Content comes in many different forms from blogs and pictures to videos and product descriptions.

So, determining what is right for you is one of the first things you need to do.

Yet, not only determine what’s right for you, consider what’s best for your clients. Have a dialogue with them. This could start with your salespeople or your account services representatives. You could also find out what’s on their mind through polls and email marketing. Social media is another way to leverage feedback. A post could solicit feedback by asking them to leave comments on your Facebook page. No matter which mechanism you choose, it all comes down to how your organization interfaces with the clients.

Next, start with an objective. What's your site supposed to do? Is it to inform, educate, sell, or create credibility?

Third, determine what type of content is needed. For example, one of Proximity Marketing’s clients sells goat milk soap so pictures are key for them. Yet, if you sell a service, traditional content may be more optimal for your business.

Fourth, determine if you should create the content yourself or outsource it. Regardless of your choice, you cannot avoid the fact that you’ll need to be involved in one way, shape, or form. But there are plenty of people ready to write on your behalf anytime you're willing to pay. Regardless, you’ll have to do a lot of the work.

Lastly, create the content. When it comes to creating content, traditionally you’d start with brainstorming sessions to find ideas and topics. Consider asking clients what’s important to them. You could interview internal team members to determine clients’ questions and the potential barriers of successful engagements. And there’s no shame in looking at what your competition is doing or looking at industry resources to see what they’re writing about and if the content is relevant to your business. You can also turn to social media to see what’s trending. Look at different analytic or search sources. For written content, you can have a client be a guest writer and add a post to your blog. You could write about case studies, successes and failures, and lessons learned from engagements with your clients. Soliciting testimonials from clients is another great form of content.

A luggage retailer we know is a good example of the best use of content marketing. Its objective was to show end users features of bags and suitcases and what fits into them. The retailer spent a lot of time in live chat sessions, answering end users’ questions about what really fits in the suitcases.

So, it created a two to three-minute product video for each of its bags and suitcases demonstrating their features and what items actually fit in them. In this case, the content was in the form of a video. The objective was two-fold--meet the end users' requirements of determining how to apply a particular bag to their life and save the company time and money while reducing the amount of customer service time spent on live chat conversations. A third objective, which probably was really number one, but it was left unsaid, was to create faster conversations. They succeeded in all three and we give them kudos.

It was all about starting with the right objectives.