How to create a well-oiled content marketing machine

You may have a great business, product or service, but your marketing efforts will quickly run out of steam if you can’t produce great content to fuel it.

Here’s some top tips on how to develop a content marketing mindset and build a well-oiled content machine.

Develop strong campaign messages and goals

Your content strategy will lack direction if it is not aligned with some clear campaign goals and key messages. Think about what it is you want your business to be known for and ensure the content you produce for the campaign links back to these themes.

This might relate to your business tagline, or a key message you have developed for a specific service. Sticking to key messages helps you to keep your content simple, clear and memorable. Being clear about how and where you will reach your audiences is also essential.

Make sure you have all the right parts

Sometimes it helps to think about content in terms of an engine and its working parts. Producing different types of content – news, blogs, video, infographics, whitepapers, events, resources, reports – will lead to a healthier content machine and better results. You can use these different approaches to create compelling content that’s tailored for specific channels and audiences.

Give your content machine the right fuel

If you really want to take your content marketing seriously, you need to give it the proper resources, time and attention. Assigning a healthy budget and delegating to a team of content creators will yield far better results than giving the responsibility to people who are not specialists or who are already too busy with the day job.

Plan your content journey

Your machine is now up and running, but before you start your journey make sure you’ve planned it properly. Create a content calendar to bring discipline to when you will distribute and share your content. This often means having clear deadlines and sticking to them. Think about how you will get your content out to your audience and how will it be shared and by whom. For example, are you going to set additional budget aside for a paid media partnership, or social advertising campaign?

Use data to improve performance

Evaluating the performance of your content marketing campaign will help you see what type of content is working and what isn’t. Gathering data and customer feedback on your marketing activity will enable you to make further improvements to your content marketing as you go along. And like any machine, it needs regular inspection and maintenance. Review how you’re doing things and keep freshening it up.

Enjoy the ride!