Implementation is an Essential Part of Planning Your Content Marketing Strategy

How do you create a content marketing strategy that really works? Let me share an effective strategy that’s centered on your blog. Your blogging creates the core of your content marketing strategy. It’s the driving force behind it. In other words, without it, any content marketing strategy that you create has no direction and no purpose and no goal.

It’s like a donut. All you do is go around and round and round. But you never get to the center of what you’re doing.

The word strategy means different things to different people. That causes problems of its own. Some people mean to plan. Others mean to plan and to implement. And there are some other definitions, but these two are sufficient for what we’re doing.

Planning is fine as far as it goes. If you decide that you want to travel from Los Angeles to New York, you have to decide whether to fly, drive, take the train, or go on a very long cruise through the Panama Canal. You have to plan what clothing to take. When you want to leave and when you want to get there. You have to decide how long you intend to be there. Is it for a week, a month, or are you moving there? If you’re driving, then you need a map. If you’re flying, then you need to figure out how to get from your house to the airport. If you’re taking the train, then you probably will need to go online to find out what’s available. And if you’re planning to take a cruise, then you’ll need to contact the company that provides that service.

But, you won’t be able to just sit there in your living room, close your eyes, and imagine getting there. Because when you open your eyes, you’ll still be in your house, sitting there in your living room. So planning is key, but by itself it’s not enough.

In order for your plan to work you have to implement it. You have to do what you decided to do. I know that sounds really obvious, but I wouldn’t be saying it if most people did it. The truth is, they don’t. They talk about how great it will be when they get there, but they never take the steps that are necessary to make the journey.

You can plan from now until the last day of your life, but if you don’t do anything about it, nothing will change. You can have the perfect plan, but if you do nothing, you won’t go anywhere. Will Rogers famously said “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

How could that possibly be? It’s because there are others who are implementing their content marketing strategy and they’ll walk right over you. You have to decide if you’re going to get going, or become a doormat for those who do.

Optimizing Your Content Marketing Strategy by Evaluating Your Results

There’s another element though to creating a content marketing strategy, and many people overlook this. Even big companies quite often fail to do this. It’s that you have to evaluate your results. Big companies look at the results, but they rarely attribute failure to achieve those results to a flaw in their content marketing strategy. Usually they blame their employees for not implementing it. But, at the end of the day, it’s the lack of implementation that they blame. That certainly is a valid reason for a lot of people, and I’ve just talked about that. But there’s another side of this you need to think about. If your content marketing strategy is flawed, you can implement it all you want, and still not get the results that you’re striving for.

That part is overlooked by many people. Not just big companies.

In this training I’m going to teach you how to not only create that content marketing strategy. But, also how to implement it. You have to make sure that you have the right foundation, and practical structure, but you also have to have a plan in place so you’ll be able to do it. You will have to revise both of these constantly in order to reach your goals.

I’m reminded of an instance when I was quite young. I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old. My father and I were out in a big field, I mean a really big one, it was probably a mile to the nearest farmhouse at least. You know, when you’re only 4 or 5 years old you’re thinking that it could take you a whole day just to walk there. And then another day to walk back.

Anyway, my father was flying his airplane, it was probably one of those early radio controlled designs. And there was another guy about 100 yards or so away who also had an airplane. And this guy was doing his best to fly his plane, but he just couldn’t really get it to work. I think at some point it came in for a pretty rough landing. They guy went over to his plane, he took the motor and all the other mechanical bits out of it, and then he proceeded to kick the rest of the plane to pieces. Now I have to tell you, as a 4 or 5-year-old I thought that was really cool. I took great pleasure in bringing some of the pieces home with me. My dad later told me that there was nothing wrong with the plane. It was the engine and the mechanical stuff that guy had kept that was the problem. You know, the same thing is true here. You need to evaluate both halves. The plan and the implementation if you want to accomplish what you set out to do.

It’s absolutely fatal to assume that you know what’s broken.