A Steady Stream of High Quality Content
The greatest challenge content marketers face is that they have to create a great deal of content on an ongoing basis. Think of all of your different marketing channels – your blog, your YouTube channel, all of your social media accounts, your email list, and so on. You need unique content for each channel.
Think also of the time frame. You don’t have to create a month’s worth of content, but a stream that goes on for months or years, depending on your marketing plan. Of course, you can delegate or outsource, and tools can help. But if you’re organized, you can handle your content creation and publishing needs no matter the volume.
A content marketing strategy has many moving parts. The best way to organize these moving parts is to create an editorial calendar. Once your calendar is in place, you can simply open it each day and you’ll know what needs to be done.
Your editorial calendar should include each piece of content and when it needs to be published. It should also include each step along the way to creating the piece, such as planning, writing, image research, and editing. Actually, every single task related to your marketing plan should be on this schedule, including brainstorming sessions, reaching out to people who are involved, and monitoring your results.
Knowing Your Audience and Solving Their Problems
In order to produce content your audience loves, you have to know your audience well. You need to collect data about them and use this to create your content. This requires an organized system of gathering and analyzing data about your audience, and keeping in constant contact with them so you can learn more.
The most effective content is that which offers a viable unique solution to these problems. Your system needs to be designed to pay close attention to these needs and challenges.
Seeing the Big Picture
All of these moving parts, your editorial calendar, and data collection from your market should be aligned with the “big picture,” your long-term business goals. The first step in getting organized is to review and/or clarify your major goals for the next year or few years. This allows you to see the big picture, which makes it easier to understand how your content fits in.
Each piece of content has its own mini-goal within the big picture. Some pieces are for attracting people to your marketing. Some are geared towards building relationships or generating leads. There could also be pieces that are designed to drive sales directly.
The wonderful thing about content marketing is that it costs very little to do. It just takes the time necessary to build an organized, streamlined system for producing and publishing content.