Content and the marketing that goes along with it is an important building block of any digital marketing campaign. When handling content marketing, there are specific phases you should know about go through in order to make them effective. Skipping phases is not recommended, no matter how confident you are. These phases exist to help you succeed and achieve your goals.

The following is a breakdown of the phases and why they are important to your content marketing:

Creating a content marketing plan:

Before jumping into creating purpose, you need to know what your goals are and whether the content you have in mind serves the purpose of achieving that goal. When creating content, you want to reflect on all the phases of the buying cycle that a customer will go through. You want your content to speak to people in the various stages of the buying cycle.

If you are only focusing your content on one stage of the buying cycle, you are leaving the rest out and missing entire audiences that might otherwise be interested in what you have to say. When planning your content, make sure you know what the purpose of it will be. One week you may focus on one phase of the buying cycle and the next you may focus on another. Make sure you give each phase the spotlight. This can be done by creating a schedule.

Creating content:

Once you have a plan for your content, you will know what you’re writing and when. This takes a lot of pressure off of coming up with ideas last minute. When you sit down to write, you will know what you’re writing about. Sometimes, when writing a piece of content, you will have more ideas come to you, so keep a running list of ideas that you can refer to when you’re planning future content.

If you aren’t much of a writer yourself or lack the time to create content, you can hire someone to create the planned content for you. Make sure you hire someone who has a good reputation and will put forth their best work for you. When hiring someone, either a firm or an individual, make sure that you are allowed into the content creation process. You should be able to approve titles, the work, and the schedule.

Promoting the content:

Now that you’ve written some great content, you need to promote it. Chances are your content will be discovered by people, but why not get it in front of more eyes by promoting it on social media? If your followers are interested in your industry, company, or brand, they will probably be interested in the content you create. Better yet, they may even share your content with their followers, leading to even more eyes on your content. Promoting your content doesn’t take much time, but it’s time well-spent.

Each stage of content marketing matters and should be treated as important. By following each phase, you can increase your chances of achieving your content marketing goals and goals you have for your business.