WORKWEEK

1. You need a narrative. You need a throughline. You need a point of view. If you don’t have a product marketing team that has defined that through audience and market research, then it is your job to do so. You will need to work with your founders or c-suite, and will need their alignment. 
2. You live or die by your operations. Build your content operations and project management system for scale from day one. You will need to refine it over time, but setting clear stages, timelines, and processes will make or break your program as you scale––and you will scale.
3. Distribution is internal. What your sales team wants to share with their prospects is likely the best indication of what your prospects want or need to hear, read, or see. Work closely with your sales team, or any internal team close to your customers or prospects, to understand what it is they would most want to share with that audience (ask them what they wish existed)––and keep a close watch on which channels they share that message in. Social media isn’t often the decision channel. 
4. Build journeys, not assets. Building a content strategy means asking what happens next. No asset lives alone. What will someone engage with next? What do you want them to engage with next? How can you move your audience through a journey with your brand, to tell them your narrative, sway them to your point of view? One asset alone won’t do it. Build a journey. Connect the experience. Help your entire organization do the same. 
5. A need begets an asset. Create assets when a need for the asset appears––i.e. A new goal, a new strategy, a new go-to-market play, etc. Too many content marketers get stuck on a content creation hamster wheel of their own making. If your internal team isn’t asking for it, if it doesn’t support a goal, if folks aren’t signing up to distribute it––don’t create it. 
6. Content attribution should measure impact. Impact can be best measured as causing an action, specifically one related to the next step in a journey. You want folks to click, to watch, to sign up, to share, to schedule, to show up, to sign a contract, to pay. Different assets have different impact, but you want to know which assets have the most impact, so you can create more of them. Which leads me to… 
7. Volume isn’t bad. You won’t know what is most impactful if you don’t create enough assets (that your internal team wants to distribute) to see what works. Volume isn’t bad. Creating content without purpose is, though. Creating a high volume of content with sturdy content operations infrastructure is. But volume alone? No. Volume itself is not bad. 
8. Repurpose what works, not what’s busywork. When you find what creates impact, repurpose again and again and again. Make more variants and versions of those. Update them. Expand them. Create executive summaries for them. Hell, build them into your narrative. Whatever you do, do not repurpose for the sake of repurposing alone. This is busywork, and the bad kind of volume. 
9. Elevate the underappreciated expert. Tell other people’s stories. Find the underappreciated experts. Your customers. Your engineers. Your customer support team. Your partners. Your investors. Reveal the genius of others in your content. Make what seems like innate product or industry knowledge to them the star of your assets. 
10. You are the editor-in-chief. You exist to ensure the narrative is consistent, the journey cohesive, and the operations running smoothly. Delegate the rest. Most likely, you should use freelancers or agencies to write so that you can focus on those other three things; They are a full-time job. 

Everyone judges a book by its cover, which is to say that the look & feel of your content matters. Design matters. Readability matters. Work closely and well with designers. Elevate their work. Support their careers. Make sure they know that your success and theirs are tied. They are.