This is the third in a series of blog posts written by Adam Robinson, Director of Marketing at Cerasis.  Founded in 1997, Cerasis is a top freight logistics company and truckload freight broker.

Now that you know about how to create a strategy, you have to execute it. This means content creation, content curation, and using the best tools possible to be effective.

#1: Content Planning

Categorize Target Audience By

• Industry: For example, we knew that within our target audiences, we had the following industry categories: Manufacturing, Distribution, Supply Chain, Logistics, Transportation
• Job Function: Next you then need to understand who are the buyers and what are their personas? Once you do this, you can weave in messaging into your content that speaks to all of them. At Cerasis, we knew our job titles were: C-suite, Managers, Employees

Create Content to speak to categories

Now that you have the categories, it’s time to create and plan for content. When you are coming up with topics, make sure you write the categories down and start creating headlines and doing research in those categories. You will notice on the Cerasis blog that there are broad categories like you see from the ones stated above, but over time we started shifting towards creating sub categories of those broad categories (e.g. Reshoring under manufacturing, or inbound logistics under logistics).

Ways to Generating Content Ideas

• Internal Interviews and Brainstorms
• Use an RSS aggregator such as feed.ly so you can curate articles and start to better understand the marketplace
• Be active in Social and Notice Most Shared

Using a Calendar

Whether you are doing one post (or more) per day or just one per week, a calendar is vital to long term success. If you don’t know what you are writing about each day, it is really easy for you to NOT write it and NOT achieve your goals. Content marketing is an ongoing project plan, and you can use tools such as Asana to have multiple people share the same workspace and work through the content.

Look out for Guest Bloggers

Another great idea for scaling content marketing and not burning out is to reach out to influential bloggers to guest blog for you. Or these can be other companies who are noncompetitive but share a similar target audience. We have had several guest bloggers that line up nicely and are relevant to our content categories. However, don’t take anyone that doesn’t add value to your readers. Think like a publisher and protect yourself from those spammy guest bloggers. You also must be proactive in networking and reaching out in social platforms as you establish relationships online such as on LinkedIn and Twitter.

#2: Content Creation

This is really where most companies get stuck. At Cerasis we leverage our employees and interviews to help get content written. You can also use great ghost writing services if you would like, but I would urge you that you write in house, as you know your authentic voice. The key is to stick to a regular schedule. Sporadic posts are going to find it difficult to build an audience. Think about your TV guide and the schedule of shows. You don’t always have to watch it the day it airs, but at least you know that it will be there.

#3: Content Distribution

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it really make a sound? This old adage is very true when it comes to content and social media marketing. If you are not posting your content in any of the social media channels or online communities, then you are not going to be effective either. Even with search engines out there crawling your new content, search engines are now favoring social signals from sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

We recommend the following tools to use to distribute your content:

• Oktopost: This is a fantastic platform for distributing content as well as analyzing your performance. Their strong suite is the ability to post into multiple LinkedIn groups and mimic the categorization of your content through tagging of your groups. You can also post to many platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn pages, profiles, and groups, Google+ and more. Our favorite feature is the Autoposter. This feature allows you to load up a cache of content and set a schedule in the future so you don’t have to use resources to post every day. In one sessions you could set up a 30 day posting schedule right in the platform and view on a calendar!
• Buffer: This platform is great for content curation. You can load in your social profiles and then set pre-determined times on any day. We really love buffer for mostly Twitter, since Twitter is much like a newspaper where you go to find all the latest news and articles on topics of interest to you. Each morning we load up our RSS aggregator, feed.ly, and buffer all the best articles for our audience.
• Feed.ly: We love feed.ly as it allows to mimic (again) our content categorization but for other sources! It’s also a great way to find other blogs and influencers in your space you can network with and potentially guest blog for. All you have to do is search for content by keyword, add them in the respective category and bam, in one platform you have your own customized newspaper from which you can curate content. It’s got the buffer app loaded in so you can easily add articles to your buffer. This is also a great way to find new ideas for content and keep you up to date on your industry!
• Tweetdeck: This platform is owned and maintained by Twitter, but allows you to not only post to and monitor your account, but also allows you to monitor industry hashtags, such as #manufacturing or #logistics so you can start to follow and interact with those in your target audience. It’s a great tool and we recommend using it!