Serendipity is a wonderful thing. But unfortunately not many of us have the luxury of living life on a whim in search of it. We need to put some degree of thought, structure and planning into pretty much everything we do.
I mean … would you consider taking a road trip without at least first charging your mobile device, downloading Google maps, ensuring there’s cash in the wallet, change of clothes and basic sustenance? You might harbour dreams of doing a Kerouac – but let's face it, not that many of us could cope with the reality.
And so why do so many content marketers still not have a fully defined content marketing plan in place? Findings from CMI's B2B content marketing Benchmark, Budgets and Trends 2017 reveal that although a whopping 89% of B2B marketers use content marketing, only 37% of them have a documented strategy.
A further 41% state that they do have a plan, but amazingly it’s not documented.
If a plan is not documented how can its effectiveness be measured and how can the rest of an organisation understand and contribute to it? If it can't be accessible or measurable - is it really a plan at all? The danger of leaving your content to happenstance is that although the outcome could be fortuitous, it could also be bad … very bad.
So defining some sort of plan and documenting it before embarking on a content journey makes sense.
It doesn’t have to be complex, costly, cover too long a period of time, be too time consuming to generate, or written in stone. In fact, ensuring it remains flexible to improvements will only increase its chances of success.
And so for those of you that are maybe struggling to put that all important plan in place, or review and update the current one, here are a few guidelines to get you going ….
