There’s a lot of excitement around content marketing. And yet it’s still a pretty new focus and struggle for many marketers. For every company that has the right people and a full on content marketing strategy, there’s another that does not.

The recent article by Joe Pulizzi at the CMI, states that only 41% of corporate marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. And only 58% of them have someone in place to oversee that strategy. And although small businesses are further ahead, (48% have a strategy and 78% have a person overseeing it) there’s still quite a long ways to go!

Check out the rest of the study here:

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B2B Small Business Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America from Content Marketing Institute

The fact is, there’s still meaningful amounts of content being created by small and enterprise businesses alike. I know because even at Atomic Reach we are dedicating valuable resources to our content marketing efforts. And even though many companies have not achieved “critical mass” in terms of content volume, there’s still time, effort and money invested in the content being produced. Don’t you want to get as much value as you can from your efforts? We certainly do!

What we’ve learned is you truly don’t need a lot of content to get a lot out of the content you are creating. AND when you don’t have tons of content it’s even more important that you maximize the value of every amazing article being created. You want to insure that every article “counts” and gets tangible ROI. That you insure it gets successfully seen, read, shared and helps you build your business and a relationship with your customers and potential customers.

So how do you do that? Here are six simple and easy steps to take:

  1. Figure out what you want your content to achieve. What is your goal? Is it inbound leads? Thought leadership? Awareness? Is it a combination? This will help you with #2.
  2. Decide what are the top 1-3 topic categories (such as: content marketing, the mobile workforce or healthy living) you want to have aligned with you brand and company. Focus your efforts on the topics that are the most relevant to your company, your brand and your goals.
  3. Create an editorial topic list and calendar so that you create a quick and easy plan around what you want to publish and how often (a good starting point is at least 3 blog posts weekly).
  4. Have key staff members in various parts of your company to create blog posts around your editorial topics. You can share your calendar and ask people to pick the topic(s) they want to write about. This way you can spread out the “work” and leverage different points of view. Even large companies like IBM have employees from all over the world contributing content to the company blogs.
  5. Insure that you and your contributors are writing content in a way that will appeal to your audiences so that they will read it and engage with it in some way (whether it’s sharing it, liking it or commenting on it, or getting back in touch with you, etc). Check out Atomic Reach. Atomic Reach has various versions of the platform (from Free to Enterprise level) that will go a long way to help you create content that will engage your audience before you hit publish. Its simple to use and delivers powerful results (literally double digit increases in web and social metrics).
  6. Share it! Be sure to leverage all your social media accounts (Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.) to get maximum exposure for the content you are creating. And you need to think about what content you share where and when. You are going to want to share different content on different platforms and it’s important to consider even the day of the week and the time of day you share it.

Whether you are producing 12 pieces of content a month or 1,200, there are quick and simple ways to insure you maximize the ROI on your content. How do you get more with less? By taking the steps above, every article you create will help you create a better connection with your target audiences and get you one step closer to your goals.