If you haven’t already, set content goals, otherwise you’ll be starting off a journey without sat nav!
What do you want to achieve by the end of the year and reverse engineer back through the four quarters then the individual months.
You might want to align content with a particular audience or offering and set goals on increasing website visits, dwell time, sign ups, downloads and form fills. Be as clear as possible, especially if there is a direct correlation to resource utilisation (discovery calls, demos, visits) or spend.

SMART goals mean being really specific like adding 50 new email subscribers by the end of February.

The best way to avoid a disappointing marketing year is to not take on too much. Doing a few significant things is better than shipping lots of very average projects just a box ticking exercise.

That’s why it’s important to project to the end of the year, work back, break down goals to smaller, more manageable targets and stick to your plan.

It’s likely you’ve got a long list of things to create but are they truly linked to the organisation’s sales, growth and brand goals?

To have a great year in content marketing, you need to rethink your content marketing to do list and re-configure it to speak specifically to your goals. That way you’ll stay on target and do your best work.

Breaking your high level goals right down into specific actions to take, monthly, weekly and daily will ensure you’re always moving forward.

Want to create a new website? Break it down into pages. Want to write an ebook or buyers guide? Break it down into chapters and each segment within them. Want a month’s worth of social media posts. Start with day one.

A successful year is based on a consistent effort and application 52 times during that year.

Or each week. And the best way for each week to be successful and forward focused is by planning ahead.

Plan ahead by blocking time, ensuring you have the research, resources and outlines needed to then do the work when it is scheduled are sure fire ways to get the most important things done.

If you’re writing web pages, blogs, landing pages and social media content, take time to really understand how SEO can help your digital content reach more people.

Use free resources like SearchEngineLand, Moz or Hubspot to get a full picture if you’re a newbie and use Google Webmaster Tools to inform your keyword focus, and content. And make sure new posts and pages are shared across your social media – including the often overlooked Google my Business listing.

Whereas having an eye on SEO will help you grow your website visibility, ranking and traffic, email marketing will help you build an opted-in subscription list to communicate and position timely content and offers to.

Email marketing helps content marketers build trust and authority.

Strong, regular email marketing – and not just a monthly newsletter but sharing web content as it publishes, creating new sign up and offer nurture sequences – consistently creates more sales ready leads for businesses.