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Always start with the end in mind. What does your organisation want to accomplish? What’s the purpose of your efforts? The words “goals” and “objectives” are often used as synonyms, and yet there is a subtle but important difference. In this first stage we use the word “goals”, because this describes broad, primary outcomes. Objectives should be measurable, concrete and specific and will be defined after the analysis in the strategy stage.

In this first stage we need to know, and to agree, what those goals are, on both a company level and on the level of marketing and communication. This offers all of us a shared scope through which we will look at our next step, the analysis.

In order to enable us to make choices, for example about objectives, key messages, audiences, channels and other priorities, we need to have access to all the relevant information. We need the right data to help us to make well-founded decisions in the strategy stage (step 3).

We have identified 14 different areas to create a complete situation analysis:

• • Everything related to our audience

• • The context of our client conversations

• • The competition we are up against

• • Other external factors, such as regulation and cultural aspects

• • The skills available in our internal and external organisations

• • The structure and mandates of our organisation

• • The technological framework and policy of our organisation

• • Our resources to develop and execute our content marketing plan

• • The content that is currently available

• • The performance of our current content

• • Our current brand story and brand promise

• • The current and previous marcom activities

• • The current and previous lead generation methods

• • Our channel’s reach.

Obviously, the analysis stage can be very time consuming. It all depends on how much information is readily available to be included in your plan. If you don’t have time to perform a thorough analysis for each of the 14 areas, you can decide to live with that reality. If you need to work on assumptions, gut feelings and educated guesses, be sure you are aware of the limitations of that choice, and share that understanding with your team.

Strategy is all about boiling options down to choices. If you don’t make choices, there will be no clear direction and all that’s left is confusion. In the strategy stage, you will define SMART objectives and you will make decisions about, for example, key audiences and key messages, priority channels, available resources, KPIs and metrics. This is also the moment when you have to write down your content mission statement, describing what your content efforts will do for your audience in order to engage with them and develop a mutually valuable relationship.

Once you have completed this step, you are half way through the Agile Content Marketing Roadmap. Experience teaches us that the strategy should be shared and promoted throughout the company. It’s a crucial moment for everyone because it’s the basis of all further activities and efforts.

It’s also a key element if you want to be successful in the next step: creative concept development. The strategy and other elements of your analysis will be the building blocks of a clear briefing for your creative agency or colleagues.

Bring in the right-brained people! The first three steps needed some creativity but they were predominantly analytical. Now’s the time to challenge the creative talents who work for your organisation, internally or as an agency for example, to the maximum of their abilities. There’s so much content available for your audiences that you have to be sure that your content is ‘epic’ enough to stand out of the crowd and do its work.

The creative concept is essential to ensure that your content marketing activities have long-term potential. To mention a few elements, it should have a clear signature in order to link it to your brand; it should be scalable so that you can easily create a long-term content calendar and it must be consistent across all media outlets, channels and customer contact points.

Content marketing is not a campaign, it’s a process! More than that, it’s a commitment to your audience and to your organisation. This means that you have to create a solid foundation on which you can build your content programme. The right organisational set-up and effective and efficient tools will help you to operate like a publisher.

You have defined your objectives, your KPIs and your metrics. This means that you can use all available data to monitor your results and hunt for ways to improve them. If, in spite of all your previous analytical and creative efforts, the results don’t meet your expectations, you can start the process of identifying the cause of the problem. Were your expectations too high and unrealistic? Should you modify your delivery strategy and switch channels? Can you improve results by changing tone of voice? Etc., etc.

You are now able to tweak and polish your programme into perfection. And remember, it takes a long time to create overnight success!