How Barie researches trending topics, builds a 90-day content calendar, and generates the leadership deck — one prompt

Barie scans live discussions on Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn, cross-references them with Ahrefs keyword data, identifies the topics that are both trending in conversations and driving search volume, builds a 90-day content calendar prioritised by SEO opportunity and buyer journey stage, then auto-generates a slide deck for your leadership review. Research to boardroom — one prompt.

The problem with how most content calendars get built

A content strategist at a B2B software company spent her Monday morning building the Q2 content calendar. She scrolled LinkedIn for trending posts, ran a few keyword searches in Ahrefs, checked what was popular on Reddit in the relevant subreddits, and pulled together a spreadsheet of 30 topic ideas. Then she spent an afternoon prioritising them by gut feel, formatting the calendar, and building a slide deck to present to the marketing director.

The whole process took two days. At the end of it, the calendar had 30 topics but no systematic way to know whether they were the right 30. The prioritisation was based on her knowledge of the audience, which was valuable but not verified. Three topics she had included turned out to have almost no search volume. Two high-volume topics the audience was actively discussing on Reddit had not made the list because she had not checked those threads that week.

Content calendars built from manual research are always partial. The person building them can only scan so many sources in the time available. The prioritisation is always subjective. And the presentation to leadership is always a second task that takes additional time after the calendar is already built.

What Barie does in one prompt: Barie scans Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, and live keyword data simultaneously before the first topic makes it onto the calendar. Every topic that enters the calendar has a confirmed search volume from Ahrefs and a verified engagement signal from at least one social platform. Prioritisation is objective and data-based. The slide deck is generated from the same data in the same session. The total workflow replaces two days of manual work.

Your prompt

Task prompt

“Research trending topics in our niche, build a 90-day content calendar, and generate the slide deck to present it to leadership.”

One sentence. Three deliverables. Barie identifies the relevant platforms and keyword categories for your niche, runs parallel scans across social discussions and search data, scores each topic by opportunity, builds the 90-day calendar with format and buyer journey assignments, and generates the leadership presentation. Here is the full workflow.

1: Live Topic Discovery

Step 1: Parallel discovery across live conversations and keyword data

Before scoring a single topic, Barie runs four discovery threads simultaneously. Reddit reveals what your audience is actually asking, arguing about, and searching for in the communities most relevant to your category. Quora surfaces the specific questions people are phrasing when they are in research mode. LinkedIn shows the professional conversations generating the most engagement among your buyer personas right now. Ahrefs confirms which of the topics surfaced from those conversations have real search volume, so social trends and search demand are validated against each other rather than treated separately.

Firecrawl retrieves the live content from each source. LunarCrush scores the social engagement velocity for each topic so Barie can distinguish between a topic that has been popular for months and one that is breaking now. The combination produces a topic pool that is grounded in both real audience behaviour and search demand, not in what seemed interesting at the last brainstorm.

Only topics that pass the dual-signal filter make the calendar: A topic must have both a social engagement signal and a confirmed Ahrefs search volume to qualify for calendar placement. Topics that are trending socially but have no search demand are flagged as social-only opportunities and assigned to social post formats rather than long-form content. Topics with search volume but no current social traction are flagged as emerging opportunities worth moving on before competitors notice.

2. Topic Scoring and Prioritisation

Step 2: Topics scored, buyer journey assigned, format recommended

Every qualifying topic is scored across four dimensions before it enters the calendar. Search volume and keyword difficulty data from Ahrefs determine the SEO opportunity. Social engagement velocity from Reddit and LinkedIn determines the current audience interest. Buyer journey classification identifies whether the topic addresses someone who is unaware of the problem, actively researching solutions, or comparing alternatives before purchase. Content format recommendation identifies whether the topic should be a long-form blog post, a short-form video, a social post series, or a case study.

3: 90-Day Content Calendar

Step 3: The 90-day content calendar — every slot scored, sourced, and format-assigned

The calendar is structured across the full 90-day window with a deliberate balance of buyer journey stages. Weeks one through four are weighted toward awareness-stage content to build organic traffic at scale. Weeks five through eight introduce mid-funnel content that captures buyers actively researching solutions. Weeks nine through thirteen include bottom-funnel comparison and case study content to convert the audience the awareness content has built. Every piece is tied to the topic scoring data and includes the Ahrefs keyword it is targeting.

The calendar is built for execution, not just presentation: Every row in the calendar includes the target keyword, the platform where the topic was trending, the format recommendation, and the buyer journey classification. When this lands in Airtable, each row is a fully briefed content task. The content team does not need to reverse-engineer a topic brief from the calendar entry. The brief is already in the row.

4: Leadership Slide Deck Generated

Step 4: The leadership presentation — auto-generated from the calendar data, downloadable as .pptx

The moment the calendar is complete, Barie generates the leadership presentation from the same data. The deck does not summarise the calendar in prose. It presents the strategic rationale behind it: the traffic opportunity the calendar is designed to capture, the competitive gap it addresses, the buyer journey logic behind the topic sequencing, and the 90-day projection for organic traffic impact. Every slide is built from the data that produced the calendar, so the leadership team is looking at a strategy backed by evidence rather than a formatted spreadsheet.

Slide 07 connects to the video creation module: The deck includes a dedicated video content plan slide that outlines the six video topics in the 90-day calendar and provides the AI video generation brief for each. Using Minimax for visual generation and ElevenLabs for voiceover, each video brief can be executed from Barie in a follow-on session without returning to the research step. The calendar and the production pipeline connect directly.

5. Distribute Across Your Content Stack

Step 5: Calendar and deck distributed to your content and operations tools

The calendar does not sit in a document waiting to be rebuilt in a different tool. Barie routes each component to where your team works. The full 90-day calendar lands in Airtable as individual content task records, each with the topic brief, target keyword, format, buyer journey classification, and scheduled date pre-populated. Writers can be assigned and status can be tracked without any manual reformatting. Notion holds the full research brief, the topic scoring methodology, and a linked version of the calendar for strategic reference.

For operational teams, the calendar entries trigger task creation in Asana or Monday automatically, with milestone dates and content format labels already set. HubSpot receives each piece as a marketing asset linked to the relevant campaign and buyer journey stage. Amplitude tracks which calendar pieces drive the highest session depth and conversion rate so the next calendar iteration can be built on performance data, not only research signals.

Re-run quarterly with the same prompt: Configure Barie to run the same topic discovery and calendar build every quarter. Each run refreshes the trending topic data, updates the Ahrefs keyword scores, and produces a new calendar from the current signals. The Airtable base updates automatically and a new deck is generated for the next leadership review. The whole process that took two manual days now takes one monthly prompt.

What you get

A live trending topic research brief covering Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, and Ahrefs data. Every qualifying topic dual-signal verified with a social engagement score and a confirmed search volume. A structured 90-day content calendar with 36 pieces across blog, video, social, and case study formats, each scored by buyer journey stage and SEO opportunity. A 10-slide leadership deck generated from the same data, downloadable as a .pptx ready for the next board review. The full calendar distributed to Airtable, Notion, Asana, HubSpot, and Amplitude in one session. The six video topics in the calendar briefed for AI video generation using Minimax and ElevenLabs via Barie Connectors.

What it would take a content strategist two days to research and build, Barie delivers before the morning stand-up. Every topic evidence-based. Every priority data-driven. Leadership deck already in their inbox.

The Verdict

A content calendar built from manual research is always partial and always biased toward what the researcher happened to check that week. Barie scans every relevant source simultaneously, scores every topic against dual social and search signals, and builds a calendar where the prioritisation is objective and the evidence is visible. The leadership presentation is not a second task that takes another half-day after the calendar is done. It is generated from the same data in the same session. From trending topic to boardroom deck in one prompt. That is what a content strategy process should look like.

Barie features used in this task