1. How Much Do I Really Know About Content Marketing?

Content marketing is always updating and developing into something more, so it is important to do the research and keep yourself informed. Content marketing is is the practice of content including articles, web pages, blog posts, social media, videos, images, and infographics as a promotional vehicle for your business. Effective content marketing provides prospective customers with informational, entertaining, and relevant information, rather than using “salesy” jargon.

• Research companies that have been successful with content marketing.
• Read other blogs as well as what your competitors are doing. This will give you a lot of information to work with so you can come up with your own creative ideas. 
• Teach your team what you have learned and see if they have any ideas that can help. Keep updating your team as you learn new tips and tricks of content marketing. 

2. Who Is My Audience? 

Not knowing specifically who you want to target can cause confusion. Several new companies make the mistake of having too broad of a target buyer persona. Of course, you want to be able to sell to all types of people because the more the merrier right? You can still sell to all types of people but you have to narrow down who your product appeals to more and who you envisioned it helping. Have you ever walked into what you thought would be a nice family restaurant and then all the sudden your family is being bombarded by people acting wild or inappropriate and you decided you would never go back? The same thing can happen to your business. If you have too broad of a buyer persona, some people will get confused and go to some other company who understands them better and will not look back. As you grow so can the people you wan to target, creating multiple buyer personas. 

3. How Do I Keep Up With All The Content? 

There is going to be a lot of content that will need to have steady flow and constant updates. Social media, blogs and landing pages are a few examples of the content that is going to need focus and attention. You can post whatever you want on social media but if you want people to take you seriously and buy your services you may want to have a plan on how and what you post. following that, you'll want that information to be searchable, relevant, informational and appealing to someone who is looking for what you sell. Having multiple people managing the content portion of your marketing is probably going to save you time to focus on the other aspects. Staying organized and posting a blog once a month is not going to cut it. You need to stay on top of it in every aspect of your  content marketing plan.

4. How Do I Know What I'm Doing Is Working? 

Content marketing is measurable, it just takes time to get the right data points. Your content marketing efforts should be measured after six months or every quarter. You can do a quarter by quarter analysis using some of the following metrics:

• Value Indicators
• Converted leads and cost per lead
• Top of the Funnel Metrics- blog subscribers, social subscribers, website visitors, page views, conversion optimization, page rank, content shares, AdQuality scores, social engagement and followership

This type of information takes time and can be frustrating because most people want results right away but you have to give people time to get to know you. If you feel like this isn't working than you should research what others are doing to get some ideas on how to improve your content. There are a lot of factors why your result numbers go up and down but you if you stay consistent and are always updating your information, then you should start to see the number of buyers increase over time.