Which Content Marketing Goals To Choose

Today we’re going to talk about content marketing goals, we’re going to look at the five top level sort of areas to approach when coming up with the goals for your content.

First of all, a couple of tips. Always align your content marketing goals with your business goals. That way, your content is helping to supplement your brand messaging and it’s ultimately going to help your business grow.

Second of all, always reassess your content marketing goals. You might put together a 6 or 12 month strategy and your business might change. It might have new needs where the content marketing needs to be so pushed in that direction. So, onto the five areas.

First of all, brand awareness. So, when it comes to creating a goal around brand awareness, you really want to be looking at being able to monitor and increase, in say, brand mentions on social channels or PR mentions, that sort of thing. You want to be looking at creating pieces of content along the lines of press releases which can then be distributed and that will hopefully bring in more awareness.

Second of all, building trust. You want to look at overcoming the problems or the hurdles that your customers might have. So, your goal will be around creating content that’s going to really add value and answer the questions that customers have. For example, you can go to your sales team and say, “Well, what are the most common questions that customers will ask?” You can then create content around that.

It’s also about sharing expertise, basically putting yourself as an expert in your particular field. So, whether that’s on your own blog or you can also look at getting some great guest blogging opportunities where you can contribute to a site and basically share your knowledge to a target audience that you may not have already been able to reach.

Next of all you’ve got leads. This will be different for every business. So, your sales, for example, if you’re an eCommerce site and you’re looking to increase the sales of a particular product, for example, say a camera. You want to create content that will not sell that product in the same sense that Sales Copy does, but maybe create something around the topic of it.

For example, if the camera’s particularly good at wildlife photography, you can create a post about the best places to take photos of wildlife. That way, you can put a call to action that points people towards that camera. You can then monitor how many, how the sales have changed, and see whether that particular piece of content works.

When it comes to subscriptions if you have a company eNewsletter, you will want to be creating a goal around how many subscriptions you get. What you do with those subscriptions is that you need to be sending out valuable content and you want to be able to sort of test how well particular types of content are doing with your audience. You might see that a couple of subscriptions are cancelled, in which case, you know maybe that piece of content didn’t work, and if you see them increase, then you might see that you’re doing a good job in terms of what you’re sending to your customers. It’s also well worth making a goal around how well your copy on your subscription page works. It’s really important to make sure that you’re telling your customers what to expect from your newsletter, otherwise, they’re very unlikely to sign up.

Next of all, engagement. The goals that you can create around engagement are really about monitoring the comment’s and shares that your content gets. So, a particular blog post that’s highly visual might have got more comments and shares than one that’s based mostly around text. That will teach you to create more visual content, that sort of thing. You really need to have a look at the types of content that you’re creating at the moment and what could be improved, and that way you can better measure how you’re going to engage your readers.

Next, we have traffic. So, a basic goal would very much be to say I want more traffic. We all want more traffic, but you really want to look at creating specific goals around how you’re going to gain that traffic. For example, guest blogging opportunities are great for owning links that’ll often drive referral traffic, same goes for social. If you’re being active on social, share your content on there. You might start to see an increase in referral traffic from your social accounts.

Basically, you need to be really thoughtful about what your goal is going to be. It doesn’t necessarily have to be very heavily focused on any of these areas. In fact, some of these areas will have some cross over, but what you’ve got to be careful not to do is have a goal that tries to encompass too much, and equally a goal that’s not really going to help your business. It’s just an easy win because you’re not really going to gain anything from that.

So, that’s it. That’s the content marketing goals I wanted to talk to you about today. If you want to find out more just follow our social channels and check out the Koozai blog. Thanks, bye.