How to Decide Whether a Service Deserves Strategic Content Investment
Not every service needs content, but the right one can anchor your GTM narrative.
Not all service offerings belong in your content strategy. But some—when they offer true market differentiation, span sectors, and tie directly to buyer risk—deserve targeted investment. This post walks through how we recognized IP management as one of those rare capabilities, and how we built a content initiative around it that supports our go-to-market positioning without reverting to a transactional service-selling narrative.
Don’t treat every service equally. Invest content only where there's real GTM differentiation.
Spot strategic exceptions. Cross-sector value + buyer risk + rarity = a signal worth surfacing.
Frame it beyond the service. Shift the narrative from “what we offer” to “how we reduce risk.”
Build for credibility. Pair reframing content (blog) with depth content (white paper) to earn trust and capture leads.
The Risk of Slipping Back Into a Services Narrative
Delve is positioning itself as a strategic development partner, not a menu of technical services. We’ve deliberately moved away from promoting capabilities like industrial design, UX, or mechanical engineering in isolation.
Why? Because while we offer those services, they don’t differentiate us. They’re table stakes in our industry.
In B2B professional services, most individual capabilities, like industrial design or mechanical engineering, don’t need dedicated blog posts or white papers. They’re expected. Creating content around them often ends up sounding generic, promotional, or redundant.
For content to support our go-to-market strategy, it has to do more than describe what we offer. It has to:
Speak to how we help companies navigate complex innovation challenges
Reflect the business problems we’re solving, not just the functions we perform
Show what it’s like to work with us across the full arc of product development
This approach has helped focus our message. But it raised a challenge: What do you do when one of your capabilities actually does differentiate you?
Why IP Management Earned a Place in Our Content Strategy
We weren’t looking to create content around IP strategy. But in practice, IP-related guidance kept surfacing in projects, especially with startup clients navigating high-risk innovation paths. And the more we examined it, the more we realized: this wasn’t just a capability. It was a market signal.
Here’s why IP management broke through:
It’s rare. Most firms in our space don’t offer it.
It’s cross-cutting. It matters in medtech, robotics, diagnostics, and consumer.
It speaks to buyer anxiety. The risk of wasting time and budget on unprotectable ideas is real—and we help prevent that.
It reinforces our GTM story. It shows we’re not just building what we’re told—we’re helping shape the right product strategy.
This wasn’t about returning to a service-selling narrative. It was about surfacing a differentiator that could support content without breaking the strategic frame.
How We Structured the Content for Strategic Impact
We decided early: this wasn’t a brand campaign. It was a credibility campaign. So we focused on two assets:
A blog article that reframed IP strategy as a product risk issue, not a legal one
A white paper that provided practical guidance and real-world context across the product lifecycle
Together, they support the funnel:
The blog draws in founders, innovation leads, and VPs of product who aren’t IP experts
The white paper earns email capture from serious readers who need frameworks and validation
We were deliberate about tone. No law-firm jargon. No capability pitching. The message:
“You can’t afford to think of IP as a legal detail. If your product can’t be defended, your strategy is broken.”
This content now supports:
Early-funnel awareness via blog and LinkedIn
Mid-funnel validation via sales teams and proposals
Ongoing visibility in speaking engagements and industry commentary
How to Know When a Capability Deserves Strategic Content Investment
Most services don’t need content. Commoditized capabilities often dilute positioning when treated as standalone stories.
But some do. If a capability is rare, cross-cutting, and speaks to buyer anxiety, it may justify strategic content investment.
Frame it as a business lever. Don’t describe what the service is. Show how it reduces risk or strengthens strategy.
Support it with layers. Use one asset to surface the problem and another to deepen expertise and drive action.
Let GTM drive the call. Don’t let internal enthusiasm dictate content. Prioritize what advances your position in the market.
Explore the Real Example Behind This Strategy
These assets show how we translated a differentiating service into content that reinforces our GTM position, without slipping into vendor-mode.
Read the blog post: Why Strategic IP Integration Belongs in Your Product Plan
Download the white paper: Developing Defensible Product Innovations
About Me
I lead content strategy for B2B brands that need high-leverage assets, not just volume. I specialize in aligning storytelling with go-to-market priorities and executing strategic content systems end to end. This blog is part of a series on building GTM-aligned content that works harder. The example in this post is based on work I led at Delve, a product design and engineering consultancy, where I helped position IP strategy as a differentiator and built the content around it to support business development and brand positioning. Explore the full series.
