Content marketing strategy goals: a step-by-step guide
As with any business programme, setting goals for your content marketing strategy will help you execute the work with greater focus and success.
In this blog, we’ll look at common strategic goals service and product marketers employ, understand the copy vs. content divide, and outline the steps required to create a set of meaningful content marketing goals. A good content writer can review these goals and create website copy to grow online visibility and leads.
Content marketing strategy goals
Let’s start by looking at the most common goals. They won’t all apply to your business, but remember: an effective content marketing strategy helps you pursue the right tactics.
Find new customers
This is likely to be a high-level goal in most businesses, but it can also be a specific goal for your content marketing strategy. Plus, it could be on any scale, from finding a handful of customers a year who commit to six-figure contracts, to finding hundreds of customers a week to spend a few bucks.
Increase revenue
This goal differs from the above as you can increase revenue with a content marketing strategy through both new and existing customers. Specific examples include upselling, cross-selling, and promoting higher-value products.
Improve customer retention
Keeping existing customers is much less expensive than finding new customers. Also, customer retention strategies usually deliver high returns on investment. Content marketing can be an effective tool if customer retention is important in your business.
Increase profitability
You can use content marketing to upsell or cross-sell, as mentioned above, as well as to promote products or services in your range that are more profitable for your business.
Improve conversion rates
Content marketing can also help if you are already getting conversions from your digital marketing activities but want to improve conversion rates, i.e., the percentage of people who consume the content that you produce and then go on to become a lead or customer.
Increase the size of your audience
Content marketing can help with this goal in a number of ways. Examples include increasing app downloads, traffic to your website, social media audience size, and email list size.
Enhance brand awareness
Content marketing is one of the most effective tools you can use to increase the awareness of your brand. It can also deliver substantially better returns on investment compared with other methods of building brand awareness, such as sponsorships or traditional media advertising.
Build brand loyalty
Loyal customers often become advocates of your brand. In other words, they can help build brand awareness and find new customers. Content marketing can help build brand loyalty.
Find and recruit new employees
Content marketing is highly effective at telling the story of your company, your vision for the future, and what you are passionate about. This can help find new, highly talented employees and is especially beneficial in industries where there are skills shortages.
Improve marketing ROI
This goal is most applicable where you have a marketing strategy that is largely delivering on your business goals but you want to drive down costs.
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Copy vs. content
Discussions on the difference between content and copy are often navel-gazing exercises indulged in by marketers and people who produce content (or copy, for that matter).
However, there is an important difference between copy and content that you should be aware of, particularly when setting goals:
Content – content covers all types of communication you create for your audience. This includes everything from blogs to videos to ads to project descriptions.
Copy is a specific type of content – a sub-set. It is content that seeks to persuade the audience to take action, such as to make a purchase or request a quote. Examples of copy include sales pages, ad text, landing pages for campaigns, and brochures.
Now comes the most important question in relation to copy vs. content – why does the distinction matter? The difference between copy and content matters as many small and medium-sized businesses focus almost exclusively on creating copy.
This means they create advertising campaigns, signage, brochures, point-of-sale materials, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, etc. In other words, almost all of their communication with customers has a sales message.
However, modern consumers want more than to be constantly sold to. This particularly applies online. When using the internet or social media, people want to make a connection with brands and products. They want to learn, they want to develop personally and professionally, and they want to feel a part of something. You need to do this with editorial content, as it’s much more difficult to do it with sales copy alone.
Therefore, you need to create and publish editorial content as part of your marketing strategy. You still need sales-focused copy. After all, any good salesperson knows that you will never get sales if you don’t directly ask for them. However, to make a real connection with online audiences, you also need other forms of helpful or educational content.
Step-by-step guide for defining content marketing strategy goals
Step 1 – Define the goals of your business
Before you look at content marketing goals, start with the goals of your business. This includes both short-term and long-term goals.
Step 2 – Identify where content marketing can help
Decide which of your business goals can be wholly or partially achieved through a content marketing strategy.
Step 3 – Use the SMART goals approach
SMART is an acronym that can be used as a highly effective tool for creating goals:
Specific – clearly define the goal
Measurable – you also need a clear method of measuring success
Attainable – can a content marketing strategy really achieve the goal?
Relevant – going through the first two steps in this process will help ensure the content marketing goals you define are relevant to your business
Time-bound – content marketing is an ongoing process, but for it to be measurable, it needs to have time-defined milestones.
Developing your content marketing strategy
Defining goals is part of creating a content marketing strategy that many people, including ‘expert’ marketers, fail to take. This leads to inevitable questions on things like the effectiveness of the strategy or the return on investment that has been achieved.
Without clearly defined goals, it is impossible to answer these questions. So, make sure you go through this process. Then, once you have defined the goals for your content marketing strategy, you can get on with creating the strategy itself – a topic we will cover in our next article.