So much of business these days is about attention. It’s not a question of whether you can do something; it’s whether anyone will care.

That means if you’re running an event, or publishing, or engaged in content marketing of pretty much any kind, you have to hit the audience sweet spot. It’s the perfect trifecta of the right topic, to the right people, using the right medium.

Miss even one of these, and you’re making a mistake. For example, if you have the audience and the medium, but don’t know the right topic, you have nothing to add to the conversation. Miss two of them, it’s even worse—the best idea, without an audience and a medium, is just a poor, lonely idea.

There’s way more to engaging an audience, of course. But these three things are the basic litmus test for whether your content strategy is sound. Often, organizations embark on a marketing strategy (“let’s use Twitter!”) without thinking through who they want to reach and what they want to talk about. Or they come up with topics that don’t survive the medium (short updates on Medium; long-form posts on Tumblr.) Or they publish great content that languishes, because they don’t know how to reach their audience.

I found this Venn diagram from a few years ago, and realized that every time I’m working with someone on a go-to-market strategy, it’s lurking in the back of my head. So I figured I should publish it.