The Content Marketing Bucket List

By Michael Brenner, Published on August 21, 2012

Content Marketing Bucket list 300x220 The Content Marketing Bucket ListContent marketing is a hot topic of discussion in almost every marketing organization.

As business buyers and consumers continue to tune out the increasing noise of product promotion from brands, content marketing is being called out as the answer to the declining response rates and increasing costs of outbound marketing.

But hey, change is hard. And many organizations are struggling to keep up with the new rules of the digital age.

Remember that life is short and you may only have one shot at helping your organization implement the kind of transition it needs.

So here is the content marketing bucket list to help you prioritize where you should start. What would be first on your list?

  1. Identify how much traffic your website gets from “early stage” keywords
  2. Calculate how many of your leads come from inbound sources
  3. Calculate the cost of content that never gets used
  4. Empower a formal Content Strategist to lead your content marketing efforts
  5. Prioritize your key buyer personas and their content needs
  6. Audit your content relative to your buyers’ needs and identify any gaps
  7. Assign content gaps to your subject matter experts
  8. Establish a content curation strategy
  9. Create a non-promotional and dynamic content destination for your business
  10. Create an editorial calendar for your content publishing
  11. Create content by buyer stage
  12. Identify your top social influencers by topic
  13. Start a formal thought leadership program
  14. Integrate your paid, owned and earned media activities
  15. Establish a social listening platform (keywords, measures, baselines, a listening tool and templates)
  16. Conduct buyer research to identify the top challenges and channels for each persona, by stage
  17. Train your employees on the art of storytelling
  18. Identify your content conversion paths
  19. Define a strategy to test and create visual content (photos, slideshare decks, videos, infographs, etc.)
  20. Finally, stop the waste and just create great content!

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments below and follow the conversation on Twitter,  LinkedIn, Facebook or Subscribe to the B2B Marketing Insider Blog.