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Usain Bolt once again dominated his track and field events at the Summer Olympics, putting the perfect finish on his last Olympics in Rio with three gold medals. For eight years, Bolt has been the standard of athleticism, triumph and competition. As the “fastest man in the world,” it seems as if Usain isn’t racing anyone but himself.

But he didn’t get there by taking sprints around the block. Bolt has trained his entire life to reach this pinnacle of athletic success. He says, “Competition is the easy part. Behind the scenes is where the real work is done and everything is done to get to that one race that you need to run.” 

In other words, the hard part comes when he’s training, not when he’s reached the primetime TV slot. Many brands probably know this applies to their methods of marketing as well. The glory of a successful campaign all pulled together, beautifully presented and generating leads, doesn’t come without the struggle, the back and forth and the elbow grease of developing good ideas that come to fruition.

While your brand might be the Usain Bolt of your industry, it’s important to remember that your team is more like the Jamaican relay team when it comes to the hard work behind the scenes. Marketing is the anchor that takes a company’s offering across the finish line ahead of all other competitors, but sales and product teams are the other relay members that bring the baton as far as they can. Bolt recognizes the critical help of his teammates; marketing should do the same.

To win the race, marketers need to constantly eye the competition in the surrounding lanes and put in the work before they reach the track. This takes a careful approach to company-wide teamwork, knowledge of your audience and a dedication to the game as a whole. To become the fastest company in the industry, take some advice from the fastest man in the world. 

Sales Team

One of the first places marketers focus their attention when trying to gain new customers, reach existing ones more effectively and increase company revenue is to partner with the sales team. Companies with closely aligned sales and marketing teams have 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates.

Most companies tie the success of these two departments together. In many cases, sales and marketing acts in tandem rather than independently. A successful company is one that has a clear line of communication between sales and marketing.

With efficient communication between departments, marketing can gain a better sense of their customers. If there is one thing that can deliver a competitive advantage it’s the use of buyer personas.

Companies who map these details and apply them to the buyer journey see 79% higher cross-sell and upsell revenue. Sales teams are often the professionals interacting with customers and hearing feedback about what is important. That information is critical to creating accurate and useful buyer personas.

The sales team is one member of the track relay team racing for the edge out in front. They help put marketing in an advantageous position when it is their turn to run. Together the two members finish the race as they hoped: in first place. Training for that hand-off before the race takes good communication, solid interdepartmental alignment and an understanding of how to work together.

Product Team

Another integral piece of a marketing team’s competitive strategy that is often overlooked because of the main focus on sales is alignment with the product team. Marketing must have an in-depth knowledge of their company’s offering to market it effectively. The best way to learn this information and apply it to any marketing campaign is to work with the product team at every stage of the process.

During innovation, marketing is able to see what the company ideals have been founded on. During development, marketing can see the evolution of an offering. And throughout it all, marketing can highlight the best and most beneficial features of a service or product that appeals to the customer. The best product teams will keep marketing goals in mind as well while doing their job to ease the collaborative process.

This is all the behind scenes work that elevates a company to the stage of competition. Usain Bolt would never have even seen an Olympic stadium without training and applying lessons learned to new strategies to get faster. As a team, the Jamaican runners trained individually, but bring the essentials and fundamentals of running a relay to their performance.

Marketing must do the same with the product team. They can each do what they do best, but at the end of the day, being on the same page will push a company to a higher level of necessity, loyalty and prominence in the customers’ minds.

Winning the Relay

Of course the Jamaican men’s 4×100 relay team couldn’t have won without the surge Usain Bolt provided in the last stretch, but ultimately it was their teamwork that set them up for success. Each individual put in the effort before the race to know how to run each 100 meters to the best of their ability. Marketing should be doing all they can to compete to the best of their ability, including building various relationships across an organization.

However, it’s all relative. After all, Usain Bolt runs 27 miles an hour, which is about 20 miles faster than the average human. But comparatively to other species, humans are quite slow. Considering the everyday house cat can run 30 miles per hour, Bolt has nothing on the animal kingdom. Marketers should remember this as well when looking to outdo their competition.

As a tiny company, your standard doesn’t have to match Coca-Cola or Apple. It should just outpace other tiny companies as you all aspire to grow to the heights and speeds of Olympic champions and Olympic-sized companies.

Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same strategies for a while, your content marketing plan needs to be better than ever for 2017.

Why? This year, you’ve got even more competition — according to Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers surveyed say they are creating more content this year than they did in 2016.

The first step to getting a leg up on the competition is to have a solid, smart content marketing plan in place. If you’re having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into why your business needs a content marketing plan and the exact steps you will need to take to create one.

Why Content Marketing Matters for Businesses

Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. Think about it — if you can create just one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an ebook or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on. 

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content. Plus, your content will not only help attract leads — it will also help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand. 

Now, let’s dive in to learn the specifics of how to create a content marketing plan.

7 Steps for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

1) Define your goal.

What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your 2017 strategy. (Want help figuring out the right goals? Download this goal planning template.)

2) Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content’s target audience — also known as your “buyer persona.”

This is especially important for those who are starting out or are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.

If you’re an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience.

3) Run a content audit.

Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make. For instance, if you’ve been doing weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be a one way to offer information in a different format. We’ll go over several different types of content you can use further down on the list.

If you’ve been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach. (Pro tip: Now is a great time to align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.)

4) Determine a content management system.

Have a system in place where you can manage your content. A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place using HubSpot software. Other content management system options include CoSchedule and WordPress (although we can’t speak to the full range of capabilities of these sites).

5) Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project. Here are some tools to get the wheels turning:

• HubSpot’s Website Grader: HubSpot’s Website Grader is a great tool to use when you want to see where you’re at with your marketing. From your blogging efforts to your social media marketing, Website Grader grades vital areas of your marketing and sends you a detailed report to help you optimize and improve each area. With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover new content ideas.

• What To Write: Get your mind gears going with What To Write’s unique content idea generator. This tool asks you questions that will help jumpstart your brainstorming. It also generates several blog post ideas for you after you’ve completed the questions, so you can use those ideas in your content marketing plan.

• HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator: Get blog post ideas for an entire year with HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator. All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you’d like to write about, and this content idea generator does all the work for you.

• Feedly: This popular RSS feed is a wonderful way to keep track of trendy topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

• Buzzsumo: Discover popular content and content ideas at Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is popular and well-liked, so this information will help you see which content ideas will do well.

• Content Forest: Content Forest offers free tools, which include KeywordKiwi and ContentIdeator. These tools will help you find popular content from your competitors, effective keywords to use in your content, and great content ideas all in one spot.
• Blog Post Headline Analyzer: CoSchedule’s tool analyzes headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume. If you have an idea in mind, run a few title options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorm process.

6) Determine which types of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create. Here are some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating and tools and templates to get you started.

Blog posts

If you haven’t already noticed, you’re currently perusing a blog post. Blog posts live on a website and should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors. Posts should provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share posts on social media and across other websites. We recommend that blog posts be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, but experiment to see if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads.

Read this blog post on how to write a remarkable post (meta, we know), and check out our free templates for writing great how-to, listicle, curation, SlideShare presentation, and newsjacking posts on your own blog.

Ebooks

Ebooks are lead generation tools that potential customers can download after submitting a lead form with their contact information. They’re typically longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract visitors to a website. Ebooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process: After reading a blog post (such as this one), visitors might want more content from an ebook and submit their contact information to learn more valuable information for their business. In turn, the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.

Check out these 18 templates to get started writing your first ebook.

Templates

Templates are a handy content format to try because they generate leads for you while providing tremendous value to your audience. When you provide your audience with template tools to save them time and help them succeed, they’re more likely to keep engaging with your content in the future.

Infographics

Infographics can organize and visualize data in a more compelling way than words alone. These are great content formats to use if you’re trying to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

If you need some more convincing, here’s an infographic about why you should publish infographics. If you’re ready to get started, get our templates for creating beautiful infographics in less than an hour.

Videos

Videos are a highly engaging content medium that are shareable across social media platforms and websites alike. Videos require a bigger investment of time and resources than written content, but as visual marketing increases in popularity, it’s a medium worth experimenting with.

We have some tips for making your first marketing video — read them here. You could also try your hand at live streaming videos on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Podcasts

Starting a podcast will help audiences find your brand if they don’t have time or interest in reading content every day. The number of podcast listeners is growing — in 2016, an estimated 57 million people listened to podcasts each month. If you have interesting people to interview or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with.

Here’s our comprehensive guide to starting a podcast.

External Content

Once you’ve been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, it might be time to start thinking about distributing your content on other sites. This could entail a few things:

• Publishing website content on social media sites, such as LinkedIn
• Repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog or social media sites
• Creating original content specifically for external sites, such as Medium

Here are some ideas for repurposing published content to generate more traffic. If you’re considering Medium, check out our insights from our first year of publishing original content on ThinkGrowth.org.

When you’re ready for more ideas, there’s a plethora of different content types to diversify your website. Check them out below:

7) Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create — it should also cover you’ll organize your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.

Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen — they’re just as relevant months from now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.

Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Thanksgiving in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates. If there are niche holidays that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media. Download TrackMaven’s ultimate list of national days to keep an eye on when you’re planning your calendar.

We know this is a lot of information, but the work has just begun. It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to adding tools to better manage your content, setting up your strategy for the new year won’t be a hassle if you follow the steps and explore the resources here. For additional guidance, use HubSpot’s Marketing Plan Generator to create a 12-month strategy in just a few minutes.

Happy creating, and here’s to a great year.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Think about everything you’ve bought in the last six months, specifically the big purchases. When was the last time you didn’t start a shopping trip with a Google search? If your answer is anything close to “I can’t remember,” you’re in good company. Every year, over 2.8 trillion search queries are made on Google alone.

A strong SEO strategy will help your business generate more leads and get found by potential customers, but search engines are constantly switching up and tightening up their criteria for high rankings. If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of search engines and their algorithms, how will you know what steps to take to help your business found?

OnPage.org and HubSpot have joined forces to bring you the answers you’re “searching” for with the foundational new ebook, What Is SEO? The Introductory Guide to Search Engine Optimization in 2017. It’s got data-backed, expert-recommended perspectives on:

• How search engines work, and what it takes to rank in them
• The keys to gaining inbound links to your site for improved off-page SEO
• Which performance indicators to track when analyzing SEO performance
• How to structure your web pages for maximum on-page SEO
• How to identify the keywords your target audience is searching for
• The keys to developing a successful SEO strategy geared toward ROI

Click here to download What Is SEO? The Introductory Guide to Search Engine Optimization in 2017.

If you work in a creative profession, you’ve likely battled with self-doubt at one point or another.

Perfectionism is the bane of any creative professional’s existence. Constant insecurity about the quality of your own work can cause creative paralysis and make it difficult to stay motivated. And that’s a big problem if being creative is how you make a living.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for developing confidence in your own work, but we’ve shared a few exercises here that will help get you started on the right path. Check them out below to start building creative confidence and a renewed sense of purpose in your work. 

4 Exercises that Boost Creative Confidence

1) Learn a creative skill outside your comfort zone.

If you’re a copywriter, take up photography. If you’re a graphic designer, sign up for a cooking class. If you’re a painter, try poetry.

It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it falls outside of your usual creative grind. Once you start earning a living in a creative field, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut — you’re getting paid to produce creative work in a single area, so why should you try anything that doesn’t directly relate to it?

Stepping outside of your creative comfort zone and trying a new skill can have a positive impact on your creative confidence. Author Srinivas Rao calls it creative cross-training, and it can help creative professionals embrace new points of view and come up with fresh ideas in their respective fields.

You don’t have to become an expert in the new field, you just have to try it out and commit to experimentation without self-judgment. Rao, a podcast host and writer, tried out realism drawing and found it gave him a new appreciation for everyday objects:

When I read the book Teach Yourself to Draw in 30 Days, I learned so many things about why nothing I drew ever looked real. I learned about the role that light and shadows play. I learned about how to create depth in my drawings. But more than anything, I learned how to see all the things that I had never noticed before when I looked at everyday objects.

Challenge yourself to try a new skill outside of your field for 30 days. Take a class, get a book on the subject, or just search the web for tutorials. It doesn’t matter how you learn it, as long as you commit to it fully and approach it with an open mind.

2) Embrace checklists.

Checklists end up getting a mention in many articles on productivity and creativity because they really work. Setting small, attainable goals and marking them as complete not only helps us keep big projects on track, it also boosts our confidence and gives us more creative freedom.

Worried that checklists are too rigid or confining to be useful in a creative profession? The exact opposite is true, according to psychologist and career coach Marty Nemko. “You won’t feel confined,” Nemko wrote in Psychology Today. “Knowing you’ll remember everything will free-up the brain space to use your creativity … safely.”

When we cross something off our checklist, our brains release dopamine — the chemical that makes us happy. Using checklists to stimulate dopamine levels can help us form productive habits and feel good about accomplishing attainable tasks — which in turn boosts our confidence. Psychologists call this effect self-directed learning.

When we acknowledge successful actions with a small reward (like checking off an item on a checklist), the resulting release of dopamine serves to “lock our attention to the current topic,” which researchers at the University of Colorado say plays a role in “encouraging focused practice on tasks where success is possible but not certain.” In other words, you’re more motivated to complete the next task, because your brain knows it’s going to be rewarded.

3) Start designing a flexible work process, not a rigid one.

Creative work can sometimes feel inherently unstructured (especially if you’re a freelancer or work from home), but designing a process you can continually come back to can make conquering creative projects more methodical, and less of a make-it-up-as-you-go kind of endeavor. Having a proven approach to creative work helps us build confidence, giving us a method we can fallback on if we ever hit a creative block.

Designing a process around your work doesn’t mean you need to immediately create a strict schedule for yourself or put intense expectations on your daily output. Going from no clearly defined process to a super-strict process overnight isn’t realistic, and you risk setting yourself up for disappointment.

When we put unrealistic expectations on ourselves to adhere to structured creative schedules, we usually only end up getting mad at ourselves when we fail to meet those lofty goals right away. This hurts our creative confidence, and makes us feel like we aren’t disciplined/talented/productive enough.

Start documenting your process to see what works best for you, and build a daily creative practice around what you discover. Keep a record of everything you do each day for a week (work-related and non-work-related), and look for patterns on the days you were most productive and motivated.

4) Build keystone habits.

Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, coined the term “keystone habits” to describe positive habits that have a strong correlation with other positive habits — like a ripple effect of positivity. For example, exercising regularly has been proven to increase confidence levels and lead to healthier eating and sleeping habits. When you adopt keystone habits, a lot of other things in your life tend to fall into place.

Building keystone habits around your creative endeavors can help you develop more confidence in your work, and increase your overall productivity on a daily basis. Start by cultivating positive daily rituals you’ll actually hold yourself accountable for, like developing a morning free-writing practice, preparing a meal completely from scratch, or even just making your bed. These seemingly small habits can add structure and intention to your day, resulting in more good habits and confidence down the line.