Whatever level you are at when it comes to content marketing – beginner, intermediate or advanced – it is important to know (and master) the fundamentals. Here’s your A to Z guide to content marketing.

Action

Your content should get your audience to take action. When you boil down your content, your message should compel your audience to do something.

Budget

To grow your content marketing efforts, you will need to grow your budget. While you can still do a lot of innovative content marketing tactics on a shoestring budget, it always helps to have money to add staff and create more original content.

Commitment

There are a lot of Cs when it comes to content marketing: content, creation, curation, choice, and conversion. The biggest C is commitment. Content marketing requires taking a commitment mindset, not a campaign mindset. Your audience and the search engines such as Google and Bing expect you or your brand to produce a lot of content and refresh old content.

Different

Your content should be different than you can find anywhere else. Are your perspectives on a topic or topics different than others? Does your content stand out compared to your competitors? To be successful in content marketing, you should be different.

Earned

Content marketing requires that you take the earned media approach. It requires a lot of work to build trust with your audience. Through a consistent effort over time, you will earn a reputation as a “go to” place to get useful and relevant content.

Format

It is important to remember that content can take many different forms such as blog posts, videos, images, presentations, and slideshows. Make sure your content has a variety of formats because your audience wants variety. And different formats will attract different audiences.

Gathering

Get your audience coming back for more. Every piece of content you create should help your audience: solve problems, entertain, inform and provoke new ideas.

Helpful

Your content should be helpful, not promotional. Don’t talk about yourself too much just like when you go to a networking event you don’t want to get stuck in a conversation with someone who only talks about himself or herself.

Imagery

The saying “a picture paints a thousand words,” fits here. Your story or content should paint a picture by using infographics, photos, slideshows, and videos.

Journalism

Learn from professional journalists and what they do well. Implement those best practices. Content marketers can learn from professional journalists. Sometimes, content marketing is called brand journalism. Whatever it is called, it is important to tell compelling and relevant stories.

Karaoke

Get your audience to participate with such tactics like encouraging guest blogging, getting them to comment on articles and developing case studies about them. Just like Karaoke encourages you to sing along to songs, your content should encourage your audience to join in.

Lists

People love to read lists. We live in a world where we now scan content. Lists are easy to digest and easy to understand. They work.

Measure

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” the old management adage goes. Unless you measure how well your content is doing with your audience, you don’t know how well you are doing or not doing. You don’t have to spend money to do it. Use a free tool like Google Analytics to find out your most popular articles and how much time they spend on an article.

Numbers

People love facts and numbers. Just like the best resumes have numbers included, the same goes for content. For example, 91 percent of B2B marketers are using content marketing and 86 percent of B2C marketers are using content marketing.

Objective

Before you start anything, it is vital that you set goals and develop a plan to know where you want to go. Even though content marketing is becoming a bigger part of the marketing mix.

Print

Print is not dead. Even though the world is going digital, there is still a tremendous opportunity to connect with your audience via print. It is time to rethink print.

Quality

With content marketing, quality trumps quantity every day. It is important to create thoughtful, helpful content over a lot of content at a faster pace.

Recycle

Since we are all doing more with less, it is important to recycle content and put a new angle on it or freshen it up. There are more than 100 ways to reuse, repurpose, and repromote your content.

Story

What is your content trying to communicate? Effective content marketing is all about mastering the art of storytelling. Watch this video of Justina Chen and the importance of storytelling.

Team

You can’t create or curate content without a good team. Throughout the content marketing process, make sure your roles are identified and defined.

Utility

As Mitch Joe, the author of Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. says marketing today is all about utility marketing or giving your audience something so useful and valuable. It is similar to what Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, calls refrigerator journalism. t is creating content so compelling, so relevant and so brief that you want to cut it out and stick it on your fridge.

Vision

Content marketing may require a mind shift change at your company. The key is to paint the picture for your team and senior leaders at your organization how your content marketing efforts will impact the bottom line and help your company grow.

Writing

Write, write and write some more. The only way to become a good writer is practice, practice, and practice. There are 10 simple steps to help you become a better writer.

X-ray

Just like an x-ray examines a person, it is important to examine your content. Assess and audit your content so you know what content you need to create, how your content ties together and what content you should produce more or less of.

Year End

Do you summarize your best content at the end of the year? What better way to close out the year than giving your audience a very accessible snapshot of your best work. You can also do it on a monthly or weekly basis but it should be done at least on a yearly basis.

Zeal

Are you passionate about creating or curating content? How enthusiastic are you? Only those who have a strong interest and desire for content will be successful.

What letters would you add to this A to Z guide to content marketing?

What words would you suggest as alternatives in this A to Z guide to content marketing?