If I were a small business owner, here’s what I’d do with my marketing department:  Make them publishers.

This isn’t news to anyone who’s been looking at news from the digital marketing world.  Social media marketing, content marketing, and digital marketing are increasingly losing their definition and melting together.  The heat that’s melting them, to keep the metaphor going, is publishing.

So what does that mean to small business marketers? It means you’ve got to get yourself some content (preferably with some heavy content strategy on the front end).

Here are five tactics to do exactly that…

Create an editorial calendar If you’re using project management software, you should have one of these at your fingertips.  You should have one even if you’re not using any PM software (google calendar, anyone?).  Get organized from a publishing standpoint, and your efforts will be much more effective.  Never write a “sorry we haven’t blogged in a while” post again.

Don’t Stop At Text Photos and videos, like publishing itself, has become so completely accessible that there are really no excuses not to start.  Just like your text, you need a schedule to produce graphic content.  A picture is worth some specific number of words.  Video even more.  You don’t have to be viral.  You do have to be consistent.

Put Social Media First Never think that social media is a fad.  It’s not.  Invest in it.  The tools of social media will change, but the premise won’t.  So from now on, you can’t broadcast your message to everyone online (you never could, although most websites were written and designed that way).  Not possible, unless your plan is to out-amazon Amazon.  So drill down and connect with the people that you’re interested in.  And remember this: if you’re not having a conversation with them, you’re spamming them.

Read Your Analytics Numbers are scary to me.  I’m a writer.  An English major, even.  But that doesn’t mean you should be (afraid of numbers, that is, not an English major, though there’s an argument for not being one of those either).  Read those reports.  How else are you going to understand what content works and what doesn’t?  I’ve even gotten better myself.  Publishers know the numbers.

Own It By that, I mean put an emotional investment into your content.  Don’t just publish because you have to.  These tools, this framework, allows you to do what direct mail, what your brochure, never could.  The connections are there to make, if you want to.  If you publish content that’s personal, not just your mission statement or your sale.  That requires your marketing to break away from traditional thinking.

It requires you to become a publisher.