Before determining what kind of content you'll publish you must have set goals in mind for your content every quarter. These could be:

• brand awareness
• customer acquisition
• sales
• customer retention
• engagement levels

Every content marketing campaign you run must be designed to accomplish specific goals that align with your future business plans.

By defining your content campaign metrics you'll be able to ensure that every single piece of content and every campaign is data-driven which will ultimately raise the chances of success, but how?

Your metrics should be tied to the content foals you set for the quarter these can include:

• Page views
• Time on-page
• Bounde rate
• Social media shares and engagement
• SEO performance
• Newsletter signups and engagement

It's vital to conduct research to ensure that you're targeting the right audience. Some things that you should note down while conducting audience research and building personas that represent your ideal customer are:

• their demographics
• psychographics; and
• firmographics

By doing so you will better understand your audience and help you create personalized experiences for them.

Creating a quarterly content plan will increase your output content ten times more by knowing what type of content to create, these can include:

• social media
• webinars
• how-to guides
• blog posts
• infographics
• videos
• podcasts
• email newsletters and campaigns
• user generated content
• white papers

You should set aside the time to work out how much you're prepared to spend on the following:

• content strategy
• content creation
• content promotion

But how much should you budget for content marketing?

It really depends on several factors: the type of content you plan on creating, the volume of publishing, and the size of your business. However, marketing budgets in general should be between 7-12% of your total revenue.

A content workflow is a series of tasks that you must perform to ensure that each piece of content is perfectly crafted and created on time.

A well-designed content production workflow ensures that content creation runs smoothly and efficiently so ask yourself the following:

• Did your content production run smoothly?
• What parts of the workflow you feel needs improvement?

Content marketing has two critical stages:

• content production; and
• content promotion

In order to create an effective content promotion plan you can do the following:

• Understand the platforms where your audience frequents
• Outline the type of campaigns you'll run to track the performance of your campaign
• Define your content promotion KPIs; and
• Create a content promotion calendar