We sell to people, not search engines

The Guardian has a great piece on the confusion about the hype around content marketing:

The danger for brands getting caught up in this is that they are indeed viewing it as a panacea. Rushing in, rather than remaining firmly focused on their customer, their interests, passions, anxieties and hopes, to try and understand what sort of content they're interested in. 

Most importantly, why they'd ever want to hear it from you and why you're bothering producing it in the first place. 

If the answer to that question is "to drive SEO, to get round the Google Panda update, to help social sharing, to reduce our bounce rate on our website", your move into content marketing is only going to benefit the content marketing salesmen.

It is useful to have a library of keywords and a social media calendar to give your social media effort form; but if you don't engage your audience it is just so much more blather on the internet. When you write you should have a specific audience in mind. It makes it easier to write meaningful prose.