Bring more focus and cohesion to your 2025 content calendar by first creating a set of editorial themes that all your content assets will ladder up to. Watch as Tendo content director Don Knapp explains how to do it, and why editorial themes (over content pillars) can give you better content with a more differentiated POV that will help you stand out.

Start B2B Content Planning with High-Level Editorial Themes

January is typically when a ton of editorial planning happens. It’s the time of year when B2B content teams are ideating topics and building out their content calendars for the next few quarters.

But I don’t think enough content strategy leaders incorporate editorial themes into their process, and that’s a miss.

My POV: Before you begin developing individual content topics and working titles for assets, take a step back and think about creating two to four high-level themes that will guide your content creation for the next couple of quarters or maybe even the next year.

What Is a B2B Editorial Theme?

In a nutshell, an editorial theme is a high-level narrative theme that ties together all the content that you’re creating. This includes all your blog posts, videos, e-books; it includes thought leadership and brand content, as well as content at different stages of the buyer journey or different buyer intents. All of it can ladder up to two, three, or four different themes, on average.

A theme is usually distilled into a brief, directional phrase that goes beyond a general topic and hints at the editorial angle and brand point of view. Here are a few sample themes—two for an enterprise networking and security company, and two for an enterprise public accounting firm:

• Go Further to Reduce Cyber Risk
• Solving Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Puzzles
• Thriving as a New Public Company
• Next-gen Accounting and Audit Precision

Isn’t a Theme the Same as a Content Pillar?

Not really. Sure, a content pillar is often defined as “a core topic or theme that serves as the foundation for all the content created by a brand” (thanks Google Search Labs/AI Overview). But too often content pillars are static and unchanging, year to year. They’re driven by SEO purposes over audience needs. And they’re typically crafted as a general keyword or keyphrase. An editorial theme goes a step further because it incorporates an editorial angle and point of view. And that’s what makes it more useful than a content pillar—and leads to more interesting and differentiated content.

How Do You Create a B2B Editorial Theme?

Start with three inputs:

• Priority business initiatives: These are the things that you want to talk about; the topics you want to cover that are obviously related to your company’s products and services.
• Priority audience needs or pain points: What’s top of mind for your key target audiences? What are their needs, pain points, challenges right now that your company can solve?
• Brand POV and narrative: What is your company’s point of view as it relates to these hot topics and audience care-abouts?

When you list out these primary inputs, the next step is to try and group them into a handful of themes, distilled in succinct phrases like the examples above.

But here’s the big challenge, which we can tackle in a future blog post: Getting all the relevant stakeholders together—sales, product marketing, brand marketing, etc.—to achieve consensus on the input topics and final themes. But all stakeholders can start by taking their cues from the C-suite and your priority business goals.

Benefits of Creating B2B Editorial Themes

When your teams go through the exercise of creating these themes, you’ll end up with content that is more focused, more cohesive, and really tells a more differentiated story. And telling a differentiated story is a major advantage for your brand, at a time when the Internet is flooded with mediocre content.

Need Help with Editorial Planning?

Work with Tendo to define editorial themes and a content lineup that engages your key audiences and helps you reach your business goals. To learn more about our approach, visit our Content Strategy & Planning services page. Or just contact us to share your needs and goals.