Linda Pophal, SHRM-SCP, SPHR

Take it off the market, or at least stop investing marketing $$'s in it until you can offer what customers are looking for. Otherwise you're just perpetuating (and, potentially, paying for!) more ill will. It's something I learned a number of years ago when involved in a major customer service/retention initiative for a health system. The research firm we hired to determine how how our services were perceived (including how they were perceived relative to the competition) stressed that if we found areas where we needed to make improvements, it was very important to implment those improvements before continuing with any promotion of those services. Makes logical sense, but not sure it's something most marketers think about.

There's no shortage of great digital marketing tools to help marketers plan, implement, and analyze their campaigns and a lot of good recommendations have already been provided. I'd add one more critical tool to the mix - good, old-fashioned connections and interactions with your customers, potential customers, and the colleagues and other internal/external stakeholders involved in the campaign. Campaigns shouldn't be created in a vacuum.

This is really the most important trait and one that can be hard to find depending on the type of content being created. I have a few go-to contractors that I work with regularly because they understand my areas of focus, they're strong writers, they're reliable, and - this one I think is especially important - they're able to really hone in on the audience and what the audience is most interested in/the information that would be most valuable to them. That ability to really connect with your audience in a meaningful way is rare, I think.

I'd recommend a number of things, actually. First, I'd start with the organization I was laid off from to see if there might be contract/freelance opportunities, if not now perhaps in the future. I'd do what I see a lot of people doing on LinkedIn - post about the type of work/projects I'm interested in and interact regularly with key client prospects. I'd make sure my LinkedIn profile was optimized with keywords that represented the type of work I was interested in, and my specific skills and I'd start immediately growing my LinkedIn network by joining the maximum number of groups (150 last time I checked) that included my prospects to help me be found in search. I think that would be a great start.

To me the key element of strategic communications is "starting with the end in mind." That means starting with an understanding of what it is you are trying to achieve, through which key audiences, and if there are any specific parameters you need to adhere to in achieving that goal. For example, what is your client's or company's capacity? I have often been surprised to find that the capacity available (either in terms of product availability or service capacity) isn't as high as I might have assumed. All of these inputs are critical to understand what content marketing efforts will be most efficient and cost effective.

When you're setting objectives it's very important to ensure that your objectives are aligned with the organization's objectives. For example, if one of your organization's strategic initiatives is to extend the lifetime value of customers, your content marketing efforts would be well spent in ways designed to welcome and keep new customers on board. If one of the organization's strategic objectives is to build market share in a certain geography, your efforts need to be aligned with this. You can't sit in isolation and come up with "generic content marketing objectives"; you need to make sure your content marketing objectives are aligned with overall business objectives.