His answer caught me completely off guard: “It’s simple. They’ve all hired blue chip salespeople, they’ve all seen what goes into completing a multi-million dollar deal, and they all know that they can get rid of salespeople and programs that don’t work. For many of these guys, though, they’ve gone their entire careers without ever seeing a marketing strategy that truly transformed a company.”

In other words, they accept mediocre marketing, because they’re not sure the 99th percentile is even achievable.

Talk to a CEO who has been a part of a 99th percentile marketing strategy, and he or she will tell you that it represented a turning point in the growth curve of the company.

Here are the concepts that the 99th percentile marketers have mastered:

• Marketing touches every facet of the company. Every department will benefit from a 99th percentile marketing effort, and no department will be spared from a mediocre marketing effort.
• An undifferentiated message will destroy a good marketing strategy. A me too message will lead to me too marketing programs. 99th percentile employees, customers and partners don’t want to work for or with me too companies.
• Decisions matter more than data. We have more data than ever, but data does not make decisions. People do. 99th percentile marketers focus only on the data that will help them make decisions, and focus only on the decisions that will make a significant impact.
• Talent matters more than software. While software may be eating the world, it hasn’t eaten the people. 99th percentile marketers invest in their talent and strategy first, and then let the talent and strategy guide the selection of the tools.
• Sweat the small stuff. Marketing is—by its very nature—public. Customers, prospective customers, employees, recruits, stockholders, and the media all see your work. 99th percentile marketers recognize that there’s no hiding, and they commit to paying attention to even the smallest of details.

Becoming a 99th percentile marketer is hard. Really hard. But choosing between mailing it in and taking a risk to transform your entire business? That should be an easy call.

Want to learn how the 99th percentile marketers address their content marketing challenges? Download our free eBook How to Grow Your Business with Content Marketing where we explain how content marketing can not only enhance your marketing efforts, but grow your entire business.

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If you haven’t written a job description, know that it’s not easy to write a good one. Even harder to write a great one. Nearly impossible to write one that stands out in the sea of sameness, marked by phrases such as “great opportunity for the right candidate that is driven by success” or “candidate should be able to deliver multiple projects on time and on budget.”

On the flip side, it’s not easy to write a good cover letter. I haven’t had to do that in quite some time, but I remember hating every single minute of it. Writing a good cover letter is made even more difficult by ambiguous job descriptions that show the above average job seeker that you, as the employer, really have no idea what you’re looking for.

Let’s make a compromise. We’re actively searching for an Account Manager, Content Writer/Editor, and entry-level marketers for Right Source Marketing. We intend to hire these people in the next 4 weeks, if not sooner. Our job descriptions are…just ok.

So let me break through the buzzword clutter and tell you what we’re really looking for, and in return you promise to stop writing crappy, typo-laden, boilerplate cover letters.

The Account Manager Position

What We Say: The right candidate will possess experience in managing multiple client accounts, be consultative in nature, and have a strong knowledge base in marketing, particularly digital marketing.

What We Mean: We’re a marketing firm. If you haven’t worked in marketing, and in particular digital marketing, you’re fighting an uphill battle. And if you’re hoping to work on that one big client that will make you earn you some type of Effie or Clio award, think again. You’ll handle multiple clients, and on a given day you may be working with a client that wants to talk business intelligence solutions, and another that wants to talk about apple sauce.

What We Say: Required – Strong written, verbal and interpersonal communication skills.

What We Mean: We hire people that are likeable, write well, speak well, and can do a day full of phone calls and meetings as easily as they can handle a day sitting at a desk and cranking out blog posts, client reports, or creative briefs.

What We Say: Please read the entire job description and review our website and blog before submitting.

What We Mean: We don’t care if you have worked on or with 499 of the Fortune 500. We’re different than your previous employer, our clients are different, and our thinking is different. Let us know that you are paying attention to that, and if you can’t see the difference between us and your previous employer, let us know so we can fix our messaging.

The Content Writer/Editor Position

What We Say: The selected candidate should write well, write efficiently, edit both concepts and copy, and do so with minimal direction.

What We Mean: Finding someone who can write their own stuff, edit other people’s stuff, and do both based on 20 minute conversations, is tough. But that’s what we need, and we know those folks are out there –we’ve already worked with them.

What We Say: Writing and editing experience (and a portfolio to prove it)

What We Mean: Don’t be intimidated by the portfolio thing. Just show us what you’ve written in the past, and make sure it’s not just a series of press releases – we need to see some variety. We’ll review that material, plus ask you to do a writing/editing exercise during the interview process. In other words, if you can write, and you can edit, it will shine through one way or the other.

What We Say: Preferred Skills – Experience in or with B2B-focused companies

What We Mean: Your average day will not be spent writing print ad concepts for consumer products. It may be spent coordinating content marketing efforts for professional services firms, software providers, and IT solutions companies. Developing content for B2B-focused companies requires a level of sophistication that a pure B2C writer/editor may not be accustomed to.

If you can handle the What We Mean parts of these descriptions, then by all means submit that cover letter and resume. Tell us who you are, why you think it might work between us, why you’re applying for this position vs. the thousands available elsewhere, and whether you liked this blog post or found it off-putting.

In consulting with dozens of organizations—both large and small—over the past few years, we’ve found that while resources are being shifted towards content marketing at a breakneck pace, very few organizations are setting themselves up to realize maximum content marketing success. Many organizations create content, but only a select few embrace the five areas involved in content marketing success: content planning, content creation, content optimization, content distribution, and content reporting and analysis.

Here are just a few of the questions this eBook will help you answer:

• What is the appropriate framework for a content marketing plan?
• Who should be on our content marketing team?
• How do we create not only engaging content, but enough engaging content?
• Where do content marketing, SEO, and social media intersect, and how do we make sure we’re not duplicating efforts?
• Why should content marketing planning always come before social media planning?

Unfortunately, if you’re seeking funding—no matter whether it’s a loan from the bank or an initial round from an angel investors or venture capitalists —you’re going to need a business plan.

You may view this plan as a boring hurdle to cross on your way to doing the work you really care about—turning your idea into reality—but your business plan is more than that. It’s your very first content marketing asset, the one that you use to market your ideas, in order to get help creating and marketing your unique products and services.

I’ve had the pleasure—and the pain in some cases—of reviewing 3-4 business plans over the past month. As I read, I realized how much the average business plan misses opportunities to inform and convince.

Below, I offer advice on turning your business plan into an effective, persuasive content marketing asset.

1. Create your own structure.

There’s no universally-accepted structure, format, or design for a business plan. There are certain things that most prospective stakeholders may want to see, such as financial forecasts or product summaries, but get creative about how you present your story. It’s yours, after all.

2. Build a great story, not just a great business.

Speaking of stories, many entrepreneurs fail to tell theirs in a business plan, choosing instead to focus on the cold hard facts and figures. Take a look behind any great, mature business, and you will uncover some unique stories. It may be a story about where the idea came from, or a story about why the founder is passionate about this particular product or service, or a story about how other successful or failed businesses led the founding team to this idea.

3. Write like your business depends on it.

There’s two ways to get readers to quickly tune out your business plan: be boring and write sloppily.

If you’re not a polished writer, find one. If you are a polished writer, get an editor to check for scuffs.

4. Lead with your unique strengths.

If your product is truly revolutionary, but you have no idea how you’re going to market it, lead with your product. If your product is a copycat, but you’ve opened up a unique distribution channel, lead with that distribution piece.

Your weaknesses will be exposed by intelligent people somewhere along the way, but if you’ve sold your strengths well enough, they may just choose to forget about those weaknesses.

5. Do your homework.

“There’s nothing like this out there, so there’s not a whole lot of market or competitive research to do.”

Those words often mark the premature death of a business idea or business plan. Whether it be secondary research, market segmentation research, or even research on a similar business model within an unrelated product category, do something.

Doing nothing comes across as lazy at worst and arrogant at best.

6. Be visual whenever possible.

No one likes to read page after page after page of copy. Use charts, tables, infographics or even early design concepts to break up the document.

7. Don’t be afraid to go long, but give readers short options.

You probably don’t want to go longer than 10-15 pages on your business plan. Even at that length, few will read the entire document. Three tips for appealing to the short attention span types:

• Provide bulleted highlights of each section.
• Write a succinct executive summary that leads with your strengths and includes facets of each subsequent section.
• Consider creating a shortened version of the entire document that includes paragraph summaries of each section and a financial forecast.

8. Be able to provide the logic behind every single number.

Sure, especially with start-up business plans, the financial forecast involves a lot of guesswork, and will change dozens of times over your first few years of operation. Most investors will admit that.

That being said, if you’re going to bother to talk revenue, cost of goods sold, short-term and lifetime value of customers, know what your numbers mean. People want to understand the assumptions behind the numbers, and want to see examples of other companies operating with similar metrics.

To conclude

Remember—your business plan revolves around an idea, an idea that you feel strongly can change a market, make people’s lives better in some way, or just make a person or people lots and lots of money. A great business plan won’t save a bad idea, but a sloppy plan can certainly slow down a good idea.

If you’re anything like the average entrepreneur, you think you have a great idea. Treat your business plan like your first and most important content marketing project, and your idea has a better chance of gaining the support it needs to become reality.

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For those of who are still reading, consider the following real scenario, with names redacted to protect the innocent. Company A believes in content marketing, and whether they know it by that name or call it something else, they invest tens of thousands of dollars per month in content marketing programs. Here’s a breakdown of who handles which pieces of content marketing in Company A:

• Small internal marketing team: Handles primarily lead generation and partner marketing programs. This team creates some content such as corporate website copy, but it’s difficult for the people managing the team and the process to also create content.
• Small employee blogger team:  Employees blog when they can, and often times post excellent thought leadership material. Blogging, however, is not a requirement, and therefore suffers in the face of higher priorities.
• Public relations agency: Creates press releases, media briefs, and bylined articles.
• Content marketing/social media firm: Manages all blog content and distribution, as well as social media content calendar.
• PPC/SEO Consultant: Creates PPC ads for search engine marketing campaigns, and handles some SEO copywriting and meta tag creation.
• Other consultants/internal staff: Others jump in when needed or hired for things like webinar, white paper or PowerPoint creation.

The good news is that these teams create lots of content. The even better news is that these teams create some impactful, high quality pieces of content. And yet the overarching complaint from those inside the company is that the core corporate message is non-existent at worst and inconsistent at best, throughout the content marketing effort.

What’s likely the heart of this problem? No one person or entity owns content marketing. The effort is completely decentralized, including administrative, management, and execution pieces.

Centralizing your content marketing program is not necessarily easy, but offers the following tangible benefits:

1.       Higher quality content

There’s a reason every major print and web publisher is always on the lookout for great editors. Amongst other things, editors not only guide content direction, but they ensure that every piece of content meets the standards of the publication or website.

Your effort as a content marketer is no different. Centralize the effort and establish a single owner, whether it be a person or an entity, and the quality of your content will improve.

2.       More consistent messaging

In the scenario above, it’s almost impossible to achieve consistent messaging. Not only does the program lack an owner, but there are 5-6 different groups creating content without any concrete direction. If you want consistent messaging, it has to start at the top, and then get communicated down to every level, person or group that is involved with the program.

3.       Long-term cost savings

Company A has at least 6 different groups creating content, and no single group or person managing the content marketing program. Establish a single owner structure, and reduce the amount of people responsible for content creation, and there is no question that Company A would reduce their content marketing costs over the long haul.

A forewarning on this one: Many companies, when exploring this type of centralization option, conveniently forget to include the real cost of full-time employees that are dedicating a portion of their time to content marketing. When I talk about long-term cost savings, it’s critical to start not just with “outsourced” dollars, but with all dollars being spent inside and outside the company.

4.       Meaningful reporting

Right now, Company A generates a bunch of reports, some of which include meaningful pieces, but nothing that ties it all together. They may know they need to issue press releases, write blog posts, and send email newsletters regardless of what the reports say, but to track return on investment at some point, you need to know what went into each piece, and what you got out of it. Based on those factors, maybe you heavy up in one area, and lighten or even remove time and money from another area. If you don’t have someone looking at how all the pieces fit together, and how all those pieces are performing in relation to one another, you’re just capturing data, and not actually doing anything with it.

Your Turn

What are the other benefits to centralizing your content marketing program? For those that have been in situations like Company A, what are the pitfalls to centralizing the program? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

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Not so fast, my content marketing friends.

First, think about the sales funnel:

While there’s no universally accepted set of steps in the sales funnel, I typically use the following:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Evaluation
• Commitment
• Referral

While volume of content is important, in the B2B world in particular, churning out content generates traffic that typically fills the top of the sales funnel—the awareness phase. So what’s a marketer to do about the middle and bottom of the sales funnel?

Create better content, not necessarily more content.

Thinking in particular about the Interest, Evaluation, and Commitment steps, here are a few tips on creating better content for the middle of the sales funnel

1. Get Sp­­­ecific

Not all buyers are created equal. They occupy different roles. They work for different types of organizations. They have different budgets. They have different needs.

You can’t necessarily create content for each individual, but what you can do is create content for groups, whether it be by buyer persona, type of organization, or size of company. Most importantly, write about specific situations that groups of your prospective customers are dealing with.

And by all means, if you can name names, do so.  The difference between saying  “a professional services firm used our product to increase lead volume by 200%” vs. “Sweeney, Davis and Scaffani, an accounting firm located in Baltimore, MD, used our product to increase lead volume by 200%” = priceless.

2. Provide Data

Especially in the earlier stages of the sales funnel, before the prospect knows you or your company well, every claim is met with a certain level of skepticism. Sure, in the sales process you build one on one trust—but that takes time.

So what’s the quick way to start to remove that skepticism?

Back everything up with data, and preferably data from a trusted source outside of your own organization.

3. Ditch the Marketing Speak

Let me guess. Your product is cloud-based. It offers seamless integration with the most widely used SaaS applications. It’s a platform, but it’s also a full-featured solution.

Some of this marketing speak is unavoidable, but cut down on it before you publish. As buyers see more and more content, they will start to tune out your buzzwords and devalue your content.

4. Get Visual

Visuals – in the form of charts, graphs, infographics, photos and more – are essential to content, especially case studies, eBooks, white papers and brochures. Not only do they help break up long copy, but for some readers they will represent the single eye-catching and informative element that helps them remember the company that authored the content.

5. Say Something Original

With the explosion of published content, both in print and on the web, it’s easy to assume that your original thoughts aren’t that original after all. And yet every week, month, and year, new thought leaders emerge with original ideas, or at least new slants on previous ideas. Find a way to be original – in message, tone, attitude, or approach.

After all, they do call it “thought leadership,” not “thought following.”

Following this advice will help you avoid making the mistake of publishing content that appeals to search engines instead of humans. In any content planning effort, think about creating content to help your salespeople as they move buyers through the funnel.

What other tips do you have for creating better content? Tell us in the comments section.

For more about Content Marketing, download our free webinar.

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The answer was simple. I wasn’t asking myself the right questions, and I wasn’t asking them in the same determined manner that I use with clients. I was letting myself off the hook.

After a good deal of back-and-forth (mostly in my own head), I came up with the following questions, which may serve as a blueprint for building a content marketing plan for your organization.

1.       Why are we doing this?

You heard right. Even someone who makes part of his living on content marketing had to ask that very important question to himself.

I came up with a variety of answers, but none more pragmatic than this one. I’ve seen first-hand what an organized content marketing effort can do for a business, and it’s powerful when done right.

2.       What’s the goal?

There are a variety of ways to answer this question. Some answers will focus on hard metrics like brand awareness, lead generation, or actual transactions. Some answers will focus on softer metrics like prospect engagement or page views. There is no right or wrong answer.

No matter what, though, answer this question early in the process.

3.       What is our unique story?

Even if you think your business falls into the cookie-cutter category, it has a unique story. If you don’t know what that story is, then you may want to go through an extensive process that focuses on company messaging.

If you do know what that unique story is, it ought to inform content marketing themes and be woven into each piece of content.

4.       Who is our audience?

More than likely, you have multiple audiences: prospective clients, current clients, prospective employees, current employees, investors, partners and more.

Then consider the audiences within each of those groups. For instance, you likely have more than one type of audience within the prospective client group. There are likely people that hold different positions, that are interested in different services, and that are engaged in different stages of a sales cycle.

My advice: It seems complicated, but don’t let that stop you. Sometimes you have to build a content marketing plan for your most “common” audience, and then you can take that, tweak it, and apply it to the other audiences.

For more on creating buyer personas, check out Jeremy Victor’s post, Buyer Personas: Where (and How!) to Start.

5.       Who is on our team? What is everyone’s role?

This may be the most important question on the list. A great plan is nothing without great people to execute it. Understanding your internal and external resources is a critical piece of your content marketing plan.

Regardless of how many and what types of people you have on the team, at the top sits the owner of the content marketing effort. Whether that is a Chief Content Officer, a VP of Marketing, or a Marketing Manager, a single person needs to own this effort and serve as champion and final decision-maker. If you’re ready to assemble your content marketing dream team, read my earlier post on this very topic.

6.       Who will handle each piece of content marketing?

Hand in hand with defining team roles is making sure that everyone knows who (internally or externally) will handle each of the following phases of content marketing:

• Content Planning
• Content Creation
• Content Optimization
• Content Distribution
• Content Reporting & Analysis

Effective content marketing programs cover each one of these phases – no skipping allowed.

7.       What are the primary themes?

Mapping out specific topics for hundreds of individual pieces of content is not an easy task. How can you make it more manageable?

Select 3-5 themes for the year, and build campaigns around each theme. Once you have a set of broad themes, generating content ideas and organizing each idea into the right spot will become far easier.

8.       What types of content should we create?

Content comes in many shapes and sizes – blog posts, bylined articles, case studies, Facebook status updates and white papers, just to name a few.

Many companies start their content marketing planning with this question, because they assume content creation guides the content marketing plan. On the contrary, your decision on the types of content to create should be guided by the questions and answers provided in numbers 1 thru 7 above.

9.       When will each piece of content get published?

This is the spot where I tell you that you need an editorial calendar, and someone to manage it with vigor. I’ve seen 5-6 different versions of editorial calendars, all with their individual strengths and weaknesses. Michelle Linn provides a great how-to post on this topic on the Content Marketing Institute blog.

10.   How will we distribute each piece of content?

Remember, content marketing is about…marketing. There’s no point in creating a plan and building out all this content without paying attention to distribution. After all, Distribution – Not Content – is King.

11.   How will we report on the content marketing effort?

Decide the who, what, when, where and how of content marketing reporting before you begin the effort. Your report will likely go through at least 2-3 iterations as you receive input from different stakeholders.

12.   What’s the budget?

When asked his about content marketing budget recently, a prospective client answered with, “I don’t know. What’s the standard budget, like $25,000 per quarter?”

There is no standard budget for content marketing. Some companies spend a good deal more than $25,000 per quarter, and some spend less than that. Like anything else, you have to prioritize the content marketing budget within your broader marketing budget, and make sure it is aligned with the company’s marketing goals.

What questions are missing?

I know I missed some questions. In the comments section, let me know the other critical questions that companies should ask themselves when initiating a content marketing effort.

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Fear – and in particular the fear of making a mistake –  is a very strong force. For a select few, it can be a trigger for adrenaline and aggressive decision-making. For many others, it can cause inaction, paralysis and conservative decision-making.

For companies that have been burned in their selection of strategic marketing firms in the past, let me offer a few pieces of advice on making a better decision this time around.

1. Know the Difference Between Marketing Strategy and Marketing Services

Marketing strategy should inform and guide marketing planning, which in turn informs and guides marketing services and tactics. Building a new website or distributing one press release each month is not a marketing strategy.

If you have your marketing plan all buttoned up for 2012, you may be ready to hire a marketing services firm to handle one or more of the tactics you identified in that plan. If not, you need to find a firm that can think strategically as well.

Good marketing strategists can not only help you with things like customer, competitor and target market analysis, but they can help you evaluate past marketing performance and use that information to guide 2012 marketing objectives.

2. Get Educated, Set Parameters and THEN Compare Apples to Apples

I see a lot of marketing proposals, and it makes me feel terrible for the people that have to translate, evaluate and compare proposals from different companies.  Even when you cut through the buzzwords and verbosity of the average proposal, you’re often left with dramatically different approaches and price ranges.

Here’s how I solve that riddle when on the buying side:

• Explain the situation and objectives – as you see them – to the firms you’d like to speak with.

• Ask them to come back with a general approach for how they would handle the situation. (This is where you’ll see good firms separate from weak firms.  A good firm ought to be able to explain their approach and how and why it might be different from others.)

• Get educated on the different approaches, and decide which general direction you like best.

• Make that your new approach, and ask for proposals addressing that new approach.

Now you ought to be able to compare apples to apples. You just used this process to educate yourself, get information from some (hopefully) smart marketing firms, and make your decision-making process more efficient.

3. Don’t Buy Tools and Software Before You Buy Your Marketing Firm

– START DIALOGUE –

Marketing Person: We just bought Marketo for marketing automation and Omniture for web analytics last month, so we’re really looking for someone that has expertise using those tools.

Mike: Who or what guided those decisions?

Marketing Person: We told IT that we needed those tools in place, and they evaluated different options and chose those. Everything is being installed right now.

Mike: Do you know how you want to use those tools?

Marketing Person: Not yet, but both Marketo and Omniture have a great education and training program to help us learn how to use them effectively.

– END DIALOGUE –

How can you not see the problem with this approach? Software cannot build your marketing plan, and should not guide your marketing decisions. Strategy and planning should come first. Tactics should come second. Software and tools should fall in line somewhere after that.

4. Design Firms Are (Typically) Not Marketing Firms

We work with a lot of fantastic designers and design firms. They are very good at what they do, and add tremendous value to our solutions.

That being said, design is not marketing, and designers and design firms are generally not equipped to handle marketing strategy and planning. And the smart ones don’t want to handle marketing strategy and planning.

Beware the overreaching design firm, or as Will Davis once said, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

5. Industry Specialists and Category Expertise Do Not Always Equal Success

If you’re in a hyper-competitive industry where all the players look and feel the same, and it’s difficult to create separation from the pack, is the solution to bring in a marketing firm that is an industry specialist?

It might be, and that might work for if your objective is to make incremental gains on the competition. On the other hand, if your objective is to become an industry leader, be careful about hiring a firm that is ready to make you into a “me too” company.

6. Ask References the Hard Questions

In most cases, reference calls are a check in a box that happens once you’ve already decided which firm you want to work with, and at that point your natural inclination is to just confirm all the good things you’ve heard about your new firm. Consider changing your approach.

• Ask for references when you’re still evaluating options, not when you’re close to a decision.

• Let the reference know about your fear and how you’ve been burned in the past. This will lead to a more open conversation, as it’s human nature to be more forthcoming when someone does the same with you.

• Ask harder, more direct questions. Every firm has a weakness, or something that you would not hire them for, what wouldn’t you hire this firm for? When you’ve had conflicts or differences in opinion with this firm, how did it get resolved? I want my ideas challenged, not just accepted, will this or that person in the firm do that?

Now It’s Your Turn

Corporate marketing decision-makers, or even marketing firms, I want to hear from you. What mistakes have you made in hiring marketing firms in the past? What other recommendations would you include on this list? Jump in with comments.

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Over the past month, the Right Source Marketing team put together our strategic plan for 2012. While we pride ourselves in helping clients with strategy and planning, it was quite an eye-opener to go through this process for our own company.

One of the most important components of this plan is a set of core values that we adhere to, or what we refer to as the guardrails that keep us on track even in moments of chaos or confusion. Those guardrails also guide decisions on the people we want to work with, including full-time staff members, part-time staff members, contractors and partners.

It became very clear during this process that Allison Novak is someone that fits into those core values, because she is talented, likable, hard-working and detail-oriented, all while maintaining a healthy sense of humor. Although Allison has been working for Right Source Marketing for the past 10 months, please join us in welcoming her in her new full-time role as Marketing Associate.

Allison will continue to be heavily involved in our content marketing and social media services, and will take on new responsibility in areas such as client account management and reporting. And of course, as with every other Right Source staff member, she will be a regular contributor to the Marketing Trenches blog.

As always, a quick note on what we learned during this hiring process – patience is an extremely valuable quality, for both the job seeker and the hiring company. In this case, it took time for us to figure out the right fit for Allison at Right Source, and it took time for Allison to figure out if we were the type of company she wanted to work for. Consider this a victory for patience, and one that will reap rewards for both sides, hopefully for years to come.

If you’d like to connect with Allison, drop her an email, find her on LinkedIn, or follow her on Twitter.

When done right though, a social media plan for marketing, recruiting, or customer service is a thing of beauty. Having completed a handful of these plans on behalf of clients in the past few months, here are the 10 components that belong in your social media plan, regardless of organization type, size, and structure.

1. The Baseline Metrics

Even if no one is interacting with your Facebook fan page and only your employees are sharing your content on Twitter, it’s important to establish a baseline. Sometimes the sole reason for establishing a baseline—as bad the numbers may look—is to set up the applause when those numbers improve.

2. Competitor Benchmarks

Don’t do this to be a copycat. Do this for the same reason you gather the baseline metrics in number one above. It’s not always easy to identify what you’re after with your social media program, and competitors make an easy (and fun) target.

Whatever you do, don’t assume that because a competitor seems to have their act together that they actually do. Follower counts, engagement and a well-designed presence are often the result of pure longevity, and not the implementation of unique ideas.

3. Goals and Objectives

This is often the most difficult piece of the planning process, because your return on social media is not—and may never be—as cut and dried as something like a PPC campaign. Therefore, you will find yourself trying to justify some goals that feel “soft” and others that seem unattainable.

My advice: Keep the goals relatively simple to start, use both soft and hard goals, and don’t be afraid to put goals into buckets or categories. For instance, you may have goals for awareness, engagement, followers/following, SEO, and even prospecting and sales benchmarks.

4. Naming Strategy

This is a seemingly minor detail, but how and what you name your social media properties is just as important as the domain you choose for your organization’s website. If your organization has a unique name, it’s relatively easy. If it’s not a unique name, be prepared for a process that involves brainstorming, searching, brainstorming again, searching again, consensus-building and finally selection.

5. Staffing Plan

You are going to need people to execute your social media plan. That’s right. People, not person.

Even if you are a small business just dipping your toes in the social media water, it will take the efforts, influence and direction of more than one person to make your plan come to life. You may only have one person doing “the work” but any successful social media plan relies on a group, not an individual to carry the weight of the plan. I could write an entirely separate post on this, but you cannot successfully execute a social media strategy without ideas, support, and resources flowing from throughout your organization.

6. Content Calendar

No content, no social media. No content marketing strategy, no social media marketing strategy. If your social media plan does not revolve around some type of content calendar, your message—and your social media plan—will fall flat at best, and fail at worst.

Whatever you do, don’t let the social media tail wag the content marketing dog.

7. Partner Integration

Guess what every single one of your partners – investors, technology partners, VARs, and others – wants to do? Expand their social media audience and engagement.

Guess what your brilliant social media plan will do for them, if done right? Expand their social media audience and engagement.

Use this plan to present some true win-win scenarios where you and your partners can cross-promote content and campaigns.

8. The Ideas!

If your plan revolves around only tweets, updates, followers, friends, and day-to-day tactics, it may be organized, but it won’t be special.

Special comes from social media campaigns, not the day-to-day tactics. If you’re trying to reach a particular audience, build an entire campaign to find and engage that audience. If you’re trying to stand out from the crowd, consider using a customized campaign that is anchored by a contest, sweepstakes or special offer.

Don’t just do social media, get creative with it.

9. Examples

At some point, you’re going to have to sell this plan to supervisors, investors, or colleagues. Chances are that most will not grasp the business case for social media, and will question whether your plan makes sense compared to other corporate initiatives.

Hands down, the easiest way to conquer these objections is to show examples of how similar organizations have used an organized social media plan to achieve specific goals and objectives. If you’re a television show, use “The Voice” as your example. If you’re a retailer, use Zappos as your example. These examples are easy to find, and will mean far more than your own proclamations about why social media can have an impact on your organization.

10. Reporting and Analysis

How are we going to track our progress and return on investment? If you don’t get this question multiple times during your social media planning process, then people either think you have the Midas touch or they simply don’t care.

First, based on your goals and objectives, decide what you want to measure. Second, decide how you want to measure against those goals and objectives.

Count on this: While each social media property includes some basic analytics, you will need to explore a variety of tools and software packages to arrive at your ideal reporting and analysis solution.

Social media planning is not easy. As a matter of fact, it’s painful for most organizations, because many of your stakeholders will not understand the first thing about using social media for business. All you can do is embrace the 7 Ps, include these 10 components in your plan, develop some thick skin, and start moving!

We’d love to hear about your social media planning triumphs and failures. What has worked for you and your organization? Let us know in the comments.

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