I am not the world's most organised person. Indeed if there were a scale of 0 = utterly hopeless and 100 = organisational genius, I'd be somewhere in the low single digits. However, I have learned to sail boats across oceans and am currently learning to fly. If these tasks were reliant on my organisational ability I'd have been in Davy Jones' locker a long time ago.

The one thing both disciplines rely heavily on are checklists and drills, where the same procedure is followed over and over again. It means that the skipper or pilot does not have to rely on their own abilities to recall every aspect of how to perform a manoeuvre. They simply follow a series of simple achievable tasks in a given sequence passing instructions for other simple, achievable tasks to the crew and getting feedback when these tasks are completed and a complex goal is achieved in comfort and safety.

To ensure long-term success in content marketing, requires a very similar approach, decide what your organisational goal is and then break it down into simple, achievable tasks, put them in a chronological list and then ensure that each step is communicated to other parties so they understand what thy need to do. 

What we've learned is that it's very important that each step is easily achievable; with content marketing, if a person is asked to do something that is too hard it simply will not happen. For example, if an over-worked executive is asked to write a 2,000 word article they will simply never get to it. What the marketing team needs to do is to make each step small enough that there are no "gates" where everything relies on a single big event. 

But if each step is sensible, achievable and monitored very "normal" people can achieve great results.

(Thank you to Eugene for sharing the article below).