Content Marketing Is One Percent Planning, Ninety-Nine Percent Perspiration

You can have the best content plan in the world, but if you have no means of producing and amplifying the content, then it means jack shit.

Whether your beautiful plan holds up or not, it all comes down to how much effort you put into it.

Content marketing is an iterative process. Brands all use the same guiding principle: plan the content, create it, distribute it and optimise. The process is an iterative one, and it is only through doing it over and over again day in day out, that you start seeing results. This is the story of every editorial team’s life.

Content marketing is designed to build on itself. The returns that you get next year will be higher than this year as you build the learnings into the next batch of content.

You get out of it what you put in. Look at the data and harness the collective experience of your team to come up with the best content plan you possibly can. Work out how to tell your story and the best way to distribute it.

Think of every single decision as a secret ingredient. Identify the right amount of each ingredient, mix them all up in your cauldron and stir it up to create your magic potion.

As an industry, we focus too much on the strategy and concepts. We don’t focus enough on the doing. We downplay creation and make light of the craft of creating great content. It takes commitment and not many people can do it well.

Making stuff is hard. There is no template on how to create a successful piece of content. You just need to keep on creating. And through the process of doing it over and over again, you learn from it. About what works and what doesn’t.

You’ll only know if something works if you put it out there. Until you put it in front of an audience, you can speculate till the cows come home about whether the piece of content is effective.

Don’t fall into the analysis paralysis trap. You plan based on your experience and knowledge, but at some point, you need to let it go. Just get on with it. Data points are historical. You need to have a leap of faith at some point.

Had titles like i-D, Vogue and Dazed follow data points all the time, they would have lagged behind the fashion curve and not be the fashion tastemakers they are today. To innovate, you need to be ahead of everyone else. To go where no one has gone before, there is no rule book or a 10-point plan to follow. There is a set of guiding principles that acts as your compass, but beyond that, you’re on your own.

You just need to get up everyday and keep on creating.

Enjoy the process.