There can not be enough stress put on the age old quote of “forms follows function”. If you haven’t heard of this before, it means: you need to know how something functions before you start thinking about all of the extra details of what it will look like. The same rule applies when dealing with content marketing.
You need to know what your plan of action for your company is before you start promoting it. You can’t tell everyone about this awesome new whitepaper, video lecture, fact sheet, or how-to article if it hasn’t been created yet. You need to have a plan of upcoming content that you are going to write before you start yelling it from a mountain top.
You want to create a content marketing plan months in advance of when you plan on releasing them. Think about what will be happening at that time in the year, what your customers find valuable,and what changes may be taking place. These are all things you need to consider when in the planning stage.
After you create a list of deadlines, start writing content! Once you get everything all organized, then you can work on scheduling, promoting, and marketing. Things run much more efficiently if you have content scheduled out in advance, because you allow yourself time to change it or work on other things. Doing these backwards or not allowing yourself enough time to do both effectively can lead to a bad working environment that is extremely stressful. Have a plan and save yourself the trouble; content first, marketing second.