1. Business objective driven: Content marketing need to be aligned with business and market goals. Without this in mind, content is shooting blanks. Let your business strategy dictate your communications instead of the other way around or they way you create content is like: “quick we need a blog post immediately because something truly inconsequential just happened.”

2. Use personas: The better you know your market, the better marketing you will have. Personas profiles comments on personas background, problems and how they deal/solve their current set of problems; explains how a persona is researching, discussing, reviewing, reading, watching or engage with content that influences their decisions.

3. Great writers: It’s the quality of your content and not the quantity that really makes the difference.

4. Calendar everything: Plan your work and work your plan. Create and maintain an editorial calendar for nearly all of your content (i.e., blog posts, white papers, case studies, webinars, videos, etc.). Share the calendar with your entire organisation and ask for ideas from everyone for new content going forward.

5. Distribution rules: If content is king, then distribution is the ace. Putting content in front of the right consumers is key. Without traffic, your content is useless. This means distributing your content using social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. and securing links from relevant sites.

6. Don’t cheat Google: The worse thing is over-employ keyword stuffing and use blogs to serve as a link bait to your website. The best way to generate a high SERP (search engine result page) is to create great content over and over again.

7. Diversify your content: Content marketing offers you the opportunity to publish in multiple formats and channels. Maintaining a Facebook Business or Brand Page or a Twitter account is a step in the right direction, but the mix might require blog posts, white papers, case studies, articles, webinars, FAQ lists, newsletters, videos, photographs, discussion forums, etc.

8. Coca-Cola Rule: Stick to the 70% – 20% – 10% rule: 70% of the content you create as being “low-risk” – do what you know works or had worked; 20% of content “innovates on what works”; The final 10% is “high risk” content or brand new ideas.

9. Design matters: The formatting and design of your website, blog, e-newsletter, white papers, case studies, FAQ list, etc. must be great. If you don’t nail the design or if you don’t believe in the importance of a professional layout, don’t expect the majority of us to take your content seriously.

10. Analyse performance indicators (every action is an investment): Analyse and adjust your approach to content marketing based on key performance indicators like: revenue metrics (aggregate impact on company revenue) and marketing performance metrics (views, shares, response to calls-to-action and so forth).

Remember:

Marketing generates cash flow in the short term and identifies sources for future cash flow in the long term.