General Electric has an incredible content marketing machine, but most of us aren’t GE. The good news is that even small teams and solo practitioners can strategize and produce lead-generating marketing content.
The key to creating a content marketing plan for any organization is an integrated cycle: strategic planning, content creation and distribution, engaging in conversation, and measuring results.
- Set marketing goals and objectives. Decide what you want to accomplish with a content marketing campaign and how to measure it. Draw up your buyer personas for your sweet spot and ideal prospects.
- Create new content and leverage existing content. Collect your existing content, decide what you can leverage, and identify gaps that require new content.
- Optimize content for search and curate for reuse. Revise both new and existing content for keywords and updated messaging. Break content into pieces to increase reuse. Curate your content so you can easily identify content for future campaigns.
- Distribute content and engage in conversation. Distribute through your channels: social media, website, publications, the media. Track and engage your commenters.
- Measure results and adapt content to next cycle. Measure results by your goals and objectives, adapt content accordingly, and begin the cycle again.
This cycle stays the same no matter how large or small your team might be. The only difference is quantity: more resources can create more content. There need not be any difference in quality or meeting your goals and objectives as long as you have reasonably assigned your resources.