Without structured goals to guide your efforts, content marketing can be a minefield of inefficiency and wasted resources.
Content marketing is a fickle thing. It can work great for some businesses, and completely fail for others while appearing identical on the surface. Why does this happen?
Most of the time, the answer is simple: a lack of strategic marketing goals.
Quality content is great, but content alone won’t save your struggling business without direction to guide it. This direction is best found through specific marketing goals that are timely, relevant to your business, and most of all, attainable:
1. Education
First and foremost, your content should provide essential information about your industry. Depending on your audience, this information can be general or specific, but needs to speak to the needs of your readers either way. Nobody reads blogs on topics that provide no value to their lives.
Ensure that your content is well-researched, informative, and authoritative on whatever topic you’re covering to give your readership the knowledge that will help them grow. Use analytics and page tracking statistics to see which pages get the most traffic and how you can optimize the others to see similar results.
2. Attracting Potential Clients
What good is your content if it’s not bringing new eyes to your page? Your material must be interesting enough to attract authority-adding links, and sharable enough to make a splash on social media. Lead generation is essential to marketing, and having content that continually brings new prospects to the table is a necessary goal for any marketing strategy.
Create unique articles that offer fresh perspectives on common trends—original content gets shared far more often than rehashed material.
3. Building Trust with New Customers
With the wealth of options available for buyers these days, trust is essential to customer retention and loyalty. Delivering steady and reliable content when you say you will helps build consumer faith in your brand. This also involves personal outreach—open a dialogue with your customers through comments and feedback outlets. This will lead to more a more engaged audience and better customer retention—a study done by Strativity on customer delighted showed that 64 percent of respondents would feel greater loyalty to a brand that made contact once a week.
To build trust with your readers, establish a personal connection and be consistent with the value that your content provides.
4. Problem Management
Your content should provide value to your readers, but what does value mean, exactly?
Content value generally relates to answering questions or solving problems your readers have. These are the issues that send your readers to their keyboards in search of solutions, and are the cornerstones of your content marketing strategy.
Addressing consumer pain points involves more than just providing solutions to their problems; it involves pre-emptively addressing your customer needs before they arise. Your content should provide solutions for the issues they’re currently facing, but should also address potential buying objections that may block their path down the sales funnel.
To proactively address consumer objects as they come up, research your market to learn what challenges give them pause. Many of your readers will face similar issues—giving you the opportunity for broad outreach with one or two well-researched pieces of content.
5. Improving Existing Relationships
According to Gartner Group via Forbes, 80 percent of your company’s future revenue will come from 20 percent of your existing customers. While new lead acquisition is usually given priority in content marketing, your existing customers are the ones supplying the bulk of your revenue stream.
Don’t let your existing customers feel forgotten after you’ve made the sale—target your content to their needs to strengthen their loyalty and keep their business.
6. Consistency and Relevancy
Aside from how you position your content, your goals must be relevant and consistent for your business model. A content marketing result of more email subscribers sounds great…unless your goal was a stronger social media presence. By that standard, you could say that your marketing goal failed.
Make sure your marketing goals align with the needs of your business, and are measured accurately and consistently as they progress.
A Framework for Success
Content creation is important—but it’s only the first step. Content marketing success relies on structured goal setting to track progress and measure results. Sure, create educational content that addresses audience pain points and generates loyalty, but make sure that any efforts you make are informed by a defined plan to keep you on the path to success.
What other content marketing goals have you found to be helpful? Let us know in the comments below!
