Practical advice on your content strategy

So, you’ve got content and you’ve got vision – but you’re not seeing results. What to do?

Over the past year, I’ve been helping a few small businesses with their content needs as a content project manager. My background is project management, training, technical writing and communication for much larger companies. Even though these companies are small, they have some of the same problems I’ve seen in much larger organizations.

Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned over the past 18 months of managing content projects.

It’s always better to plan

I’ve spent the better part of my career trying to help people do better planning. Unfortunately, this is often an uphill battle. I can appreciate a ready, fire, aim person – I want results too! But diving into the deep end of the pool doesn’t result in fine swimmers – it results in folks struggling to keep their heads above water long enough to ensure survival.

Is that how your content strategy implementation feels?

If you want more leads or more traffic or more influence it’s more likely to happen with a daily, weekly, monthly plan. The key is consistency. If you know where you want to go, you’re more certain the get there.

As a project manager by trade, I know that the project plan is the first piece of marketing collateral. That plan is what you use to convince your management that success is possible. Does your management or clients believe your ideas come to fruition through magic? Probably not.

If you have a well-thought out plan and execute it, you can track your results. After a few months of consistent results, you can evaluate your plan and see if any changes need to be made.

This type of tight execution is very attractive to upper management and paying clients.

If you’re making it up every month – inconsistent posting or materials that don’t seem to relate to one another your message gets lost.

What’s not attractive to the folks paying the bills is data that can’t be analyzed or is non-existent and results that can’t be tracked.

Define success

Make sure you understand why you’re producing content. One of the first reasons I hear when I ask why more or better content is needed is “My competitors are doing it.” That may be true, but why are you considering more or better content?

• More influence?
• More traffic to your website?
• Rank higher on Google?
• More sales leads?

It’s important to know why you’re doing this. Your content needs to reflect your goals. As a content project manager, I know that to get to a successfully completed project, I need to have specific deliverables.

As a writer, if I know what keywords you’re trying to rank for or what your campaign is trying to accomplish, I can help you get there.

When writing an update to my team and stakeholders explaining where we are in the process, defining progress is based on what is delivered. When producing a blog post or whitepaper, create it in light of the ultimate accomplishment.

If content cannot be traced back to why you created it, then you’ve got a hobby and you won’t achieve your business goals.

Be flexible

Some of us get very deep into the details of our daily work. We’ve seen it and worked on it for so long, we sometimes make assumptions as new information, design, or technology arrives. We aren’t very flexible.

This is a dangerous place.

Sometimes it’s hard to come out of our comfortable place, look around, and notice that some things have changed. As a project manager, we’re always trying to be in tune with what’s happening around us and any new risks – positive or negative – that may arise.

As a writer, I may have an angle on a story that seems very natural to me but isn’t to the client. Take the time to view the topic in a new way – it keeps the content fresh and new. There are thousands of new articles and blog posts added to the internet every day. Give your audience content that feels current with a great call to action and you’ll see results.

If you can’t commit, understand the limits

If it’s difficult to find the time to plan or you just haven’t taken the time to define success understand that any time spent on creating, publishing, or promoting content can’t be tied to business goals. You may get lucky and have a blog post go viral or a Tweet shared by an influencer. It is difficult to recreate that type of victory.

It’s phantom success.

That’s what I’ve seen. It feels great to have a blog post be found and shared. As the hype dies down, how do you replicate that success if you don’t know how you got there in the first place? It’s like going to a great restaurant, but you were blindfolded on the way and never knew the address. It’s a fluke to find it again.

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What have you learned over the past year about content marketing and managing content projects? Share in the comments.