'What's your strategy when it comes to content?'

                    'Errrrrmmm' ...followed by a long, lingering pause. 

This is too often the reaction to the above question. The long and short of it is: planning is paramount and jumping into content marketing without one is like driving blindfolded. Okay - perhaps not that disastrous, but basically, your efforts are unlikely to yield any genuine value.

Think about it this way: if 50 customers and 50 prospects were due to watch you speak on stage tomorrow, would you try and wing it, or would you prep beforehand? 

Unfortunately, it's not everyday that 100 of the 'right' people rock up to hear what you have to say. Carefully formulating a content strategy with your team is a much better idea, and here are 4 questions to get the ball rolling.  

1. Who is your target audience? 

Who are the 'right' people that should be consuming your content and regularly engaging with your business? 

2. What should the focus of your content be?

What key messages do you want to be giving out? Remember, relevance is everything.

3. Are there any regulatory issues? 

What shouldn't you say? Consider creating an editorial policy or an approval process for sense-checking purposes.

4. What does success look like? 

This will give you and your team a goal to work towards. This could be measured on the actualisation of your efforts (e.g. 28 blog posts every month, or 52 newsletters in 1 year) or the reception of your content (perhaps a 20% boost in website traffic, or 1,500 shares on social).