The short version: a jobs to be done content template maps every piece of content to a specific job a customer is trying to get done, written as "when [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]". You fill it in from real customer conversations, not from a workshop with sticky notes, then use each job statement to decide what to write, what format it should be, and what it needs to overcome before someone acts on it. Skip the interviews and you've just renamed your persona document.
What the template is trying to fix
Most content calendars get built around keywords or around what the founder feels like writing about that week. Both produce content that ranks or gets shared but doesn't move anyone closer to buying, because neither one asks the only question that matters: what job is this person hiring my content, and eventually my product, to do?
Clayton Christensen made the phrase famous with the milkshake study for McDonald's, where people buying milkshakes at 8am weren't after a dessert, they were hiring a thick, portable, one-handed breakfast to make a boring commute less boring. Marketing teams borrowed the framework because it forces specificity. You can't write "small business owners want efficiency" into a job statement. You have to write "when I've just missed a supplier payment deadline for the third time this quarter, I want a way to see all my invoices in one place, so I can stop apologising to suppliers." That sentence tells you exactly what to write, what to call it, and what objection to answer in the first paragraph.
The template itself: five fields, one sentence structure
Strip out the consultant-speak and the template that gets used has five parts:
- The job statement: when [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome].
- The trigger: the specific moment or event that makes the job urgent right now, not someday.
- The anxiety: the thing stopping them from acting on the job even once they've noticed it.
- The content format that fits: comparison page, checklist, video walkthrough, calculator, case study.
- The definition of done: what "solved" looks like from the customer's side, not yours.
That's it. No columns for demographics, no age brackets, no stock photo of a person who supposedly represents your audience. Just the job, the trigger, the fear, the format, and the finish line.
A real example: the payroll software client and the wasted calendar
A client of mine, a small payroll software company outside Reading, came to me with 47 blog posts ranking on page one of Google. Traffic looked healthy. Over eight months, that traffic had produced four demo requests. Four.
The content was built around keywords: "payroll software UK", "best payroll systems 2026", "payroll compliance guide". Perfectly reasonable topics. Completely disconnected from why anyone clicked.
We ran nine customer interviews, twenty minutes each, over two weeks, and asked one question repeatedly: "walk me through the last time you looked for something like this, what had just happened?" Not one person said "I woke up thinking about payroll compliance." What they said, again and again, was some version of: "I'd just had HMRC flag a late submission and I was panicking about the penalty." That's the trigger. The job wasn't "understand payroll compliance", it was "when HMRC has just flagged a problem, I want to know exactly what happens next and whether I'll be fined, so I can stop panicking and fix it before end of day."
We rewrote three of the worst-performing pages around that single job statement, added a short "what HMRC does in the next 14 days" section near the top, and added a downloadable response letter template. Same keyword. Same page. Different job. Demo requests from those three pages alone went from near zero to 22 in the following quarter. Nothing about the SEO changed. The job did.
Filling in the template, step by step
Here's the process, in the order I run it with clients:
- Step 1: pull 8 to 10 customers for short interviews. Twenty to thirty minutes each. Recent customers and recent lost deals, not your happiest fans, they'll just flatter you.
- Step 2: ask about the moment before, not the product after. "What happened right before you started looking?" is the single most useful sentence in the whole exercise.
- Step 3: listen for the trigger event, not the category. "I needed a CRM" is a category. "My assistant left and nobody else knew which leads had been contacted" is a trigger.
- Step 4: write the job statement in the when/want/so-that structure. Force yourself into that sentence shape even when it feels clumsy. The clumsiness is the point, it stops you writing marketing copy at this stage.
- Step 5: rank jobs by frequency and urgency, not by how flattering they are to your product. A job that comes up in 6 of 9 interviews beats a job that sounds impressive in a boardroom.
- Step 6: assign a content format to each job. Urgent, high-anxiety jobs want fast, scannable answers, checklists, short videos. Slow-burn jobs (research phase, comparing options) want longer guides and comparisons, this is where something like an in-depth honest product review style piece earns its keep, because the reader is deep in the anxiety stage and wants proof, not a pitch.
Six steps, roughly ten working days if you're doing it alongside a normal workload, and you come out with somewhere between four and eight job statements that will drive your next two quarters of content.
Where teams get this wrong
Here's the bit most articles on this topic gloss over. Jobs to be done became fashionable in marketing circles around the same time personas fell out of favour, and a lot of teams adopted the language without adopting the work. They ran a two-hour workshop, put sticky notes on a wall, wrote job statements based on what the team assumed customers wanted, and called it done. No interviews. No customers in the room. That's not jobs to be done, that's a persona document wearing a JTBD costume, and it produces exactly the same disconnected content the framework was supposed to fix.
The interviews are the uncomfortable part, they take longer than a workshop, they require you to hear things you don't want to hear about your product, and they don't produce a tidy slide deck. That's precisely why teams skip them. A rough, badly-worded job statement written by someone who sat on five support calls will beat a beautifully formatted one built entirely from guesswork, every single time. If your team has never spoken to a customer while filling in this template, throw it out and start again, because you've built your content calendar on fiction dressed up as strategy.
The second mistake is treating the template as a one-off. Jobs shift. A company like Webflow built its content strategy around a job that has quietly changed over the years, from "I want to build a site without hiring a developer" toward "I want my whole team to manage a site without waiting on a developer for every small change." Same customer type, different job, because the market matured. If nobody revisits the template every two or three quarters, your content quietly drifts back to being about your product instead of about the customer's problem.
Turning job statements into an actual content calendar
Once you have your job statements, mapping them to content is mechanical. For each job, ask three questions: where in the job's timeline does this person meet content (before they know a solution exists, while comparing options, or right after they've bought), what format suits the anxiety level, and what's the one objection that has to be answered before they'll act.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
A company like ActiveCampaign built much of its content and email strategy around the job of "automate my marketing without needing a developer", and you can see the whole content library split cleanly by where someone sits on that job: early awareness content about why manual email is costing them time, mid-stage comparison content, and post-purchase content aimed at people who've bought but haven't set up their first automation yet. That's a job statement doing three jobs of its own, feeding top, middle, and bottom of the calendar from one sentence.
I use a simple grid to plan this, one row per job statement, columns for trigger, anxiety, format, and which stage of the buying journey it serves, built in something as basic as a shared spreadsheet or, if the team wants more structure and automation between fields, a base in a tool like Airtable, whose own marketing content is built around similarly job-specific use cases for different teams. The tool matters less than the discipline of never writing a piece of content that doesn't map back to a row on that grid.
Once the calendar exists, distribution should follow the same logic. Urgent, high-anxiety content (the "HMRC has just flagged me" piece) belongs in places people search when panicking, not just organic search but paid and community channels too. Slower research-stage content does better distributed patiently over time, and if a team doesn't have capacity to manage that distribution across social channels consistently, that's usually the point where it's worth bringing in a proper social media marketing service rather than letting good job-mapped content sit unseen in a blog archive.
Who should own this in a small team
In a team of five or fewer, this doesn't need a dedicated researcher. It needs someone disciplined enough to run the interviews and someone disciplined enough to say no to content ideas that don't map to a job. I've seen founders hand the interview scheduling and initial write-up of job statements to a well-briefed virtual assistant, which frees up the marketing lead to do the actual listening and synthesis rather than chasing calendar invites. The template only works if somebody owns keeping it alive past the first quarter, otherwise it becomes another document that was useful for three months and then forgotten in a shared drive.
If your team has tried this before and it fizzled out, it almost certainly wasn't the template's fault. It was a lack of a re-run date on the calendar, no owner for the next round of interviews, and content planning quietly sliding back to "what do we feel like writing this month."
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a jobs to be done template and a customer persona?
A persona describes a type of person: age, role, industry, pain points. A jobs to be done statement describes a specific situation and desired outcome, regardless of who the person is. Two very different job titles can share the same job to be done, which is why JTBD content often outperforms persona-based content: it targets the moment, not the demographic.
How many job statements does a marketing team need?
Between four and eight for most small to mid-size businesses. Fewer than four and you probably haven't dug deep enough into your interviews. More than eight and you'll spread content thin across jobs that don't have enough volume to justify a dedicated content stream.
Can you build this template without customer interviews?
You can write something in the format without interviews, but it won't be accurate, and inaccurate job statements produce content that misses the real trigger and anxiety, which is the whole point of using this framework in the first place. At minimum, mine support tickets, sales call recordings, and churn survey responses if live interviews aren't possible.
How often should a jobs to be done template be updated?
Every two to three quarters, or immediately after a major product change, a new competitor entering the market, or a noticeable shift in why deals are being lost. Jobs don't change weekly, but they do drift, and a team that never revisits the template ends up planning content for a customer situation that no longer exists.
Related reading: B2B Lead Generation Case Studies: Which AI Marketing Tools Paid Off and How to Plan a Project Timeline Using a Spreadsheet Template.
If you want the full breakdown, here is everything I know about digital marketing.
