Everyone is talking about the role of content marketing in 2015, but with an overwhelming amount of possibilities for content, where should you start? And how will you know if you’ve been successful? The Content Marketing Institute offers a variety of guides to help you hone your strategy, but the best place to start is with their content marketing framework. You can read the full presentation on their site, but below is an abbreviated version of their seven part framework:

1. Plan: your content marketing plan but align with your company’s larger strategic goals. For many people, it’s helpful to define what your competitive advantages are, and you then need to identify how you can leverage those unique advantages to achieve your business goals.

2. Identify your audience: you then need to identify who you are trying to reach. If you have clear buyer personas already developed for your business, then you should segment your content by buyer persona, and create a unique campaign for each of those identities, keeping in mind important aspects of each profile such as buying cycle. It is crucial that you define how you will market to them in each stage of that cycle.

3. Write your story: your company’s story is an essential building block of your strategy, but there are few hard rules about how it needs to be structured. You can always fall back on classic structure to guide your storytelling.

4. Pick your channels: you will want to use different channels for different stories, depending on the strength of that channel, always keeping in mind which channels are best suited for each of your buyer personas.

5. Define your process: it’s important to establish responsibilities, guidelines, and schedules for each of your campaigns. This requires telling everyone in your organization what unique role they will play and why they are crucial to the success of your strategy.

6. Engage in conversations: figure out which social conversations that you want to (and are able to) be a part of.

7. Measure your efforts: measurement is crucial to content marketing success, yet it is so often overlooked. If your main goal in the past was brand awareness, it’s time to start thinking of your goals in terms of web traffic, leads, and sales. Good measurement will help you in planning for your next campaign.