You had your light bulb moment.

You had your million-dollar idea.

Startup should be easy, right?

Wrong. The real work is yet to come.

Thankfully, the Tow-Knight report on a starting up digital media organizations is chalked full of the “all you need to knows” and the “ask yourself” questions to ensure that your online presence is a force to be reckoned with.

Developing your strategies can be lengthy, but breaking it up into segments and covering all your bases can get you the roadmap you need. In the Tow-Knight article, they hit every step in the development process to optimize results. Most importantly they tell you to “figure out your overall goals and realistically assess your operational capacity and ability to execute on the tasks that will be key to achieving those goals.”

These segments include defining your audience, developing a content strategy, developing and marketing/brand strategy, and developing your business model.

As someone that works in media marketing, I found chapter three to be a recap of everything I tend to do on a daily basis in a successfully functioning startup. But in social media marketing in particular it has been an incredible asset to the company and one of my core job responsibilities, I found that this segment stuck out the most to me. Although it seems simple, it is important to ask yourself the right questions when constructing a campaign.

The articles asks startup founders to think about their overall goals and how they will measure impacts of their campaigns.

Yes, we know everyone is buried in their phones scrolling through their newsfeeds. But just posting engaging content isn’t enough. It’s about assessing your audience and creating content that is relevant to them and then measuring success.

The best part? There are tools out there to help us perform these actions. For example, I like to use hootsuite as the means for managing my campaigns so I can keep them consistent and up to date. I use Google Analytics to measure my results as well as assess the market.

It’s important to be knowledgable about the platforms that you will be using so that you can, not only select the right social media platform to use but you are able to dream up the best content for it. Do you need to deploy video? Do you need more than 140 characters to get your message out? These are all questions you should ask yourself before picking how to get your message out there.

“Social media is not a passing trend and, with 83% of Internet users under the age of 50 using some form of social network, it is critical to make sure that you’re integrating it into your total marketing mix, as well as your editorial workflow.”

Not only do we need to ask ourselves the questions pertaining to how we develop our strategies but we have to also be cognizant of the values within our message. The best way to engage viewers is to gain trust within the messages we put out. As the Journalism Code of Ethics applies to delivering news, interpretations of those ethics can be applied to the marketing and advertising of a company.

In Newsonomics: Rebuilding the news media will require doubling-down on its core values, Ken Doctor connects the values instilled in Boy Scouts and the Journalism code of ethics and unites the same theme of fairness. Customers will hold companies accountable just as readers hold the media accountable.