In today's competitive market, it's essential for businesses of all sizes to employ effective content marketing strategies. The benefits of content marketing are clear: it can help you with search engine optimization and drive traffic to your website, attract new prospects, generate leads, deepen customer relationships, and ultimately result in increased sales.
But what are the goals that content marketers should pursue when it comes to content marketing? In this article, we provide you with a list of six essential goals every business should achieve when it comes to content marketing.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves consistently creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
Content marketing can take many forms, including blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, social media posts, infographics, ebooks, and more. It can be used to educate, entertain, inspire, or persuade your audience, depending on your goals and the needs of your target audience.
It is a long-term strategy that focuses on building trust and relationships with customers in your niche. It aims to provide value to your audience and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. By consistently creating and distributing high-quality content, you can attract and retain a larger customer base and ultimately drive profitable customer action.
Why is setting up content marketing goals important?
Setting content marketing goals is important because it helps you focus your efforts and resources on specific objectives that align with your overall business goals. It gives you a way to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy and determine whether you are making progress toward the outcomes that key stakeholders want.
Benefits of content marketing goals
There are several benefits to setting content marketing goals. Here are a few notable ones for your reference:
- Clarifies your strategy: Setting goals helps you define your target audience, determine the content format, identify the channels you will use to distribute your content, and select the right content topics.
- Increases accountability: Having smart (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals allows you to track your progress and hold yourself accountable for meeting them.
- Improves ROI: By setting goals and tracking your progress, you can determine the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing efforts and make adjustments as needed to improve their effectiveness.
- Fosters collaboration: Setting goals helps bring your team together and ensures that everyone is working towards a common objective.
- Enhances decision-making: Having clear goals helps you make informed decisions about your content marketing strategy, including the content to create, how to distribute it, and how to measure its success.
6 Best content marketing goals you should focus on with tips on how to measure
Content marketing is a strategy that requires significant time, energy, and resources. If you want your managers, team leaders, CMOs, or CEOs to invest in content marketing, it is crucial that you set the right content marketing strategy goals and achieve them. This will help prove that content marketing is a great way of attracting leads, engaging prospects, and delighting customers.
Let’s take a look at six important content marketing goals examples that you can use for your next campaign.
Building Brand Awareness
Developing a website, designing landing pages, and signing up on social media platforms is the easy part. The hard part is growing your brand presence in the sea of similar websites and social media profiles. Therefore, building brand awareness is an important goal for every content marketing strategy.
It is a continuous process, and the goal is ever evolving to the next 1000 visitors on your website or followers on your social media account. Building brand awareness is the first and most important goal for every content marketing strategy, especially when you are just starting with content marketing.
How can you measure
To measure your success in building brand awareness, you can set up website analytics and track visitor traffic. For social media accounts, remember to create a business account and you will get a dedicated analytics dashboard that gives you brand awareness metrics such as impressions, follower count, post likes, shares, and comments.
Getting Conversion Through Content
Say you have built a brand with a decent number of people reading your blogs, liking your posts, watching your videos, and interacting with your content in general. It's time to strengthen your sales funnel and focus on conversions through your content.
Conversion does not necessarily mean a purchase of your product/services. Businesses in the initial stages of content marketing can understand conversion as smaller actions such as email subscribers and ebook downloads.
How can you measure
To measure the effectiveness of your content for this goal, you can track the number of email subscribers, form fill-ups, or free trial sign-ups. These metrics, when tied to the content pieces on which the visitor performs the action, will tell you exactly which content pieces are performing better.
Increase Organic Traffic
Increasing organic traffic is tricky but not impossible. Just like brand awareness, this marketing goal is also a continuous one. It takes consistent efforts in publishing high-quality, value-adding content to start getting constant organic traffic.
Focusing on this goal will help you leverage your website as a lead-generating machine. The more people that visit your website, the higher the chances of leads being generated from CTAs, forms, and other types of lead capture systems on your website.
How can you measure
To measure the increase in organic traffic, you must ensure that your website has the right analytics integration. For example, Google Analytics is an ideal website analytics tool that helps you track the traffic on your website. It also enables you to optimize your content, check for errors, and identify the sources of website traffic.
Building Customer Loyalty And Trust
Building brand loyalty and trust by giving discounts will devalue your products and reduce your profit margins. However, content marketing can help you build retention strategies, increase customer loyalty and attract new customers by establishing trust through insightful and engaging content.
How can you measure
To measure the customer loyalty and trust built through your content, track the performance of your content. For example, if you are sending a monthly newsletter, see how many of your current customers open and view the email content. Or, if you are publishing a blog about your products and services, track the returning visitor traffic on your Google Analytics dashboard.
Foster Customer Relationship
Fostering customer relationships is an important part of content marketing. After all, the goal of every marketing activity is to attract and engage customers. You can focus on this goal by creating content that speaks to your target audience’s pain points.
Help them with DIY guides and ebooks about important topics around your products and services. The goal is to forge a relationship with your customers through content.
How can you measure
To measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts in fostering customer relationships, track the number of leads generated through your content and how many of these leads were converted into paying customers or product trials.
Enable Sales Support
Sales is more about inspiring people to take action and solve their problems with your products than simply narrating the product specifications. Content marketing can enable sales teams by providing highly engaging sales pitches and presentations. This will help your sales team effectively showcase your products and services and, if everything goes well, bring in more customers.
How can you measure
In order to measure the success of your content in enabling sales teams, divide your leads into two parts; one where your sales team uses the collateral you create and the other where they do not use content marketing collaterals.
If your content is actually helping the sales team, the first group of leads should have a higher conversion rate.
If that is not the case, re-evaluate your content with the sales team and make necessary changes that help your sales team convert more leads into customers.
Always link your content marketing goals with KPI
While setting content marketing goals, it is vital that you tie each of your goals to specific and measurable key performance indicators. For example, if your content marketing goal is to increase brand awareness, you can tie that to the increase or decrease in organic traffic.
Doing this will help you quantify the impact of your efforts and tweak your campaigns to improve results.
Having said that, there are many KPIs for you to choose from, and to make the right choice, you need to know each of them. We have created an in-depth list of over 40 content marketing metrics or KPIs that marketers can use to track the performance of content marketing campaigns.
For more information about these content-marketing metrics, refer to this detailed Scalenut blog, ‘40 Content Marketing Metrics that Every Marketer Should Know in 2022.
Use Scalenut to boost your content marketing ROI
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