On Friday, 05 June 2026, I spoke at the Kent Business College London Masterclass held at the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch. The event was a great opportunity to indulge in three of my favourite things: talking marketing, teaching marketing, and thinking about marketing. The room had over 60 marketers who had travelled in from as far off as Bristol, Birmingham, and Manchester. It was great to finally meet in person many of my learners from the Level 6 Marketing Manager Apprenticeship Programme and their line managers after weeks of Teams calls.
My goal with the session was to equip our learners (marketing managers and executives) with useful operational models and simple frameworks that can help them develop well thought out content strategies, and help them manage effective content campaigns. I chose 10 frameworks sourced from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)’s content and strategy curriculum, management scholarship, and from my own experience working in PR & comms consulting.
The 10 frameworks were synthesized into a content strategy stack, presented in the style of architects and builders – with layers of ‘foundation’, ‘structure’, ‘craft’ (piping & wiring, facade & design), and ‘prove’.
I began by making a case for why marketers should use more frameworks in their day to day practice.
Why do frameworks matter?
Frameworks give the marketing team a shared language, they speed up the work, they stop you scrapping a campaign after one nervous week, and they keep your daily tactics tied to an actual strategy. There is also, I’ll admit, a little razzle-dazzle to them, giving off that vibe of professionalism and ‘McKinsey-ness’ that the c-suite loves.
Building The Foundation
For me, the first step in content planning is to think strategically. And what does this even mean? It means to be goal-oriented and purposeful, to be proactive and to think long-term; to connect the work you’re doing with the corporate mission and with customer needs.
This means starting out with an analysis of where things stand as of that moment (what have we done, what are we doing, what’s working, what’s not, what’s competition doing, what do customers want, where are we headed). After getting clarity on the current situation, we then set SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).
The implication of this is that every piece of content, even a thirty-second TikTok dance, has to trace back up a chain to an organisational goal. If you cannot explain how that post helps your chief executive hit a revenue target, it has no reason to exist. This is where a planning framework like SOSTAC comes in handy. It works for the overarching marketing strategy and for content too. For content planning, you just need to keep asking, at every level, how does this ladder up?
Setting Up The Structure
Now that the foundation is set, we need to develop a structure. The Hero-Hub-Hygiene (3H) Modelsorts content by ambition: the Hero piece you can only afford once or twice a year (e.g. a major event, original documentary shoot, etc), the regular Hub content that keeps the lights on (e.g. your weekly newsletter), and the evergreen Hygiene material that quietly answers what people type into Google or ChatGPT (e.g. basic explainers, fact sheets, and FAQ-type blog posts).
Then you have The Content Purpose Matrix, which queries the purpose of every content idea: what is this actually for? The matrix maps content type against two axes: emotional vs. rational appeal on the vertical axis, and awareness vs. purchase intent on the horizontal axis. Here, your content purpose could fall into one or more quadrants: to entertain, to inspire, to educate, or to convince. One thing I did stress is that entertainment is not the exclusive preserve of consumer brands. B2B is allowed to be interesting too!
Then there’s the ACPRA Framework– Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Advocacy – which reflects the various stages of the customer journey map. This tool helps marketers map their content inventory against customer journeys, to ensure that no matter which stage of the process a customer is, they are being targeted with relevant communication.
The next framework is the PESO Media Framework – Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned channels – which is mostly used as a planning tool. I encouraged attendees to design their content strategy to work across all four types, with Owned as the foundation since that’s the only channel that they have absolute control over. Ideally, Paid should be used to amplify Owned, to generate Earned and Shared, and content strategy should be designed to work across all four types, with Owned as the foundation.
I also pointed out the owned-media trap, which catches almost everyone. Social following is not really ‘owned media’, it’s Shared. Mark Zuckerberg owns Instagram. Elon Musk rewrote Twitter’s rules overnight. Organic reach is never guaranteed since we’re all at the mercy of algorithmic changes that we have no say over. As a marketer, what you actually own is your website and digital assets, your contact list. Everything else is rented property.
Crafting The Content
For crafting effective content, I shared The BEST Framework (Behavioural, Essential, Strategic and Targeted) which is referenced in the CIM Level 6 Content Strategy module as a key quality filter for content approval. A practical application is to use BEST as a creative brief checklist before any content goes into production.
One of my favourite frameworks for crafting communications is one I first heard about from my former boss who was a journalist before becoming a PR consultant. That is The 5W+H framework (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How) which traces its origins to classical rhetoric, and was later adapted by journalists as the cornerstone of newswriting and editorial judgment. This ancient wisdom still works on any piece of content, be it written or filmed. For PR professionals, the framework maps directly onto how journalists evaluate stories. If you can answer all six questions compellingly, then you have a press-ready narrative on your hands.
One other framework that I’ve used a lot is the Four Narrative Perspectives for brand storytelling. It reminds you of at least four ‘angles’ to explore while building a content bank for a campaign. You can tell the story of the brand itself (product or corporate), of the beneficiary (customer, user, etc) whose life it improved, of a third party through their testimonial (voice of the user, advocate, influencer), or of the whole ecosystem you operate in (sectoral or market impact). That last one is a quiet gold mine that many marketers don’t think about. Market leaders own the conversation in their sector simply by being its loudest, most generous voice. By being the voice of your corner of the world, you quietly suck the air out of everyone else’s (competitive advantage).
Reporting and Proving Impact
Before, during and after doing the work of content marketing, it is important to think deeply about how to show and tell the story of impact. This is where The AMEC Frameworkcomes in. The model is quite well known in PR practice, but I’m not so sure how well marketing managers are embracing it.
The six stages of the framework move from resource (Inputs) through activity (Activities/Outputs) to communication effects (Out-takes/Outcomes) and finally to business results (Impacts). This model is useful because it prevents marketing teams from measuring only Outputs (impressions, views, volume of posts) and calling it success. It reminds us that Outputs are mere inputs to the rest of the chain.
A practical application would be to use the framework as a measurement planning template. This way, before launching any campaign, you can already identify how you will measure each stage, from what it costs (Inputs) to what business change it drives (Impacts).
The model pushes you to tell the full story of your work, from the team level inputs all the way to the board level impact (think revenue generation, profit growth, share price increase, sectoral policy change, etc.)
Case Study: Quick Look at Red Bull’s Content Strategy
I closed the session with a short video on Red Bull’s approach to content. The brand became a media company by pointing the camera away from the product, and at people doing extraordinary things, inspired by the product. One takeaway from this was that, even without Red Bull’s multimillion pound budget, we can all turn the camera away from our brands (for a minute) and shine the light on the more interesting, relatable people and places that we serve.
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