Content marketing: How to get started
If you’re like a lot of organizations, you’re already practicing some kind of content marketing.
You may have a blog that you post to regularly, or perhaps you’re active on social media. But despite this activity, do you have a strategy? Are you making progress? And toward what? If you’re not sure, here’s how to refine your content marketing strategy when you’ve already been producing content.
This blog post is right for you if you’re already producing content, but your posting schedule and topics are a bit sporadic, even random. The steps below will help you start being more intentional, organized and strategic in your content marketing efforts. Your end goal is likely sales-driven (e.g. generate qualified leads). This won’t get you there by itself, but it will give you a framework to get moving in that direction.
Establish benchmarks
At this point in the game, your main goal should be to just get things posted in a more organized and strategic way. If you don’t have any specific metrics for success, or if you’re not sure what you should be measuring, start by establishing some benchmarks to measure future content against. For example, keep track of the traffic to your blog and specific types of content (e.g. infographics v. long-form content). Track the number of visits, clicks and engagements against content geared toward a specific audience/buyer persona. Do the same thing across all of your social media channels.
Get organized
Create an editorial planning calendar, something simple with columns such as: posting date, channel, owner/author, topic, summary, target audience and call to action. This should get you and your team, and anyone else in your organization thinking about writing toward your target audiences as the top priority. If you don’t know who the content speaks to, you probably need to rewrite. If you’re unsure about calls to action, start by linking to other blog posts about similar topics.
Set your organization up for success
Now that you’re going into your content creation with an audience and a call to action in mind, share this process with your team and across your organization. Especially if you have subject matter experts in other departments, bring them into the loop on your content efforts.
Just get started
Before you fall into what I like to call “analysis paralysis,” planning out every single detail before posting any new content, instead, just get started. Remember, a single blog or social post doesn’t have to accomplish every goal or simultaneously educate all of your audiences. Now that you have your editorial planning calendar together, test out some topics, see what people are reading and go from there.
This blog post was originally published in March 2020. It has been updated and republished to keep you up to date.
Leave a Reply