You’ve decided to get started with content marketing for your small business.  There are a lot of ways you can funnel leads into your sales pipeline with content, but it takes strategy and commitment to make it work.

Here are steps to plan your strategy and content creation so it’s effective for your lead generation.

Dial-in Your Attitude

Why do does your business want to do content marketing?  Do have some genuine insight that goes beyond promoting your products?  Are you willing to offer authentic advice, even if it gives people alternatives to working with you?

Remember that content marketing is not direct-response sales copy.  It’s not all about you and trying to convince leads.  Instead, it’s a genuine effort to help consumers make the right choices.  You’re not trying to sell to everybody, you’re trying to connect with people who will genuinely benefit from your offer.

Gary Vaynerchuck puts it nicely:

Content marketing is about earning attention rather than winning it.  Your attitude needs to start with a willingness to help people without expectation of anything in return.  Only that way will you create the type of content people will appreciate and respond to.

Set Your Goals

You need to be specific about your content marketing goals.  Do you want to develop broad awareness?  Are you trying to create more connections with influencers in your industry?  Are you looking to improve your SEO?  Is everything about getting more leads?

It is okay to acknowledge that your main motivation for starting a content marketing campaign is to generate leads.  But also remember that lead-generation is an end-result that is derived from achieving many other goals.

For example, with social media marketing, you’d likely be disappointed if you try to track direct leads from the effort.  Rather, your goal there is to increase brand awareness.

Your goal for native advertising may be to get more website visits and increase your retargeting lists.

Your content marketing goals target prospects in various phases of the buying cycle.  Make sure you understand those specific goals, and also how they interconnect with your overall lead-generation.

Avoid the common pitfall of thinking every phase of content marketing is about direct, measurable lead generation.  This will cause you to abandon efforts that have longer term pay-offs.

Develop a Strategy

Now you’re ready to talk strategy.  First, identify the people on your team and the assets they’ll need.  Then look at your target audience and what your competition is already doing.  How will you stand-out?

Set time-frames, benchmarks, and budgets.  Decide how you’ll measure activity and results.

Strategy work is where your team needs to develop an idea for the voice your brand will use in your content.  As a business, you need a certain consistency in style and tone – one that reaches your audience and represents your brand.  Ask:

• Who are we?
• Why do we do what we do? 
• What are we like to deal with? 
• What three adjectives best describe our company? 
• How can we put our product into a context that goes beyond just features and benefits? 
• How can we develop a story with a point of view, humor, tension, or surprise? 
• How do we create a voice that gives our business a unique feel that always recognizable? 

Perhaps most importantly, develop a strategy for how you’ll maintain consistency with your content development.  The biggest killer of content marketing campaigns is that they peter-out.  Everyone starts with enthusiasm, certain of success.  But as months go by, efforts start to drop-off.  “Busy with other things” becomes a go-to excuse.

If your content marketing strategy doesn’t include a way to sustain your efforts for at least two years, you might as well not even start.  This is a long-term strategy that requires sustained, consistent effort.  Plan ahead for how you’ll keep it up.

Plan Your Tactics

Now that you have a strategy in place, you can better understand what tactics will work for your business.

Look at your target audience to determine what social media platforms you need to be active on.  Not every business needs to use every type of social media.

Get your copywriters in place and create a content calendar or checklist so everyone knows what content is where.  Determine how voice will impact the different types of content you create.  Create lists of the different places you’ll publish and how often you’ll do so.

Plan video creation and how you develop that type of content.

Consider how you’ll move people from your informational content to your more promotional material, including the touches and time-frames needed to move leads further into the buying cycle.  Your advertising will work in conjunction with your content marketing, and in some cases may overlap.

Last, develop your calls-to-action and how you’ll take the awareness, connections, and trust you’ve created and turn it into leads.

Execution

Last comes the step that many businesses – mistakenly – do first.  Execute your tactics and start developing your content.

Again, keep your team (or yourself if your doing this alone) motivated and connected.  An initial blast of execution won’t be effective if your efforts dwindle later.

Also, be prepared to modify your content marketing as you go.  You may realize that certain strategies and tactics are not working.  When your data shows a well executed tactic isn’t meeting goals, make changes.  This type of marketing is almost never static.

But remain committed to your overall strategy.  Keep in mind that there’s a certain amount of serendipity involved with content marketing.  As you broaden your reach across more channels, you make unexpected but valuable connections.

Making connections underlies what content marketing is all about.  You create more awareness and get permission from people to share your content.  As those relationships develop, your best leads discover you and learn how you can help them.

In the end, when they become a lead, the sales process is easy.  They already know and trust you.  They understand how you can help them.  By the time they are ready to make a decision, you are the natural choice.

It’s not easy or quick, but when it works, it’s marketing at its best.