Content marketing goals are one of the most important things to focus on as you develop your content marketing strategy. But how do you choose the right goals for your content marketing efforts? In this article, we’ll explore some tips that will help you choose the right goals for your content marketing efforts.
Define your goals
Every goal you set for your content marketing should be a high-level, measurable goal. You should be able to describe it in one or two sentences. For example, “I want to increase sales by 20% in the next three months” is a high-level goal. You can break this goal down into smaller actionable steps. For example, you could create a new buyer persona, add some visuals to your post to help them learn more about your product, and publish the post. Your goal is to take a very broad view of your content marketing goals and break it down into actionable steps.
Determine your goals for the next six months or year and break them down into smaller, more manageable steps
While your overall goal for content marketing is to increase awareness of your brand and grow your audience, your short-term goal might be to increase traffic to your website or to the page where you promote your products. For example, you might set a goal to publish two high-quality blog posts each month that each receive at least 100 social shares. If you have a long-term goal of building an audience of loyal brand advocates, you might want to create educational content that answers your audience’s questions and helps them make educated buying decisions—that’s much more valuable than generic content. Your goals should be specific and actionable and should align with the marketing activities you want to accomplish.
Set your short-term goals
Short-term goals are those that you accomplish in a short period of time. They can be related to specific campaigns, or even to a single piece of content. This helps you to keep your content creation and promotion on track. Short-term goals are easier to accomplish and can help to get quick wins that motivate you to continue your content marketing journey. Examples of short-term goals are increasing website traffic, improving social media engagement, increasing the number of leads from your content, increasing brand awareness, or increasing your overall sales.
Set your long-term goals
If you’re new to content marketing, setting goals is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. However, setting your goals is one of the most important things you can do for your content marketing strategy. Not only will setting goals help you track the growth of your business, but it will help you stay on track towards achieving your overall business goals. Set your long-term goals before creating your content. By doing so, you’ll be able to create your content with a clear vision of what you want to achieve.
Know your goals
If you’re wondering how to choose the right goals for content marketing, you’re not alone. You don’t need a rocket scientist to figure it out though. In fact, you’ve probably already written down a few of them. The trick is to pick the ones that are most important to your business and your customers. For example, if you’re looking to grow SEO traffic, your goal might be to increase your keyword rankings. If you want to increase brand awareness, you might want to write about your best-selling product or a content piece that answers the question, “If you had to buy just one thing from our company, what would it be?”
Know what you want
One of the first things you need to do is define your goals. You will need to take a close look at your business and your own goals to determine what content marketing goals are most important to your business. While the focus of content marketing is to attract, engage, and convert, there are other goals, such as SEO, that you want to complete before prioritizing content marketing.
Know what you don’t want
Before choosing your goals, you need to know what you don’t want. If you don’t know what you don’t want, how will you know what you do want? You can’t move forward in life if you don’t know where you want to go. Your goals should align with your values. For example, if you value helping your community, a goal of generating leads to help a local business might be a great fit for you. You can choose the goals that align with what you value most, and these will be the goals that you will work towards with consistency, dedication and passion.
Know what you’re willing to do
The first step to goal setting is knowing what you want. It might sound like a no-brainer, but many marketers struggle with goal setting because they don’t know what they want. If you have difficulty setting goals, do some deep thinking. Write down a list of your current and future goals. Then, look at them all and pick the top five. Make sure that these goals are ones you can realistically accomplish. For example, if you want to grow your email list, you need to know your audience and know how to attract them. You can’t grow your email list by sending spam.
Know what you can’t do
The first step to setting effective content marketing goals is to understand the difference between what you can do and what you can’t do. For example, you may want to create an informative YouTube video, but before you create that video, you need to know your priorities. Will you cover topics you know your customers are interested in or will you create a video about what you know about the most? While it may be tempting to create content on all topics, it’s important to know what you absolutely can’t do to ensure you’re setting your content marketing goals correctly.
Know what’s stopping you
If you can’t describe your goals in a way that drives action, you won’t optimize your content to help you achieve them. Define your goals in terms of outcomes you want, the metrics that will let you know if you’re on track, and the actions you need to take to reach your goal. That way, you’ll be able to create content that generates results.
Align your goals with your business objectives
Not only does content marketing help you achieve your business goals, but it offers you a way to better understand how your audience thinks and acts. Your audience needs to see your brand the same way you do, and to do that, you need to have a clear idea of your brand voice and how you want to represent it in all your content. This helps you create content that will resonate with your audience and align your business objectives with your brand goals.
Align your goals with your business objectives
Your content marketing goals are closely linked to your business objectives. If you want to achieve your marketing goals, you need to know what those goals are. Your business objectives are the specific outcomes you want to accomplish. You’ll need to know your company goals and what activities need to happen in order to reach them. If you want to increase sales, you’ll need to know what your current sales level is. If you want to increase brand awareness among your customers, you’ll need to know which demographic you should be targeting.
Align your goals with your organization’s mission
The way you define your goals should align with your organization’s overall mission. If you’re a B2B organization promoting a software product, your goal to increase website conversions won’t be the same as improving your lead generation program. Instead, you’ll want to use your website to attract new leads and get more customers. Aligning your goals with your organization’s mission ensures your content marketing programs will accomplish your objectives and meet your organization’s goals.
Align your goals with your strengths
Your marketing goals should align with your strengths as an organization. If you have a very competent writer, don’t just write for SEO. Write for your audience. Write to inform, to entertain, to make them feel better about their lives. And you will be more compelling as a brand and will attract more people who are interested in your business.
Align your goals with your resources
Your content marketing goals and the marketing activities you’ll need to accomplish them have to be aligned with your company’s available resources. For example, you may want to build an audience through SEO, but you don’t have the budget to hire a full-time SEO expert. In that case, you can enlist the help of your marketing team to create content that satisfies the search engines while also providing value to your audience.
Know your audience
Before you create any content, you need to know your audience. You can use demographic data and information gathered from your website to segment your audience and create a buyer persona. This will help you determine the type of content to create and what content to share on social media. For example, if you sell bikes online, you can segment your audience by gender, age, location, and other demographic characteristics to determine what types of bike-related content you should create for them. This will help you create content that is relevant to them so they can become your audience.
Know their challenges
Your audience cares about what they struggle with every day. They are looking to solve a problem and are more likely to respond to a solution to their problem. When you know what problems your audience struggles with, you can create content that helps them and motivates them to buy from you. For example, let’s say you sell dog treats. You might find that dog owners who are looking for advice are more likely to respond to a guide on how to train their dogs than someone looking for grooming advice.
Know what they want
It sounds obvious, but you need to know what your audience wants and expect from your content before you create it. What content do they need to solve their biggest problems? What information do they want to receive? What do they want to accomplish? These answers are essential before you begin creating content. You don’t want to create content that your audience doesn’t care about and isn’t interested in reading.
Know what keeps them up at night
The content your target audience cares about most will vary depending on your business and the type of content your offer. One person might be interested in educational content about how to safely jump a ditch, while another might want to see videos of how they can fix their own wobbly door. The point is, know what your audience is interested in to help you figure out what type of content to create. If you’re not sure, ask your audience or perform a little market research to find out what they’re most interested in.
Determine what content to create
Before writing any content, you need to determine what type of content you want to create. For example, you might create a guide about how to fix a leaky faucet, or you might create a how-to post about how to replace your car’s windshield wiper fluid. If you don’t know the answer to this question, you’re not ready to create content. Your content should be directly tied to your business goals and answer questions your audience has about your products and services.
Define your audience and their challenges
You must know who you are speaking to and what their struggles are before you create content for them. Doing market research is part of a well-balanced content marketing strategy. It helps you determine what your audience is interested in and what they’re struggling with. You’ll know what problems they’re looking to solve and what they need to hear to feel satisfied.
Determine your content strategy
In order to determine what you need to create, you need to know your content strategy. A content strategy is the plan for creating, curating, and sharing your content to attract and retain your ideal customers. It includes your overall marketing plan and your content creation and promotion plan. A content strategy can be a tricky thing to put together, especially if you’ve never attempted one before. The best way to figure out what you need is to research other brands’ content strategies and how they’ve managed to create content that their audience loves.
Determine what content to create
The right content for content marketing can vary depending on your goals. If you want to increase awareness of your brand, create an educational piece that you can share on social media. If you want to stimulate leads, create a case study or guide that your audience can use to solve a problem they face. If you want to increase your website traffic, create content that answers frequently asked questions. The key is to choose content that your ideal customer would want to read and share with their friends and family.
Develop your content strategy
A content strategy helps you plan, create, distribute, measure and refine content for your customers. It can help you improve your branding and increase traffic to your website. When you have a solid content strategy in place, you’ll be able to create content that keeps your audience engaged and helps you achieve your business goals. Before you can create content for your audience, you need to know what they’re interested in. For example, if your audience consists of customers, a content strategy for them might be knowing what they’re looking for when buying a product, what questions they have and how they find the answers. You can also use content to solve a problem your audience has, or to offer information they need.
In conclusion, if you want to create content that will help you achieve your marketing goals, it’s important to choose the right goals to begin with. Ask yourself what you want your content to achieve, and then choose goals that will help you get there. Keep your goals SMART, and be sure to track your progress so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. With the right content marketing goals, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.
