Content marketing is the logical evolution of social media, the practice that puts the theory into action. Many companies, whether B2B, B2C, enterprise or small business, are jumping on the content bandwagon. But lots are also missing the key connections that turn content marketing into leads and ROI.

1. Your content should serve your audience, not your company

I spent much of my pre-social media career in marketing communications. Back in the last century, the marcom team mostly wrote product literature, and customer success stories that were heavily product focused. There's still an important place for product-related content, obviously. But if you want a broad audience to read, share and remember your content, it needs to solve your audience's business problems. What's keeping your customers awake at night? How can you help them solve those problems?

If you don't know the answers to those questions, ask your customers. Or ask your sales people. Look at your web analytics and see what topics are bringing people to your site. Use a social media listening tool like Salesforce Radian6 to sift through the conversations and find the questions your customers are asking. Like you, your customers are busy, and looking for content that they can use right away to create value. 

Not convinced? Would you be reading this post if it was called, "Using Salesforce Radian6 to Drive Your Content Marketing Plan"?  

2. Volume and speed trump perfection and polish

Back in the old days of marcom, it wasn't unusual for a piece of content to be written by one writer, edited by another, laid out by a graphic designer and reviewed by what felt like half the company. A white paper or product literature might have a three-month production cycle. Things happen quickly in the age of the Web, and there's no doubt our attention spans are shorter. If you want to capture the imagination of your audience, your content needs to be timely. Can you shed some light on an issue in the news? Write a blog post about it and garner the benefit of those early search results. (David Meerman Scott tells this story much better than I can in his book, Newsjacking.) 

And as much as we'd like to think we're writing directly to an eager audience of customers and prospects, in reality we're writing for Google search. Purchasing decisions these days begin with a keyword search for the topic. The more content you have out there on a given topic, the more likely your audience is to find you.

Produce more content more quickly. Worry less about what it looks like. Get it out there. Publish or perish.

3. Content is wasted without a call to action 

Marketers worry about how to convert content pageviews into sales leads. If you write the world's most helpful blog post, how can you be sure it will influence the person who reads it? How do you even know who they are?

Every piece of content you create needs to have a call to action. Look at the end of this blog post. After I wrote it, some smart person (probably Amanda) put a link or button at the end to our Content Marketing Book. That's a call to action. Give your audience a reason to subscribe, or to request more information. Then not only can you add them to your contact list, but you can see if your content is valuable enough for people to put a little skin in the game to get it.

4. You're creating more content than you realize 

The most common question I get asked when I speak about content marketing is, "How do we find time to create content?" First of all, you're probably creating more content than you realize. Any time you find yourself sending someone an email explaining how to do something, or the impact on your business of a merger or a global development or sharing your expertise in some way, that's content. Put it on your blog. 

Your execs are probably creating presentations for internal or external use. If they don't have proprietary or confidential information, post them to SlideShare. Or get a writer (on your team or an outsourced writer) to turn that presentation into a blog post. Stick a video camera in the exec's face and ask her to tell you the three key takeaways from the presentation.

5. You don't have to create everything that you publish 

Nobody has time to read every article or blog post relevant to their industry, or to watch every video or webinar. Why not act as a curator for your audience? Publish a weekly (or daily!) post of the five most important pieces of content created by other people. Not only will you be creating content quickly and easily, but you'll be providing a service to your audience and demonstrating your industry knowledge. 

6. If content is king, engagement is the royal army

Another frequent question from enterprise marketers is, "Why should I be on Facebook or Twitter?" The early answers revolved around the necessity of listening to your audience and responding to questions, opportunities or complaints. That's still just as true as it ever was. But another key value of your social media channels is the ability to share your content. Post on your blog, then share on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Give your audience as many chances as possible to find your content. 

And if you're lucky enough to have an engagement team, they can be proactively searching those channels for people asking questions your content can answer.

7. Your video department doesn't have to look like a TV studio 

In fact, these days the "video department" of a lot of companies is contained within the iPhones of their employees. Again, back in the last century, a corporate video was a slick, highly-produced, scripted production that might take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars, or more. When was the last time you watched one of those and thought, "I need to show this to my team"? Again, there is still a lot of value in well-produced video that supports your corporate branding and key company messages.  But don't let production values stand in the way of telling a good story quickly.

8. Unlock the potential of your employees, customers, partners and influencers

Everybody is looking for content to share, and looking for outlets for their content. Your employees who are clued in to the value of social media want to share useful content with their followers on Twitter. Your customers and partners are looking for content for their blog, and places to share the content they create. The thought leaders, analysts, bloggers and authors who influence your community not only have great content to share, but they need to keep their social channels timely and relevant. Creating content-sharing relationships with these groups of like-minded folks could be as simple as asking.