The New Year brings a clean slate and yet, you’re already feeling pressure to generate more leads.But your marcom team is stretched to the limits of its capacity. Somehow you need to do more than you did last year. Produce more content. Nurture leads more effectively. Maybe you are missing a critical skill on your team and would like to fill that gap.So you are going to hire someone.If you have missed a critical step, you could be making an expensive mistake. You might have good reasons to hire someone.Sure, adding headcount will give you more capacity. You might be able to add new skills to your team. Whatever the reasons for the hire, you won’t get the best return on that investment (or even your existing team) without a clear content marketing plan.Things might get incrementally better with your new hire. But you probably won’t see the big change you were hoping for until you have the right plan in place. By the way, many companies have a list of assets to be created and events to attend, and call it a plan. But really it’s just a list.An actual content marketing plan will show you exactly which assets you need and how they will work together to accomplish your goals.Hiring another person to do more of the same will get you a little more of the same results. If that’s all you need, you’ll probably pay too much.Ask yourself these four questions before you decide:

1. Does everyone on my marketing team (product marketing and marcom) know specifically what our goals for 2015 are with respect to target customers, products to focus on and the expected results in a defined time frame?
2. Is every marketing activity focused entirely on those specific goals?
3. Do you have well-defined personas that describe your target customers for each of those goals so that you can develop content and campaigns that are relevant and engaging?
4. Do you have a plan to create a collection of content that works as a system to attract new customers and turn them into enthusiastic brand advocates?

If you answered “No” to any of those questions, your marketing is less effective than it could be. Doing more of that is just plain expensive (not to mention unsatisfying). Who wants that?Putting a content plan in place first increases your chance of success. With a complete content marketing plan, you may discover you don’t need more capacity. Just doing things differently may solve your problem. Or you may realize that you have need for a different skill set than you had originally thought.Either way, you’ll be moving forward with a plan that is easier to execute, more effective at generating and closing leads, and a process that will make every future plan a simple exercise that doesn’t take weeks to develop. If you choose to add someone, your new hire will start her job on a team that is already working efficiently and that she can quickly contribute to.A plan like this can be completed in a matter of days, a week at most.  When you are done, you’ll know exactly what content you’ll need to move prospects all the way through your funnel. Not just adding names to your list, making up assets to keep them warm or a lot of feature-heavy sales tools. You’ll have a system that will take them through every step of the buying process.The plan will also give you an outline based on real customer needs for any piece of content you decide to create. And once you have developed this plan, next year’s plan (unless you introduce a product unlike anything you’ve ever sold before) will take less than half the effort. You’ll be executing while your competitors are deciding which holes in the funnel they can plug with chewing gum and duct tape.So what will you do? Will you hire another person to do more of the same for an incremental improvement in your results or take a few days to improve the way you do everything and (excuse my enthusiasm) start kicking your competitors’ you know what right now?