How I Decide What Not to Write: A Content Prioritisation Framework

Here’s a number that should make every content marketer uncomfortable: somewhere between 60 and 70% of the content B2B organizations produce goes completely unused, according to Forrester’s research on content utilization, sitting on sales portals and website shelves where nobody ever touches it. Some companies told Forrester their non-usage rate was actually above 80%.

Think about what that means. Most of the time, money, and effort poured into content marketing produces work that nobody reads, downloads, or uses to close a deal. The problem was never that these teams couldn’t write enough; they wrote way too much, and most of it was the wrong thing.

When you’re a solo content marketer, that statistic stops being an abstraction and becomes a survival issue. I don’t have a team to absorb wasted effort. Every hour I spend writing something nobody needs is an hour I didn’t spend on something that moves pipeline, so the most valuable skill I’ve developed has nothing to do with writing faster or better: it’s deciding what not to write at all, and having a content prioritisation framework that makes those calls defensible when someone inevitably asks why their idea didn’t make the cut.

What is a content prioritisation framework?

A content prioritisation framework is a repeatable system for scoring content ideas so you can decide, consistently and without ego, which ones get made and which ones get killed. It exists to stop you from defaulting to whoever asked loudest, whoever outranks you, or whatever idea happened to land in your inbox most recently. Without one, your content calendar becomes a record of other people’s impulses instead of a plan tied to business outcomes.

The framework doesn’t have to be complicated. Mine runs on three questions, scored fast, applied to every idea before it gets near the calendar. The whole point is to make the decision in minutes, not to build a bureaucratic scoring ritual that takes longer than writing the thing would have.

The three-axis decision matrix: impact, effort, alignment

Every idea gets scored on three axes. I keep it loose, usually high/medium/low rather than precise numbers, because the goal is a fast directional read, not false precision.

1. Impact: will this actually do something? This is the business-outcome question. Will this piece generate pipeline, support a deal already in motion, rank for a query buyers actually search, or build authority in a space that matters to our positioning? A piece that maps to a real buyer question at a real funnel stage scores high. A piece that exists because “we should probably have something on this” scores low. If I can’t articulate what this content is supposed to achieve in one sentence, that’s my answer.
2. Effort: what will this cost me? Not just writing time. Research time, stakeholder interviews, design dependencies, review cycles, the SME who takes three weeks to answer one question. A 2,000-word technical piece that needs four interviews and two rounds of engineering review is a very different bet from a sharp opinion piece I can draft in an afternoon. High effort isn’t disqualifying, but it raises the bar on impact.
3. Alignment: does this fit the strategy? A piece can be high-impact and low-effort and still be wrong if it pulls against the current positioning or targets a persona we’ve deprioritized. When my last company pivoted its ICP mid-quarter, a chunk of perfectly good content ideas suddenly failed the alignment test overnight, because they spoke to the audience we were moving away from. Good idea, wrong moment, killed.

The pattern that earns an immediate yes is high impact, low-to-medium effort, strong alignment, while the pattern that earns an immediate no is low impact, high effort, weak alignment. Most ideas land somewhere in the messy middle, and that’s where judgment comes in, but having the three axis forces me to name why I’m hesitating instead of just vibing my way to a decision.

How do you say no to a pet project without torching the relationship?

This is the part most frameworks skip, and it’s the part that actually matters when you’re a solo marketer reporting to people who outrank you: the matrix tells you what to kill, but it doesn’t tell you how to kill it without making an enemy.

Pet project requests are their own category; the CEO wants a thought leadership piece on a topic they’re personally obsessed with, sales wants a one-pager for a single prospect, someone read an article over the weekend and now we “need to have a point of view on this.” These requests almost always fail the impact test, and they almost always come from someone you can’t just ignore.

The move is to make the framework do the talking: when you say no based on a personal opinion, you’re inviting an argument between your judgment and theirs, and they outrank you, so you lose, but when you say no based on a transparent scoring system tied to business outcomes, you’ve changed the conversation. Now it’s not me versus them, it’s the idea against the strategy we already agreed on.

“I’ve scored this against what we’re trying to hit this quarter, and here’s where it lands. If we make it, here’s what drops off the calendar to make room. Which one moves the needle more?”

That reframe does two things: it respects the person enough to take their idea seriously, and it forces a trade-off conversation instead of a yes/no fight. Half the time, when people see the opportunity cost spelled out, they pull the request themselves; the other half, they make the case for why the impact is higher than I scored it, and sometimes they’re right, and I update. Either way, the decision got made on strategy, not on who shouted.

Strategic no versus lazy no

There’s a difference between killing an idea because it doesn’t serve the strategy and killing it because you can’t be bothered, and the difference matters enormously for your credibility.

A lazy no is “we don’t have bandwidth” or “that’s not really our thing” with nothing behind it; it’s reflexive, it’s unexplained, and it teaches people that you’re a bottleneck to route around. The fastest way to lose your seat at the strategy table is to become the person who says no to everything without ever showing your reasoning.

A strategic no is specific; it names the axis the idea failed on, it acknowledges what was good about the idea, and it usually offers a path. Something like: this scores low on impact because it targets a persona we deprioritized, but the underlying insight is strong, so let’s hold it and revisit if we shift focus back; or: this is high impact but the effort is enormous right now, so let’s do a lightweight version first and earn the investment in the full piece.

The strategic no keeps you credible; people will accept a no they understand, and they’ll keep bringing you ideas because they trust the process. This is the same principle I wrote about in why content ownership means being accountable for the calls you make: saying no is part of owning the function, but only if the no is reasoned rather than reflexive.

Real content I’ve killed

Abstract frameworks are easy to nod along to, so here’s the version with actual decisions in it:

• The exhaustive glossary nobody asked for. I scoped a massive terminology glossary for the industry, the kind of thing that feels productive to build. High effort, weeks of work; when I scored it honestly, the impact was low: the terms were already well-covered elsewhere, it mapped to no active buyer question, and it would have ranked for nothing. Killed before I wrote a word, and that decision alone saved me two weeks.
• The executive’s passion piece. A senior stakeholder wanted a long opinion piece on a macro trend they found fascinating. Genuinely interesting, genuinely irrelevant to anyone in our buying cycle. Instead of writing the 2000-word essay, I proposed a short social post to test whether the topic landed with our audience at all; it got modest engagement, we learned the appetite wasn’t there, and we’d spent an hour instead of a week finding that out.
• The competitor-chasing content. A competitor published a big content push on a theme, and the instinct in the room was to respond in kind. The alignment test killed it: chasing their narrative meant playing on their turf and reinforcing their framing instead of our own. We did something on our actual differentiator instead, which is a better use of the same hours.

Notice that none of these were killed because the ideas were stupid; two of the three were genuinely good ideas, they just lost to better ideas, which is the entire point of having a content prioritisation framework.

How do you build a backlog that’s actually useful?

A killed idea doesn’t always stay dead, and this is where most people’s systems fall apart. They either lose every rejected idea entirely, or they dump everything into a backlog that becomes an undifferentiated graveyard nobody ever opens again.

A useful backlog is curated rather than all-inclusive. When I kill an idea, I make a fast call on whether it’s dead-dead or just not-now; dead-dead ideas get cut entirely, because a backlog full of permanently bad ideas is just noise that makes the good ones harder to find; not-now ideas get parked with a note on what would have to change for them to become viable: a strategy shift, a product launch, a seasonal moment, a persona coming back into focus.

That note is the difference between a backlog and a junk drawer. When the ICP shifts or a launch lands, I can pull up the parked ideas that now pass the alignment test and move fast, because the thinking is already done. The backlog becomes a strategic reserve instead of a place ideas go to die. This is part of treating content as a system rather than a pile of one-off requests, which I dug into in why you need a content system, not a content team.

The backlog also doubles as evidence: when someone asks why we’re not making more content, I can show a list of deliberately deprioritized ideas with the reasoning attached. That reframes the question from “why aren’t you producing more” to “here’s everything I chose not to produce so I could focus on what’s working,” which is a much stronger position to argue from.