10 Tips to Maintain an Ongoing Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing cannot be something you do for 3 months and then forget about it. A proper content marketing strategy WILL be successful, but it must be ongoing. Here are 10 tips to maintain an ongoing content marketing strategy.

1. Have buy in from the top down. If everyone supports the strategy from the CEO on down it's more likely that resources will be dedicated to the strategy whether they are manpower or budget resources.

2. Actually have a strategy. Having a meeting and discussing content marketing without defining goals and the strategic implementation is not the way to properly implement content marketing.

3. Hire an outside consultant. As much as you think you might be able to do this by yourself, it will be difficult. You can approach this in a couple of ways

a. Hire a consultant for the content marketing strategy. Because they are the experts, they'll be able to develop a strategy that is better than what someone with minimal knowledge about content marketing could do.

b. Hire a consultant for accountability reasons. Meeting deadlines is one of the most difficult tasks of any content marketing strategy. An outside 3rd party can make sure that your team is meeting the assigned deadlines through consistent content marketing meetings, touch points, and deliverable reviews.

c. Hire a consultant for more than just consulting, hire them to help with the actual implementation.

4. Identify your buyer persona(s). Do not fall short on this step. If you have not accurately identified this step the voice and direction of your content marketing will not be on track and you will have to work harder to get where you need to be.

5. Identify your buyer's journey. Again, no shortcuts here. Knowing your buyer's journey will help you plan your content topics for the short and long term.

6. Plan to adjust. Content marketing is measurable so we want to find what is working and do more of it and find out what is not working and fix it. Don't plan on hitting a home run out of the gate.

7. Give it time. If you don't see results in a week that doesn't mean it's time to throw in the towel. Remember, your content marketing strategy is meant to be long term with data driven strategy changes over time.

8. Be consistent. Whether you are actually writing the content or meeting with your content marketing consultant, maintain some consistency. We all know how hard it is to get back on the boat if you fall off.

9. Have the right platform. If you are implementing this strategy on your own your content management system (CMS) must be friendly for you. If you struggle every time you try and post something new, you'll get frustrated and start slipping. WordPress is very user friendly and can achieve all of your goals.

10. Don't put your strategy in a silo. By this I mean you have to understand that content marketing is more than blogging. Content marketing is blogging, email, offers, video, social media, etc. Just because your strategy starts using one set of mediums doesn't mean you cannot adapt as necessary.