Setting Up Your Content Strategy

Your strategy is the single most important configuration in ACS. It defines your brand voice, content direction, and goals — and it shapes every piece of content the system generates. Time invested here pays dividends across every campaign.

Where to Find It

Go to Start Here → Strategy in ACS. This is where you configure, review, and update your strategy over time.

What the Strategy Covers

Brand Voice and Tone

Describe how your brand communicates. Is it direct and authoritative? Warm and conversational? Opinionated and contrarian? The more specific, the better — vague guidance like "professional and friendly" produces generic content.

Good voice descriptions include:

• Concrete examples of phrases you use or avoid
• A sentence that captures the overall feel ("sounds like a sharp colleague explaining something over coffee")
• Notes on sentence length, use of jargon, how you handle humor

Target Audience

Go beyond demographics. Describe what your audience cares about, what they already know (so you don't over-explain), what keeps them stuck, and what they are trying to accomplish.

Example: "B2B SaaS founders at 10–50 person companies. Smart, time-poor, and allergic to fluff. They want frameworks and specific tactics, not inspiration or theory."

Content Goals

What should your content actually accomplish? Build newsletter subscribers? Drive SEO traffic? Establish authority in a niche? Position you for speaking opportunities? Being explicit about goals helps ACS prioritize the right angles and calls to action.

Persistent Context

This is your most powerful configuration field. Persistent context is information that stays attached to every campaign — your unique perspective, proprietary frameworks, things you always want woven into content, and things you never want mentioned.

Examples:

• "Always connect topics back to our core thesis: distribution beats product in B2B"
• "Never mention [competitor name] or link to their content"
• "Reference our PACE framework whenever discussing content strategy"
• "We write for a UK audience — use British spelling and idioms"
• "Our founder has a background in behavioral economics — draw on this when relevant"

Content Mix

Specify what types of content you want per active platform. ACS uses this to plan what each campaign produces:

• Newsletter: weekly long-form deep dive
• SEO Article: evergreen how-to targeting a specific keyword
• LinkedIn: short, insight-forward post with a strong hook
• Twitter/X: thread expanding on the newsletter theme

Your Strategy Evolves

ACS maintains a versioned history of your strategy. After each campaign cycle, ACS can optionally append a reflection layer — observations from your content performance that should inform future direction. You can review version history and roll back to any prior version from Start Here → Strategy → History.

The longer you run ACS, the sharper the strategy becomes — because your actual performance data shapes what it recommends.

Strategy Tips

Be specific, not generic. "Friendly and professional" is what every brand says. Specific examples of your actual voice are far more useful.

Treat persistent context as your editorial rulebook. If there is something ACS should always or never do, put it in persistent context — not in the general tone section. This ensures it applies consistently across all content types and platforms.

Update after strong performance. If a campaign produces content that particularly resonates, note what was different about it and add that observation to your persistent context or content mix description.

Do not overthink the first version. Write a reasonable starting point, run a few campaigns, see how the output looks, and refine. Strategy improves iteratively.