Like any other marketing activity content marketing requires planning and hard work in order to succeed. Most of the times lack of planning is the reason for failure of a content marketing strategy. So follow these 5 steps to succeed in content marketing:

  1. Planning: Before you create content, it’s important to have a plan that includes clear goals, the time needed, budget, and more. Planning is the key phase of any marketing strategy. A content marketing plan should be flexible. As time goes on, you’ll need to adjust various aspects of your original plan, so make sure to review it regularly. You can set simple goals like the number of blog posts, ebooks, or white papers published each month and then adjust based on the results.
  2. Define an Audience: Defining your audience should be a top priority when planning a content marketing campaign. This can make or break your efforts. I’ve often seen great marketing campaigns fail to produce results because they targeted the wrong audience. Try to see things from your customer’s perspective and consider some key questions. First, think about who will be reading or watching your content and why they would be interested in it. Aim to assist your audience by addressing their problems.
  3. Content Generation: You must decide in advance the frequency and quantity of content generation. Many people feel that in order to achieve success they need to publish in as many formats and as frequently as possible. Yes there are advantages of publishing content regularly and in multiple formats but this is not for every industry and business. In one industry whitepapers and research reports can help in getting leads and generating sales but in another they can be a complete waste of time. So plan the most important formats for your business and find the right publishing frequency. Let’s consider Pinterest. As we all know Pinterest is an image sharing platform . Now certain industries such as fashion, clothes, retailers have advantage if they promote their content on Pinterest but for other industries where image doesn’t plays a big role in sales cycle returns from Pinterest will not be high and they’d be better if they use any other social media platform to promote their content.
  4. Resources: A successful content marketing strategy identifies your current resources in terms of people within your organization who are capable of creating content and budget available. Many businesses believe that they can outsource everything but this is not the case normally. Organizations are restricted by the amount of money available for content marketing, time frame etc. Even if you are able to find the perfect content marketing agency it’s quite possible that they are already working on other projects. You will not be their first priority and this will result in time costing delays. In order to overcome this problem you can find talent within your own organizations and prepare a plan which will utilize your internal resources in addition to your marketing agency.
  5. Budget: There is a myth around content marketing that it’s free or low cost. But as most of the experienced marketers know there is no such thing as free lunch in business world. Content Marketing is no different, if you want to implement it successfully you need to account for money you will need for publishing content, videos, eBooks etc. There is a very big chance that at least some part of content creation you’ll need to outsource so decide how much budget you have for outsource these tasks.One option is to shift some part of your traditional marketing budget to content marketing.

By following these tips you can ensure that you achieve desired results from content marketing and there are no unpleasant surprises. Please leave your questions in comments and share this article if you enjoyed reading it.