Content Marketing is all the rage these days. From big corporations to small startups and independent writers; content marketing helps each of them realize their end goals.
Content marketing, even as potent as it is, can only help you if you know how to set content marketing goals and go about making them come true.
Before that, let’s begin by understanding what content marketing is.
It is a marketing strategy used for attracting, engaging, and retaining an audience by producing and sharing relevant content including videos, articles, podcasts, etc.
If you take a look at the present scenario, you’ll see that content marketing seems to be working well for some businesses, but not so well for others.
Why is that so?
Sometimes, content that appears to be “great” does nothing for a business. Irrespective of how amazing it is, content by itself is just content. It will not take you where you want to go until you add these two things to it: context and clear goals.
If you are creating content for a business, you need to know the purpose of writing it, who you are creating the content for, in addition to the main objectives and goals.
This entire process of defining and gauging how a content piece can be useful to a brand is known as setting content marketing goals.
In this blog, we’ll discuss some common content marketing goals and how to set them. Let’s begin without further ado!
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Brand Awareness
We all know the importance of a solid brand presence and brand awareness. Both of them are quite critical for the success of your business. Hence, increasing brand awareness should be one of the content marketing goals you set. Doing so also increases the opportunity for realizing various other marketing goals including sales, increased revenue, networking, and more.
Tip: Create and develop hard-hitting, relatable content that automatically makes your audience think about your brand & business as soon as they come across it.
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Lead Generation
According to many marketers, “lead generation” is one of the common content marketing goals you should set. This enables you to gauge the impact of your content in the form of targeted, qualified leads before pushing out more content. Doing so helps you figure out if your content is working the way you intended it to.
We recommend that you set goals for the total number of leads you get in a month. Then you can target a specific percentage of conversions from those very leads.
Tip: It would be useful to find out which topic gets the most traffic and leads. Once you do, you can produce more relevant & unique content based on that topic. This will help you generate an increased amount of quality leads.
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Audience Relevance Score/Providing a unique solution to audience problems
Today, another content marketing goal set by marketers is the “number of audience’s problems solved” by your content. Find out the issues your audience is facing and what annoys or worries them about a specific course of action within your industry/field.
To do this, you can simply go through blog comments, host Q&A sessions, read user emails/queries/feedbacks/replies, or through some specific Google Analytics metrics.
Once you figure out the issues they face, provide targeted, unique solutions geared towards those issues.
As you solve the problems of your audience, they start to trust you and rely on you for more unique solutions in the future. This trust generates customer engagement and brand loyalty. Another upside of this process is that you get to know the kind of content you need to create for the future.
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Returning Visitors
Today, many marketers share the view that content marketing managers should concentrate on setting goals to increase the number of returning visitors to their website. The reason for this is that returning visitors give you an idea about the long-haul effects of your content marketing strategy. Measuring the volume of visitors for each content piece separately can mislead you about the results of your overall content marketing efforts. Thus, it’s always better to focus on the number of returning visitors.
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User Engagement
Some marketers consider user engagement as a crucial content marketing goal. Why?
It ensures that you are producing content that your audience cares about. Concentrating on engagement also makes your brand presence stronger. Moreover, when you set this goal, you also get to witness an increase in brand awareness and conversions in the long term.
Audience engagement helps you set your brand apart from others and realize your content marketing goals.
Note: Prioritize tracking engagement statistics over sales as they tell you the important information you need to know about your customer.
In case you find out that something is not right, you can get to the core of the issue and fix it. Tracking engagement also leads to an increase in brand awareness as well as sales figures.
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Conversions
One of the most common content marketing goals set by marketers is “Conversions.”
However, conversions don’t always have to mean purchase.
Depending on your company’s business model, a conversion can also be defined as a user clicking “set up a demo” or filling up a contact form. Conversions are different for different stages of the funnel, and it is essential to understand what they could mean for your own business.
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Trust
Developing audience trust is key to ensuring a solid brand presence. As per the latest statistics, 75% of content marketers use content to develop trust.
When you generate engaging, valuable, and helpful content, your audience starts to put their faith in you. This lays the foundation for a long-term user relationship that makes them return to you.
How to create this trust? Provide help and foster a relationship with your potential customers without offering them your services in their first encounter with you. When they develop faith in your services, your audiences are more likely to purchase from you in the future as well.
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User Intent
Producing content that is written according to user intent is a content marketing goal that all content managers must set. For achieving this goal, it is important to step into the shoes of your users and understand their complete customer journey. Along with this, you also need to create content that answers the audience’s questions and is not just optimized for Google, Bing, and other search engines.
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Content Repository
Another goal that a content marketing team must set is to take out some time and create a repository of content marketing ideas/images/memes/clips that can be used when needed.
This content repository will come in handy on days when you are not able to put fresh, engaging content together.
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Content Clarity
This is yet another content marketing goal to set. You should write content which the readers can read instantly to find the answers they are looking for. If they can find out the solutions to their problems, their curiosity will be piqued and they will be interested to know more about you.
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Daily Social Media Posts
One content marketing goal all content marketing managers/teams should set is the best time to post on social media platforms. You can think of doing 1-3 stories/reshares/reposts even if you don’t feel like posting on your Instagram feed daily.
This is important because when you post frequently, you keep your followers interested and engaged. It also works as a friendly reminder that your business is thriving and is here to solve its issues.
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Domain Authority
Increasing domain authority is another important content marketing goal. By increasing your domain authority, you establish that your content is valuable both to your audience and your industry.
Aside from the 12 above-mentioned ones, there are a lot of other content marketing goals that you should give thought to. Some of these include:
- Ensuring content cohesiveness (because content that looks scattered isn’t likely to hold the attention of your audience).
- Spending enough time promoting content and increasing its visibility (promoting content is just as important as writing a great piece of content).
- Updating old posts (every content marketing team should make it a point to update a minimum of 10% of blog posts on a site, that too every month).
- Maximizing the visibility of infographics.
What Are The Types of Content Marketing?
Now that we know some of the common content marketing goals and how to set them, let’s understand the different types of content that you can utilize for your content marketing efforts. These include:
- Blog posts: Regarded as a cornerstone of content marketing, blog posts help increase brand awareness and overall engagement.
- Videos: Producing high-quality video content can increase the chances of converting and nurturing a lead. As per the latest statistics, people retain 95% of a message from a video, as compared to 10% from static forms of content. (Insivia)
- Guides and how-tos: These help you increase brand engagement, authority, and presence on the internet.
- Infographics: Individuals remember 65% of the information they see in a visual. Visuals are also a great choice when you wish to explain something in a more engaging, wholesome manner. Thus, creating infographics should also be a part of your content marketing strategy.
Other ways to engage and retain your customers with content are eBooks, checklists, case studies, testimonials, and reviews. You can even think of creating memes to present your ideas or communicate your intentions if they make sense for you and align with your brand message.
Wrapping It Up
Content marketing can be considered a powerful marketing and awareness tool. It can aid you in achieving increased brand awareness, audience trust, quality leads, and a lot more!
Now that you know the definition of content marketing goals, the most common ones to set, and how to set them, you can go ahead and decide which ones you are going to focus on. You can then apply them to your content marketing plan and be well on your way to reap amazing results.
