point of view out loud. Then ask: would a reasonable, intelligent person in your market disagree with this?
If the answer is no — if the statement is so broadly agreeable that pushback is implausible — it is not a point of view. It is a platitude. “Trust matters in B2B sales.” “Content quality is more important than content volume.” “Relationships drive long-term business development.” These are all true. They are also useless as organizing principles for a content strategy, because they are so self-evidently correct that agreeing with them requires no particular conviction.
A genuine point of view produces friction. Not hostile friction — not a position so provocative that it alienates your audience before you have earned the right to provoke them. But productive friction. The kind that makes a reader think: I have not thought about it exactly that way before. Or: I actually disagree with part of this, which means it is worth engaging with.
Consider the difference between these two statements:
“Building trust with buyers takes time and consistent effort.”
“By the time a sophisticated B2B buyer agrees to a meeting with you, they have already formed a preliminary opinion about your firm — and if you have not been building credibility with them for the previous twelve to eighteen months, that opinion is almost certainly neutral at best.”
The first statement is a truism. The second is a claim. It has a specific mechanism, a specific timeline, and an implication that challenges how most firms allocate their marketing budget. Someone who disagrees with it has something to argue with. Someone who agrees with it has learned something they can act on.
That is the difference between a platitude and a point of view.
Where Points of View Actually Come From
The reason most firms struggle to articulate a genuine point of view is not that they do not have one. It is that they have not done the work of excavating it.
Points of view live inside the firm, embedded in the experience of the people who have spent years doing the work. They exist as the accumulated observations of every client engagement, every failed pitch, every market shift that played out differently than expected, every question that kept coming up in conversations with buyers. They are the things that the most experienced people in your firm know to be true — know in the specific, granular, been-burned-by-this way that only comes from direct experience — but have never been asked to articulate.
The excavation process is straightforward, even if the output requires refinement.
Start with frustration. What do your best people find themselves wanting to say in client conversations that they hold back because it seems too blunt, or too contrarian, or outside the scope of what the client asked? The things that get suppressed in professional settings are often the things worth saying publicly. They are held back because they have an edge — and edge is the raw material of genuine perspective.
Then look at where buyers are wrong. Not maliciously wrong. Just wrong in the way that buyers who have less experience with a problem than the people solving it are predictably wrong. What do buyers in your market systematically misunderstand about the problem you solve? What do they think they need that is not actually what they need? What do they optimize for that is the wrong variable? Every experienced practitioner has a list of these. That list is the seed of a point of view.
Finally, look at where the conventional wisdom has quietly stopped being right. Every market has beliefs that were true ten years ago and have become less true as conditions changed, but which persist because no one has articulated the update clearly. Finding one of those — identifying the thing that used to be the right answer and explaining why it no longer is — is one of the most reliable ways to establish authority quickly. You are not contradicting the established wisdom so much as updating it, and doing so in a way that demonstrates you are paying close attention to how the market is actually evolving.
The Authority Positioning Formula
Once you have the raw material — the observations, the frustrations, the corrected conventional wisdom — you need a way to organize it into something that can anchor a content strategy. Here is a simple formula I use with clients.
[Your specific audience] believes [common assumption]. In our experience, [what is actually true]. The implication is [what they should do differently].
A few examples of how this plays out:
Most management consultants believe that the quality of their methodology is what wins engagements. In our experience, procurement committees at large organizations have already filtered for methodology before the first meeting — what actually determines the outcome is whether the committee trusts the specific team they will be working with. The implication is that building individual practitioner authority is more valuable than investing in firm-level brand awareness.
Most SaaS companies believe that the key to reducing churn is improving the product. In our experience, churn in mid-market SaaS is more often caused by poor implementation and inadequate internal adoption than by product deficiencies. The implication is that the highest-ROI investment for most SaaS companies is not engineering — it is customer success infrastructure in the first ninety days.
Most financial advisors believe that demonstrating a broad range of capabilities is what attracts affluent clients. In our experience, the advisors who grow fastest in the mass affluent and high-net-worth market are the ones who have narrowed their focus so specifically that referrals become nearly automatic within a clearly defined community. The implication is that generalism is a growth ceiling, not a growth strategy.
Each of these has a specific audience, a challenged assumption, an experience-based correction, and an actionable implication. Each one could anchor six months of content — blog posts, newsletter issues, LinkedIn articles, webinar topics, podcast pitches — without repeating itself.
That is what a genuine point of view gives you. Not just something to say, but an organizing principle for everything you say.
The Courage Problem
I want to address something that comes up almost every time I work through this process with a founder or a marketing team: the moment when a real, sharp point of view surfaces, and someone in the room immediately moves to soften it.
“We do not want to alienate potential clients who might disagree.”
“Our investors might not like us taking a position on this.”
“What if a competitor uses this against us?”
These concerns are understandable and almost always wrong.
The instinct to soften a point of view — to add qualifications, to acknowledge that both sides have merit, to hedge toward a position that no one could object to — is the instinct that converts a genuine perspective into a platitude. And platitudes, as we established earlier, are invisible.
The clients who might be alienated by a sharp point of view are almost certainly not your best clients. Your best clients — the ones who get the most value from what you do, who refer others, who stay longest — almost always respond to a genuine perspective with recognition and relief. Finally, someone who actually has an opinion. Finally, a firm that says what it means. That recognition is the beginning of trust in a way that careful, balanced content never is.
And the competitors who might use your position against you? In my experience, taking a visible, specific position in a market generates far more inbound interest than it loses. The buyers who disagree may go elsewhere. The buyers who agree — and who had been waiting for a firm willing to articulate what they already believed — come to you already convinced.
The point of view that nobody disagrees with is not protecting you from anything. It is simply ensuring that nobody particularly agrees with you either.
Start Here
If you have read this far and are still uncertain what your firm’s point of view actually is, here is the single most useful question I have found for surfacing it.
What is the thing you know to be true about your market — based on your actual experience — that most of your competitors are not saying out loud?
That thing is your point of view. It is probably sitting right at the intersection of what you know best and what most people in your market have not yet clearly articulated. It has been there the whole time, embedded in the expertise of the people in your firm who have been doing this work for years.
Your content strategy is just the mechanism for saying it, consistently, to the specific people who need to hear it.
Everything else — the cadence, the channels, the formats, the distribution — is secondary. The point of view is the foundation. Without it, you are producing content. With it, you are building authority.
Those are not the same thing. And the difference between them is the entire distance between being known and being trusted.