It’s that time of year. Marketing planning season has arrived.Do you know what it will take to win? Can everyone on your team state the goals you are working towards?I don’t just mean numbers of leads. I mean do they understand the specific goal, or strategy, for how you will win? These are goals such as “Increase monthly traffic by 30% within the next 6 months.” Or “Convert 15% more web visitors to contacts over the next year.”Goals are important and a goal for the number of leads you need to generate makes good sense to drive your business. But it’s not enough. It doesn’t help you or anyone on your team focus on the best opportunities for content marketing to get you to your overall goal. Imagine if the coach of your favorite team were asked how he planned to get to the championship and he declared the strategy was to “just win”. What chance would your team have against one that had an actual strategy for how to win? One that understood its own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its opponents?It will be a long, frustrating season watching a team with no idea how to improve their chances (except maybe to “work harder” at what they have always done). The players on the opposing team, however, would be able to focus their efforts to maximize their relative strengths and minimize their weaknesses. They would take advantage of their best opportunities to win.The key ingredient: specificity.A revenue or lead generation goal is not enough to guide your efforts. You need a content marketing strategy that is built to achieve a specific goal.Maybe you have been publishing a lot of content, but the results have been underwhelming. Does your content seem disjointed? Are your marketing efforts spread thinly across too many initiatives? Do random (but urgent) requests for new pieces of content keep you from gaining momentum?If any of this sounds like you, it may be time to step back and think about your marketing goals.Without specific goals, it’s easy to be distracted by ad hoc requests for more content or added activities because they all “fit” the broad lead generation goal. But if they aren’t aligned with your best opportunities, those requests will slow you down and actually hurt your results.Being as specific as possible about what you want to achieve will focus your efforts on activities that increase your chance of success while avoiding distractions.You are not alone.About 50% of companies doing content marketing don’t have a documented strategy. This is your chance to get ahead of the competition. The first step to being successful is to decide what you want content to do for you. And document it. The funny thing is that when you have a specific goal and focus on it, you are likely to achieve it.How to get started.Of course it makes sense to start with your business goals in mind. But those are often broad. Let’s say your business wants to grow by 4% next year. What are the best opportunities for your marketing team to help make that happen?Is there a specific geography where the market is growing rapidly? Are there new products or applications you can focus on? Is there a new segment you can penetrate with your technology? Is there a part of the buying cycle where you are underperforming? These are all areas that can be the focus of your content marketing plan.Begin with your overall business goal in mind. Then work with product marketing and sales to understand opportunities where content marketing can make a difference. Prioritize those opportunities and concentrate your efforts on achieving those specific goals. Just as importantly, avoid doing anything halfway. Casual efforts won't make an impact.Build a plan you can learn from.Make sure your goals contribute to a long term improvement in your marketing processes. You’ll be more effective in the long run if you can carry successes and lessons from one campaign into future campaigns.If you do a little bit of everything (the old way) you won’t succeed. On top of that, you won’t learn anything that will help you in the future.Once you have a targeted content plan in place with a specific goal, you’ll find that you don’t need to produce as much content as you might have thought. Fewer pieces of well thought out content can get the job done.“But we need to do all these other things.”I'm sure there are activities you can't get away from. Even if you are still doing many things, set at least one specific goal for your content marketing and develop a detailed plan to achieve it. If you accomplish nothing else, meeting this goal will give you a success that you can expand to other activities in the future.A better alternative.Whether you are on track to meet your goals for this year or not, the expectations for next year will certainly be higher.You may already feel stretched to the limit and wonder how you’ll be able to do more. Turning up the volume on the same old programs isn’t going to be the answer.If you are thinking there ought to be an easier way to do content marketing, you're right. Contact me and tell me about your challenges. Or check out my content planning tools.Photo credit: Valder137 via photopin ccTopics: Content Marketing