What Is the Difference Between Content and Content Marketing?

What is the difference between content and content marketing? The answer is the destination you will use to attract and build an audience.

Content marketing is about attracting an audience to an experience (or “destination”) that you own, build, and optimize to achieve your marketing objectives.

Content is everywhere. There’s product content, sales content, customer-service content, event content, employee-generated content, marketing and campaign content. Even advertising is content.

With content marketing you are attracting an audience to a brand-owned destination versus interrupting or buying an audience on someone else’s platform.

Think American Express’ OPEN forum:

Or Red Bull’s RedBulletin:

Or my latest favorite content marketing destination, Casper’s VanWinkle’s:

These are three great examples of content marketing destinations (content marketing hubs) that are owned by brands, look and act like publisher sites, and in different ways, drive business value for the brands that own them.

The problem with content

I talk to people every day on the subject of content marketing. And I find the concept of having a content marketing destination, owned by the brand, to serve as the property for its content efforts, is too often lost.

Most marketing teams are focused on creating content that supports the brand or its products. We create this content mainly because someone asked us to. Not because it meets a customer need.

The problem with content is the same as the problem with campaigns. The average half-life of content on Twitter is less than three hours. On Facebook, five hours will give you 75% of all the views you will get. An average article reaches just about everyone it’s going to reach in 37 days.

Thanks to social media, our attention spans are now around 8 seconds. That’s 4 seconds less than a goldfish.

Like content, campaigns run for a short period and then they die. And if you’re like most organizations, 60 to 70% of the content your company creates goes unused.

The problem with most content is that it is created for the boss. It isn’t created for the audience you are trying to reach, engage, and convert. So stop creating content that sells. Stop creating content no one will ever see. Stop creating campaigns that have a short shelf life.

Stop creating content. Create a content brand.

Promise of a content brand

As Seth Godin once said, content marketing “is all the marketing that’s left.”

Many people easily confuse content with content marketing. Content marketing is a strategic solution to a strategic problem. To reach, engage, and convert new customers for your business, you have to create content people actually want.

And you need to attract them to a content marketing destination. According to author and speaker Andrew Davis, “developing a content brand takes an audience-first approach to business storytelling that builds a loyal audience.”

Joe Pulizzi wrote Content Inc., a whole book to help brands and entrepreneurs attract an audience BEFORE developing products and services.

Joe’s work has been an inspiration to me for years. I used the steps Joe recommends in his latest book to drive the approach I’m using on my own content marketing destination, Marketing Insider Group. I’ve been blogging as a marketing insider for over five years, posting one to two times per week, to build an audience of engaged readers.

But only last year did I take the step of branching out to offer services to brands looking to figure out how to build an effective content marketing strategy.

The difference is the destination

OK, so now you’ve got the message. You’re committed to moving beyond just creating better content to acting like a publisher. But how do you go about building an effective content marketing destination? Follow these eight steps:

1. Determine your content marketing mission statement. It should support your brand mission and put your customers at the center. Define who your target audience is, what topic or topics you support, and what value you provide for your audience.

2. Pick a URL. Consider whether your content marketing destination should be your company’s brand domain (www.yourcompany.com) or on an unbranded site.

3. Determine how branded your site will be. This is a similar but different question than No. 2. An on-domain content site should contain at least some elements of your corporate brand.

On an off-domain content site, your creative direction should support whatever topic you want to become an authority in.

4. Think about the components of an effective content marketing destination.Your site should include all the components typically included on any publisher site such as:

• Categories across the top to show what topics you cover
• Articles published frequently with visible authors and publication dates
• Heavy use of images to support the topic and break up the text
• A strong focus on growing your owned audience by including calls to subscribe in your updates
• Highlights of top-performing content so readers can easily discover your best content
• A call to action, an offer, or a contact-us page for those who want to reach you directly
• Social-sharing options so your readers can easily help promote your best content
• 

5. Build the site to focus on subscriptions. I know I am repeating this step. But this is so important it is worth repeating. Subscribers are a measure of reach, engagement, and conversion. They represent the audience of readers who invite you into their overflowing email inbox. Optimize for them. Build your list. Then build trust by consistently producing great content.
   

6. Publish consistently. If you cover one topic, publish at least once a week. If you cover two topics, publish at least twice a week. If possible, publish every day on the categories of content that will attract the right audience.
   

7. Define your measurement plan. You do not need to pick 65 metrics to track. Just look at traffic (visitors and page views), engagement (social shares, comments, time on site) and conversion (subscribers, contact-form submissions).

8. Create a plan to support visual content. Getting all of the above done is hard enough. But once you do, you will find that visual content is a challenge. You don’t need to break the bank to incorporate visuals. You can cover and embed other people’s visual content. You can create SlideShare decks for little or no budget.
   

By following these steps, you can build a content marketing destination to reach, engage, and convert new customers for your business.

Join Michael Brenner as he shares more tips for successful content marketing during his presentation at Content Marketing World 2016. Register today and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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6 Essential Ingredients to Content Creation

No matter the industry or size of the business, all content teams work with one primary goal in mind: creating quality content that inspires their followers to engage with it and share it with others. This could be anything from a relevant article to an ultimate guide on the world’s best grilled cheeses. The overall goal for any piece of content is ideally that it's easily found in search engines and promotes actions such as sharing, retweeting, and so on. But how is there a guarantee that a piece of content will do well in a day and age where anything and everything is available at our fingertips?

What makes content stand out from the clutter on the web today? One of my favorite Huffington Post articles, 6 Essential Ingredients to Compelling Online Content, illustrates their six steps to creating compelling, shareable content. I’m going detail each of these ingredients, and how they apply to how we create content here at Likeable.

1. Know your audience and create buyer personas.

Something at Likeable we have taken an interest in is exploring the needs and desires of our customers and understanding them on a deeper level in order to produce better content. Many businesses utilize a system of ‘personas’ under which to categorize their customers in order to better meet their needs. These personas help identify the needs of each customer which the content team can then address. When creating content for each customer tag, everything down to the font choice on a content image matters when trying to best match the ‘feel’ of that business. Understanding customers on a deeper level and delivering premium content by employing archetypes, or ‘personas’, is what allows us to create content that we feel our customers will connect with.

2. Make sure your content is useful and interesting

In a world where trends come and go overnight and anyone can look up anything at any time, the trick is finding content that will hopefully be new and insightful for the intended audience. The Huffington piece uses an acronym called WIIFM, or, ‘What’s In It For Me?’. Again, content should be useful and new for customers, or should at least offer a different perspective on the topic. If there’s anything we want our customers to take away from posting our content, it’s the sense that what they’re posting will establish their thought leadership, and build a sense of engagement and trust between them and their own customers. Guides, tips, lists, quizzes, and so on, can all be great resources because they benefit the customer and their audience with potentially new information and encourage them to seek out more content from us.

3. Make sure your content is visually appealing

While the Huffington article talks about the visual aesthetic of the paragraphs themselves (subheads, length, etc.), graphic content is equally as important. We offer tags to which our customers can subscribe, such as ‘Coffee’ or ‘Top Picks’, and what often draws them to a certain piece of content is an image that has been custom designed by the creative team. We employ vector graphics, high-quality photographs, and appealing text overlays to give the customer a sense of what this piece of content is about before they click the link. Without using these visuals as part of our content strategy, the posts instantly become much drier and customers may feel less inclined to share our content.

4. Include a call-to-action (CTA)

A ‘call-to-action’ is defined as: an instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response by using imperative verbs such as ‘call now’ or ‘find out more’. We have two ways that we like to approach using CTA's. One way is to employ a traditional CTA that beckons the audience to click and learn more, such as the examples above. Another way we like to entice our customers to explore our content are clever quips, questions, or conversation starters. An inspiring piece of content that asks ‘What is the magic in your life?’ or a top 10 list on how to build better relationships with the caption ‘Improve your people skills’ are different ways to engage your followers with CTA's. Change up the pace by using playful, encouraging CTA's that will stand out from the crowd of call's to action devoid of personality. 

5. Make sure your content is sharable and search-friendly

One of our core values at Likeable is ‘We are driven to create a #likeable world’. Emphasis on the hashtag. Something that our custom content creation promotes is the use of hashtags when scheduling a post. When a customer goes to make a post, they are given the option to alter the provided copy as well as add their own. Additionally, they can add hashtags which can promote a greater amount of traffic on a given piece of content. Our platform also offers the option to connect your Hub account with an assortment of popular social media sites. Enabling our customers to post to as many relevant platforms is what generates the greatest amount of exposure possible.

6. Analyze your effectiveness

One of the more helpful features of the Likeable Hub is the ability for customers to measure how well their posts are doing in the analytics section of the site, as well as in our weekly update emails that are sent out. Not only is this helpful for customers to keep track of how well their posts are doing, but it also helps us internally to know which pieces of content are doing well, and which ones need to be retired. By analyzing which posts do well, we can create more of the same great content and constantly improve what we’re providing for our audience. Analytics allow us to keep up with all the most relevant content trends and enable us to continue to provide the best possible content we can offer.

Maximizing the traction your content gets can seem daunting at times, but these six ingredients for success are a great and helpful place to start! They’ve definitely made a big difference for us.

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How to Prioritize Your Content Marketing To-Do List

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and confused, I don’t blame you.

When using content marketing to build your business, you can work on: email marketing; cornerstone content; landing pages; paid traffic; building an email list; promoting your content on social media; creating opt-in incentives; writing and setting up an autoresponder (or five); offering webinars; using Blab or Periscope; running Facebook ads; offering content bonuses; hosting a podcast; creating content inside membership sites; publishing a book; writing guest posts … the tactics go on and on.

Faced with all these options for building your online presence with content marketing, where will you start?

What will you focus on first, second, and third?

Of course you’d like to have all of the above in place. And maybe someday you will.

But right now? All those tactics look like a mountain you need to climb. You don’t know which path to take to the summit. You don’t even know where to start!

At least, you didn’t know where to start. After reading this article, you will.

I’m going to share my favorite technique for making what seems overwhelming seem doable. I’ll show you how to prioritize those tasks so you can begin checking them off, one by one.

The fog of confusion will lift and you’ll have a crystal-clear view of the target you’re aiming for. Ready?

The answer is … it depends

One of the most-loved offerings inside our Authority advanced content marketing training program are the live Q&A sessions we host every month.

Those sessions are an opportunity to ask questions directly related to your business and your current circumstances where you can get advice and guidance from members of the Rainmaker Digital team.

And in those Q&A sessions, there’s one phrase we say often, always accompanied by an apology.

“It depends.”

In business, the right path always depends on your current goal, the people power and tools you can count on, and the time you have available.

Know your goal and the resources you’re starting with. Taking these into account will help you as you prioritize your to-do list.

How to pinpoint your most-urgent goal

If you’re in the business world, chances are good that your ultimate goal is profit. And you know in a vague way that just about all the tactics mentioned above have the potential to reap profit.

If you work for a charitable organization, your ultimate goal may be donations. Or votes. Or community action.

Some of the tactics listed have a measurable impact on your goal right away. Most, though, are investments: you set them up today knowing that you may not see the payoff for a while.

For many of the tactics listed, you must have certain elements in place before you can use the tactic.

In the project management world, these are called dependencies.

Let’s look at a few:

• You shouldn’t send paid traffic to a site that has no content in place for visitors to consume. Using paid traffic is dependent on you crafting content on your site.
• It’s not a good idea to build a complex paid membership site until you’ve built an audience of people to offer it to. Creating and selling memberships is dependent on you building an audience.
• Writing guest posts is a waste of time unless you have a way to capture email addresses from the people who visit your site because of your posts. Building your audience with guest posting is dependent on you getting your email marketing set up and an opt-in form on your website.

The first thing to do when you see a brand-new content marketing tactic is to think about everything that needs to be in place upstream and downstream for the tactic to work.

This is easy to do if you think about your site visitors’ customer journey. As they walk down the path of getting to know, like, and trust you, what are the touch points along the way?

It might look something like this:

1. A prospect searches for a keyword associated with your topic and lands on acornerstone content page.
2. On the page, they see a call to action to register for your website to get free information and tutorials related to your topic.
3. Once they register, you send them a series of autoresponder emails about your topic. One of the early emails includes a coupon for 40 percent off the price of one of your most popular products.
4. Those people who buy the product and become customers receive a series of autoresponder emails with tips for making the most of their purchase.

There are some fancy, high-tech, involved ways we could make the journey above happen. But let’s start out with a minimum viable approach so we can get it done! You can always tweak and improve later.

Let’s call this the “Phase 1 version” of the customer journey.

Phase 1: Necessary for launch

Pinpointing your goal is important. And identifying dependencies — tasks that must be accomplished before other tasks can happen — is important, too.

But approaching your tasks by asking, “What’s the shortest route between thinkingthis idea and making this idea come to life?” might be the biggest confusion-buster of them all.

Because in the end, the faster you go from idea to implementation, the faster you’ll begin to see results.

And the faster you’ll get feedback, too! Feedback is how you’ll discover if your product or service is working for the prospects you’re offering it to. And you can’t get feedback until your idea is launched and out in the wild.

As you look at all the things you could do to get your product launched, I urge you to ask yourself, “What’s a minimum viable approach to making this product live?”

For the example above, a minimum viable approach might be:

1. A prospect searches for a keyword associated with your topic and lands on a cornerstone content page. Publish two or three cornerstone content pages that use the keyword you’re targeting.
2. On the page, they see a call to action to register for your website to get free information and tutorials related to your topic. Create a tutorial you can use as an incentive for registration.
3. Once they register, you send them a series of autoresponder emails about your topic. One of the early emails includes a coupon for 40 percent off the price of one of your most popular products. Write three autoresponder messages. Create a coupon for your product and include it in one of the messages.
4. Those people who buy the product and become customers receive a series of autoresponder emails with tips for making the most of their purchase. Write three autoresponder messages for new customers.

That’s the minimum viable version of this plan. That’s a version that will get you from “idea in your head” to “idea in the wild” in the shortest possible amount of time.

Phase 2: Nice-to-have for launch (but only if there’s time)

Want to dream a little?

You can make your bare-bones launch more polished … but only if you have time to spare. Remember, our goal here is to bring that idea of yours to life as quickly as possible.

If you do have time to add some polish to your launch, try ideas like these:

1. A prospect searches for a keyword associated with your topic and lands on a cornerstone content page. Add images throughout your cornerstone page. Write four to five pages total all related to your topic and all with the aim of enticing people to register for your site. Begin a social media campaign to promote the pages and reach out to site owners with similar audiences to let them know the pages exist.
2. On the page, they see a call to action to register for your website to get free information and tutorials related to your topic. Add value by creating a worksheet to help people apply what they learn from the tutorial.
3. Once they register, you send them a series of autoresponder emails about your topic. One of the early emails includes a coupon for 40 percent off the price of one of your most popular products. Write a few additional autoresponder messages and repeat the offer more than once.
4. Those people who buy the product and become customers receive a series of autoresponder emails with tips for making the most of their purchase. Use marketing automation and branching logic to create if/then scenarios for prospects based on their behavior inside your autoresponder.

Phase 3: Can wait to be implemented later

Just for fun, let’s look at the fancy, high-tech, involved version of this same plan.

You don’t need any of the tactics below to launch, but once you’ve tested your idea and want to improve the performance of your offer, you can add bells and whistles like this:

1. A prospect searches for a keyword associated with your topic and lands on a cornerstone content page. You use paid advertising to drive search traffic to the cornerstone pages you created.
2. On the page, they see a call to action to register for your website to get free information and tutorials related to your topic. You use sophisticated landing page software to make the offer and you create and deliver a highly polished tutorial video with a worksheet and audio downloads.
3. Once they register, you send them a series of autoresponder emails about your topic. One of the early emails includes a coupon for 40 percent off the price of one of your most popular products. You write an extensive autoresponder series — possibly 15 to 20 messages. You sprinkle offers throughout. You create elaborate, highly detailed content on pages on your website.
4. Those people who buy the product and become customers receive a series of autoresponder emails with tips for making the most of their purchase. You use marketing automation to offer upsells to related products that are featured depending on behavior.

Pick your approach (but start with Phase 1)

Any of the approaches above will take your idea from in your head to in the wild.

Phase 1 is where you want to start, though. A minimum viable approach is faster, easier, and less overwhelming.

All those more-advanced tactics will be there waiting for you when you’re ready for them. Until you are ready …

Avert your eyes from that shiny object

Information about effective content marketing is shared using — guess what? Content marketing.

That means that as content marketers in training, we’re constantly exposed to new techniques, new ideas, and new approaches to creating effective content. This can lead to confusion and a feeling of overwhelm. And it can also afflict us with severe Shiny Object Syndrome.

Shiny Object Syndrome, as you probably know, is that state of mind that has us lurching toward one new idea after another, grasping for a cutting-edge solution without allowing our current approaches to play out.

When you set up your to-do list, don’t go after whatever new idea you’ve been exposed to recently.

Instead, think strategically about all the dependencies that need to be in place to get you to your goal. Use a minimum viable approach to getting your idea into its most basic form. Get it out into the wild so you can begin gathering feedback.

Where does constant learning fit into this?

So, how does ongoing education figure into this approach?

I’m not suggesting you close your eyes, plug your ears, and ignore all the new content marketing tactics you learn about. What I’m recommending is that you continue learning but divide your education into two categories:

• Deep dive education. If you need to set up your email marketing program, for example, you’ll focus on learning about opt-in incentives, effective calls to action, autoresponders, etc. Whatever tactic you need to employ that you don’t have a good grasp of, spend some of your education time doing deep dive learning so you can implement it successfully.
• Continuing education. You’ll also want to have an understanding of how all the pieces of content marketing work together, so don’t stop learning about other elements of content marketing. Just try to avoid seeing them as shiny objects you must implement immediately. Instead, treat it like continuing education that will help you do your job as a trained content marketer.

How do you prioritize your to-do list and your learning?

This feeling of overwhelm is common: I know because I’ve felt it myself and have spoken to many others who have too.

How do you sort through all the information out there and keep yourself informed? Let me know in the comments.

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17 Tips for Creating a Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is the backbone of SEO. This is exactly why a report from the Content Marketing Institute showed 80% of B2B marketers have a strategy in place for it. Regardless of whether you’re a novice or you’ve had years of experience, creating a proper content marketing plan should be a priority in 2016.

Here are 17 useful tips to help you draw up a successful content marketing plan this year:

1. Identify Your Purpose

What do you plan to achieve with content marketing? Are you aiming to generate more leads? Do you wish to improve brand loyalty and increase retention rates? Maybe you want to build more awareness about your product or establish your brand name. Before you start drawing up a content marketing plan, you need to determine the reason driving your need for content.

Takeaway Tip: Start simple with two or three major goals that you wish to achieve through your content marketing.

2. Set Your Priorities

What should you prioritize in your content marketing plan? Do you wish to tell your brand story? Do you want to understand your audience better? The Content Marketing Institute stated that creating more engaging content seems to be the top priority for B2B marketers. Take time to establish your priorities so that you can tailor your content marketing strategies accordingly.

Takeaway Tip: Note down your top five priorities and draw up a plan for addressing each of them.

3. Determine Your Organizational Goals

Your content marketing plan should be integrated in such a way that it helps you achieve your overall organizational goals. Whether it’s to drum up more sales or improve customer loyalty, your content marketing strategy should always be in sync with what you want to achieve as a brand. Lead generation is typically the top organizational goal for B2B content marketing.

Takeaway Tip: Draw up short-term content marketing goals to fulfill your long-term organizational goals.

4. Know Your Audience

Before you simply churn out content by the hundreds, you need to determine whether or not your audience will value the information. Ask yourself questions like which channels do my potential readers use the most? What do they normally talk about? What do they need from me? What sort of content will they find most appealing?

Understanding your target audience is especially important for those who are new to the content marketing field. The idea is to produce relevant content that your target audience would want to share.

Takeaway Tip: Conduct thorough research through analytics, social media, direct conversations, and surveys to understand your audience.

5. Define Your Audience

Developing an effective content marketing plan requires you to clearly define your target audience or “buyer persona.” It’s important to remember that you’re not targeting yourself. Once you have a better understanding of your target audience, you can model them based on different buyer personas.

Instead of throwing them all in one group, try to define at least two or three different groups with a catchy name and description for each. For instance, one group could consist of customers who are price-conscious and looking for the best deals. Another group may be the people who look for top-quality service, such as faster delivery and premium support. Below is an excellent example of one of Single Grain’s buyer personas known as “Frank Founder.”

Takeaway Tip: Identify at least two different customer personas, write a proper description for each, and then act to satisfy them.

6. Choose Your Content Type

Now that you know what your audience needs and values, you can move on to picking the type of content you should produce. Your personal strengths are important to consider here. What are you good at? Are there any fields in which you have superior knowledge? Are you great at giving instructions? Perhaps you have a knack for collecting data that your audience could find useful.

If you’re having trouble determining which content type to produce? Here’s just a few of the different content types you could use:

• Infographics
• Guides
• Webinars
• Interviews
• Custom illustrations
• How-to articles
• Industry news
• Surveys
• Q&A sessions
• Product updates
• Case studies

Takeaway Tip: Focus on producing original, evergreen content that maintains its usefulness over time.

7. Find Your Uniqueness

What’s the one thing that will set you apart from your competitors? There’s a glut of content being produced by marketers around the world every day. That means it’s challenging for content marketers to stand out in the the crowd and get their work noticed. What’s unique about you? For instance, maybe you could use humor when your competitors are being too serious. You could tell real-life stories instead of offering generic information.

Takeaway Tip: Study your competition and come up with something unique to offer your target audience.

8. Research Trends

Whether it’s in content marketing or any other marketing field, trends constantly change from time to time. For instance, Impact Branding & Design said 71% of marketers use broad keywords for capturing leads. On the other hand, Demand Gen Report stated 86% of buyers want interactive/visual content on demand. Researching trends like these can help you identify ways to develop better content. It can also let you decide which content types to include in your marketing plan.

Takeaway Tip: Follow leaders in content marketing to get updates on the latest trends and changes.

9. Identify Challenges

Like every other type of marketing, content marketing has its share of challenges. According to the Content Marketing Institute, producing engaging content is the biggest B2B content marketing challenge (60%). Other big challenges include measuring the effectiveness of content (57%) and being consistent in content production (57%).

Once you’ve identified your biggest challenges, you’ll be able to set up strategies for tackling them. Develop a proper strategy that can help you in avoiding these issues in your content marketing plan.

Takeaway Tip: Make sure your overall strategy involves methods to tackle the major content marketing challenges.

10. Set a Budget

No content marketing plan can be complete without a proper budget. B2B marketers with the most effective content marketing strategies allocate 42% of their marketing budget for content. How much are you willing to spend on content marketing? Do you plan to pay for promoting your content? How much will you allocate for content creation? Having separate funds for your content marketing will help you cut costs and spend wisely.

Takeaway Tip: Allocate your budget based on the priorities you set in tip No. 2.

11. Optimize Your Content for Search

According to Imforza, search is the biggest source of traffic for content sites. Your content marketing plan needs to include a strategy to optimize your content for both readers and search engines alike. Many Internet users conduct searches to find useful content. You need to make sure that search engines like Google help these users locate you easily through keyword-optimized content.

Takeaway Tip: Use the following keyword selection checklist from the Content Marketing Institute to brainstorm ideal keywords for your content marketing plan.

12. Map Your Content Correctly

You should have several buyer personas among your target audience. Now the challenge is to deliver the right type of content at the best time to the most ideal people. Each type of customer goes through various stages in the buying cycle, so you’ll need to map your content correctly to answer the questions they have at each stage.

As you can see, there’s a way to map your content for specific personas at three different stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. You can develop the right type of content to guide different buyers through their purchase journey.

Takeaway Tip: Ask questions to analyze the doubts and problems of each persona at various buying stages.

13. Brainstorm Content Ideas

You’ve determine the type of content you wish to produce and what keywords you will use for optimizing them. You also have a proper content mapping system that will guide you in creating the relevant content at the right stage. Now is the time to determine the topics you wish to cover in your content.

This is perhaps one of the most challenging parts of your content marketing plan. You’ll have to decide on how to answer your audience queries and guide readers to a purchase decision using the right topic.

Takeaway Tip: Utilize tools like Buzzsumo to begin listing unique content ideas on trending topics.

14. Create Content

The actual content creation stage is crucial in your content marketing plan. Are you planning to write the content yourself? Do you have an built-in content team? Do you intend to hire a third-party content writer? Regardless of your choice, you need to make sure that your brand voice can be heard through your content.

Takeaway Tip: Ensure that the core values of your brand are expressed through your content to keep your brand identity. If you’re a newbie to this, then the Skyscrapers technique would be a great weapon for you.

15. Craft a Distribution Plan

How will your audience consume your content? Where will they access your information? Will you be sending out newsletters or posting blogs? You may even want to publish your content through digital magazines. Either way, your content marketing plan should include developing a proper content distribution strategy.

Takeaway Tip: Use the buyer personas you have created to determine the best distribution method for your content.

16. Commit to a Schedule

As mentioned earlier, producing content consistently is a major content marketing challenge. Quality and consistency should be your core focus when producing content. Whether you publish content every week or twice a month, commit to a publishing schedule. You need to deliver content regularly for your captive audience to follow.

Through Sprout Social’s publishing calendar, you can schedule and plan your social media posts to keep your content fresh and consistently in users’ feeds.

Takeaway Tip: Have an editorial calendar complete with topics and ideas to avoid missing any deadlines.

17. Draft a Promotion Strategy

So you’re churning up content on a weekly basis or maybe even daily. How will you get your audience to actually find the information? Maybe you’ll be promoting your content through social media or through influencers in your industry. Include a proper strategy for promoting your content within your content marketing plan.

Search engine marketing is the most popular method (66%) for content promotion. Print or offline promotion methods are also popularly used (57%).

Takeaway Tip: Draw up a proper content promotion strategy within your budget based on your buyer personas. Use tools like Ninja Outreach to make promotion outreach easy and find relevant influencers for sharing content. This can light a social fire for free.

Conclusion

There are a number of challenges you will face before you can successfully implement your content marketing plan. The idea is to learn from your failures and use them to your advantage. Determine what works best for you by measuring and testing your results. Making changes to your content marketing plan along the way is healthy. Try Sprout Social’ssocial media publishing tools to stay organized with content tagging, message approval and social media scheduling features.

Hopefully these tips will help you draw up a more effective content marketing plan that’s just right for your brand. If you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comments below.

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