Why and How To Create Jobs-to-Be-Done Content

If your content calendar comes from a keyword list and a persona deck, you’ve probably published a post that ranked but didn’t help the reader finish what they came to do. A marketing manager researching how to justify new software to a chief financial officer lands on a definition of the software category with no next step and closes the tab.

Jobs-to-be-done content gives readers what they need by starting with the task they’re trying to complete.

What Jobs To Be Done Means

A job is the progress someone is trying to make in a specific situation. Jobs to be done (JTBD) is the framework that treats a person’s situation as the starting point for content decisions.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, made the case to marketers with Scott Cook and Taddy Hall in a December 2005 Harvard Business Review paper, “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure.” In an excerpt published by Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, the authors wrote, “With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension.”

You can see all three in a fairly ordinary B2B task, like a marketing manager who has to justify new software to a finance leader: 

• The functional job is to produce a cost comparison the finance leader will accept. 
• The emotional job is to feel prepared going into the meeting. 
• The social job is to be seen by colleagues as the person who brought a well-researched recommendation. 

A piece of content that handles only the functional job leaves the other two unaddressed.

Jobs To Be Done vs. Buyer Personas

A buyer persona describes who someone is, and a job describes what that person is trying to get done at a given moment. You need both answers to write a good piece, so dropping personas throws away information you’ll end up reaching for anyway.

Page Laubheimer made a similar argument for Nielsen Norman Group in 2017, describing personas as rich representations of users that carry demographic details, attitudes, goals, motivations, and behavior. He argued that well-executed personas already have goal information comparable to a jobs-to-be-done definition. The two can exist side by side, or that core job information can be folded into the persona.

The persona tells you how to write, since it holds the reader’s vocabulary, along with what they already know and care about at work. What you write comes from the job, which tells you the question to answer and what “done” looks like for the reader. Two marketing directors at mid-size SaaS companies can fit the same persona, but need completely different pieces. One might be comparing vendors and the other building a budget request. The personas alone won’t tell you that.

How To Find Your Audience’s Jobs To Be Done

The most reliable way to find jobs is to ask people what they were trying to get done, then watch what they do.

A starting list usually comes from a few places:

1. Interview recent customers about the situation that led them to look for help. Ask what they were trying to get done, what they tried first, and what almost stopped them. Recorded sales calls work for this too if you have them.
2. Mine support chat logs, help desk tickets, and community questions. These places are where existing customers reveal the jobs they’re attempting in the reader’s own wording.
3. Read search behavior as a job signal. Someone searching “how to build a business case for marketing automation” is describing a task, and the query itself is close to a job statement.

Write down each situation in the customer’s words before you tidy it up. The phrasing you’ll want in headings and opening sentences already sits in what they said.

Mining Existing Customers for Jobs To Be Done

These same methods work for retention and expansion content, with one wrinkle: the job that got a customer to buy often differs from the job they do with your product every week. Onboarding guides, use-case posts, and renewal content should answer the second job, and support tickets are usually the fastest place to see it.

How To Create Jobs-To-Be-Done Content

Turning a job into content takes four steps: write the job statement, match it to a format, turn it into a brief, and build the piece so it ends when the job is done.

Write the Job Statement

The standard format for a job statement is “When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome].” 

Before you move on, run each statement through a few checks:

1. Make the situation specific enough that you could picture the person’s day. “When I’m preparing for a budget meeting on Thursday” gives you more to write from than “When I’m evaluating software.”
2. Keep your product out of the statement. “When I need a platform that automates approvals” describes a solution and gives the content nothing to teach.
3. Write the outcome in the reader’s terms. The outcome is what the reader gets to do next, and it’s the finish line for the piece.

Match the Job to a Format

Plenty of jobs are better served by something other than a blog post, and three questions will usually point you to the right format:

1. Does the reader need to understand something or produce something? A reader who has to produce a business case or a migration plan is better served by a template, checklist, or worksheet than by an explainer.
2. Does the job repeat? A recurring job, such as a monthly reporting task, suits a reusable asset. A one-time evaluation suits a comparison or a decision guide.
3. Where is the reader when the job happens? A job done at a desk with a spreadsheet open suits written steps and a download. A job that happens away from a screen, such as thinking through a hiring plan on a commute, suits audio.

You don’t always have to pick just one format. A written guide can host the template, for example, so the reader finds it through search and leaves with the asset.

Turn the Job Into a Brief

Put the job statement at the top of the brief and add four lines beneath it: what “done” looks like, what the reader probably already knows, the format, and the one question the first paragraph has to answer. With only a keyword and a word count, most writers default to a definition, so the job statement is what lets them see the reader’s situation and write to it.

Build the Piece So It Ends When the Job Does

Structure the piece around the steps of the job, in the order the reader would do them, and end on the reader’s next action. Cut sections that answer questions the reader isn’t asking at this point in the job, even when they’re interesting.

Worked Example: From Job Statement to Finished Piece

Here’s how that plays out for a fictional B2B SaaS company that sells accounts payable (AP) automation to finance teams. Say interviews and support tickets keep surfacing the same situation, and you write it up as a job statement: “When my finance leader asks me to justify new AP software, I want a cost comparison I can trust, so I can get the budget approved without rebuilding the analysis.”

The three format questions narrow things down quickly. The reader has to produce something, so an explainer won’t cut it, and since the job comes up every time a team evaluates tooling, a reusable asset makes sense. They’re also working at a desk with a spreadsheet open, which points to a business case template in spreadsheet form, hosted on a step-by-step guide that search can find.

Under the job statement, the brief defines done as a completed comparison the reader can take into the meeting. It notes that the reader already knows what AP software is but doesn’t know which costs a finance leader is likely to question. The format is a guide with a downloadable template, and the first paragraph needs to answer what belongs in a business case for AP automation.

The finished piece opens by listing the inputs to gather, then walks through building the cost comparison, then covers the questions a finance leader is likely to raise, and ends on how to present the case. The emotional and social dimensions shape the last two sections, because the reader wants to feel prepared and be seen as prepared. The piece doesn’t define the software category, since the reader already knows it.

Where Jobs To Be Done Content Fits Your SEO Strategy

Job-based content targets the phrasing people use in the middle of a task, which product and category keyword lists tend to miss. Someone mid-task often searches for the task itself (“how to build a business case for accounts payable automation”) as well as the category (“accounts payable automation software”). The same can be said for what those individuals type into Google.

That changes how you run keyword research. Add the task phrasings your job statements produce to the category terms you already track, then check the volume and competition for each one before you prioritize it. A query that matches your reader’s situation can justify a page even when its volume is modest, and job-based content extends your keyword research.

The same structure helps in AI search, where Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode can split one question into several smaller searches (a technique Google calls query fan-out) and build an answer from whichever pages cover each piece. Because the steps of a job tend to line up with those smaller questions, a page that answers each step directly gives an AI system more reasons to cite it.

Job statements also give a content cluster its structure. At Victorious, we build a cluster around an anchor page that drives revenue, with supporting pages that guide readers through the buying journey. Each job you’ve documented is a candidate supporting page. The jobs closest to a purchase decision, such as building a business case or comparing vendors, point toward the anchor page’s topic, and internal links connect each supporting page to it so a reader who finishes one job can see the next step.

The hope is that buyers who got real help with an earlier job may remember the source when they form a shortlist. Your conversion data will show whether that holds for your audience.

Turning individual job statements into a content program across a whole site takes strategy development and content production. We do that work through our content marketing services, and it’s a natural next step once you’ve documented your first set of jobs.