If it seems that a lot of your content marketing efforts are based on creating a page, video or infographic or some other type of app, you might want to invest in some additional Web development capabilities.

Content marketing is not rocket science. With the right setup, it’s easy to get started and produce some great results, regardless of your level. It’s important to understand the basics, however.

In order to deliver the right type of content to your audience, you have to identify your target audience.

Targeting consumers at the grass roots level is the most powerful tool for content marketing. Determining your target audience can start with your current customers and staff, or by asking your current customers. Do people look at your content marketing efforts with curiosity? Or are their eyes glazed over, tired, and disengaged?

To make things easier, it’s easy to narrow down your focus to just your specific market. Ask your mom whether she’s a content marketer or not. Once you get her response, you’ll know just what type of content you should be producing, and how you can better target your audience.

To ensure that all of your content marketing efforts are centered around your target audience, you will need to develop a content marketing plan.

The content marketing plan is a part of your content strategy and content collection process. The content strategy will clearly define what you want to do, and also determine how you want to communicate your message. The content collection will consist of your various content properties such as blogs, social media, video and articles.

The content plan will set a stage for your company’s future communication and product development. This will help position your brand as a leader in the space, thereby, positioning yourself as the one that people will choose to look to.

It’s also important to understand that a content marketing plan also specifies the content assets that are going to be produced in each category of content. It is by defining these assets that you can keep your content strategy moving forward on all cylinders.

Below are some basic guidelines for developing a successful content marketing plan:

Identify your target audience: Your target audience can help set the stage for your content marketing strategy. Make sure that you already have some consumers in mind, as they usually help generate your ideas for content. A good place to start, depending on your level of understanding, is with your current customers. Generally, get the feedback of your customers to see what works for them and what doesn’t. Review your existing video and blog content with this in mind. Discuss potential new items of content with your team and customers. Discuss new content projects with your team and customer teams.

When building a content strategy, it is important to be specific. This means that you only want to produce the content that creates content for your target audience. Be very specific about content that would appeal to your target market or community.

This type of individualized content will most certainly resonate with your target audience, and will help establish a tone of personalization, which is something everyone should strive for.

The content collection process: Every content production type requires content management. Whether you’re creating video content, or creating articles, it is essential to create a management system to keep track of your content assets. Create a central hub for your content distribution. Make sure that this hub contains all of your produced assets so that each asset can be synchronized across all of your publishing sites. It should be easy to find and identify your assets in your hub. You can make it an actionable destination, just like a personal profile would be for you, by incorporating a map of your hub’s location.

To give your hub the ability to publish your materials into different channels at once, you will need to create a WordPress plugin to be able to copy/paste content from one central hub to another channel. This is a very powerful tool to help your hub with social media sharing and other publishing activities.

The content collection is always working on a few different pieces at the same time. Create a Hub or landing page as well as your primary platforms, for each piece of content you’re working on. See if you can build a draft blog post into an e-book and then file it through this landing page. What would the e-book look like? You can begin outlining the content and further refining the layout before putting it into your hub, or building a blog post into an ebook. Keep track of each of these pieces so that you can retrieve and use the materials at any time.

If your content management system is not set up, you can use WordPress to construct content directly from one of your primary platforms, as well as some other official sites. You can also link the data from any pages on your hub, or to a social media site.

Whatever process you use to build your hub, keep these tips in mind.

1) Take