Content Marketing Goals

The content marketing strategy is the foundation on which all content is built. Your strategy determines what content topics you'll address, what content formats you'll use, who will be responsible for content creation and who will manage your team of writers. It also includes how your content will be distributed to your target audience.

When content marketing goals are well-defined and specific, content marketers can develop content that is relevant to their customers' needs and business goals.

‍

Content Marketing Objectives

‍

‍

• Increase Brand awareness

• Generate High-Quality leads

• nurture and convert leads to customers

• Empower your team to deliver a consistent message and values

• Establish and maintain thought leadership

• Help existing customers

• Thrill your customers so they promote your brand

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Increase Brand Awareness

When a company increases brand awareness, it means that more people know about the company and what it offers.  Sometimes this is referred to as reach.  

Content marketing can help a company increase its brand awareness by providing content about the company to target audiences.  For example, content that shows how well-known companies are using the company's products or services has the potential to increase brand awareness for those companies.

Impressions

When people are served your content either through a search engine or on social media it is called an impression.  

Increase your content marketing goals by keeping track of how many impressions you get online. Content marketers can increase content marketing goals, for example, by increasing the number of impressions they generate or increasing the value of each impression by targeting their content to specific audiences.

Interactions

This is an even more important metric.  Interactions with your content.  

A content marketer's content marketing goals are likely to be increased if their content is being shared, liked, or commented on by its intended audience.

The more interactions your content generates, the more successful it has been at reaching your target audience and increasing brand awareness.

Demand Generation

Content Marketing, and gaining views of your content can sometimes be considered demand generation.  

Demand generation is content marketing content that generates views, backlinks, and awareness. It's content that people are interested in viewing.

Generate High-Quality Leads

One of the ultimate goals of content marketing is generating high-quality leads. Leads and potential customers are the lifeblood of a business.  And lead generation is the step that follows after demand generation.  

If content marketers can utilize content to generate leads, they will be more likely to reach their content marketing goals.

Content marketers who are interested in high-quality lead generation should look for content that helps potential customers with their problems.  This is where you can generate things such as a mini-course, e-book, or other "lead magnets."

Marketing Qualified Leads

A marketing qualified lead, or MQL, is an expression that indicates that the person has expressed interest in your products or services.  

Getting MQLs is an indication that you are successful at generating leads. It's one of the most important content marketing metrics.

Sales Qualified Leads

A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a potential customer who has been identified as being more likely to buy your product or service than other leads in your database.

To be considered a SQL, a lead must have met certain criteria that you have set up beforehand, such as expressing an interest in your products or services, downloading a white paper, or attending a webinar.

In addition to this the need to be likely to be qualified to purchase your product.  

Nurture and Convert Leads to Customers

Nurturing and converting leads has historically been viewed as a sales function only.  But increasingly the wall between sales and marketing is coming down.  Lead nurturing is increasingly becoming a collaborative approach.  

If you can generate top-quality content that your leads want to view, you can nurture them along the sales funnel and eventually convert them into customers.

One of the most important tools in content marketing is email.  Using email to promote your products or services has the potential to increase conversion rates, engagement with content, and reach.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

As mentioned, if the customer journey is well-considered then it will serve as a blueprint to nurturing leads.  This is where you really want to bring sales and marketing to the table to identify the top needs of customers, and potential customers.  

Then generate awesome content that will lead to new customers. This is how sales and marketing get in lockstep, by considering the customer and creating content that serves both sales and marketing.

Sales Team

The primary function of sales is to win new business.  The sales team can seriously up their game by focusing more on customer education, and being a resource than hard closing.  

If content marketers and sales work with each other, they can create upsells or cross-sells that will bring customers back again and again.  Content marketing helps sales by creating an educational resource for potential customers.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is one of the number one ways to power up the sales and marketing cycle.  This is where you can send relevant content to people as they move through the customer journey.  

This usually includes marketing in multiple channels.  A few examples are email marketing, and using retargeting ads to continue to interact with the lead.  

‍

Empower your whole team to consistently deliver your company message and Unique Values

One of the major content marketing objectives is to empower your whole time to present your unique brand voice.  And to enable everyone on your team to be able to present your unique value proposition.  

By developing this kind of content, you can drive your customers to purchase your products or services.  But also make sure that the sales team will be empowered to move prospects through the sales funnel. This is why it is important for them to work with marketers because they are the ones who have customer information, and know what their needs are.

‍

Service

‍

‍

By teaching and coaching everyone on your team to present the same message.  And by creating high quality content that they can share, you can unify your whole team.   The service team  is a great example of being able to deliver your brand message.

Creating consistent content for everyone empowers the whole company and builds a stronger relationship with customers.  Service team members often work with customers who have challenges.  They have the opportunity to gather customer stories.  

By providing top notch service you create brand loyalty.  Customer success stories are both valuable content for engaging with new customers, it will lead to repeat business.

Customer Engagement, Loyalty, and Advocacy

When you empower your team to communicate more effectively, they will be better resource for customers.  As mentioned before, the service team is a great example of this.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Other Departments

But this doesn't just work with sales, marketing and service.  There are other departments  you can consider for content creation.

Such as finance  and accounting.  These departments can create content that will help future customers make more informed decisions before they purchase your products or services.

And by really knowing your companies unique values, even other departments can help deliver a unified message.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Establish and Maintain Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is the ability to think strategically and critically about an industry or market. It's the ability to identify opportunities, and to provide insights and ideas that are valuable to others. Thought leaders are usually respected for their expertise, and they're often able to influence the thinking of others.

There are a few reasons why a company should try to establish thought leadership.

The first reason is because thought leadership can help a company differentiate itself from its competitors. When a company is able to think strategically and critically about an industry or market, it can provide insights and ideas that are valuable to others. And this can help the company stand out from its competitors.

Another reason why thought leadership is important is because it can help a company build trust with its customers. When customers trust a company, they're more likely to do business with it. And thought leadership can help a company foster this trust.

Finally, thought leadership can also help a company attract top talent. When a companies talent recruitment is more effective than your competition; you can dominate the market.  

Topical Authority in SEO

Topical authority is a search engine optimization (SEO) term that refers to the ranking power of a website on a specific topic. A website with topical authority is seen as an expert on its topic, and is therefore more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for related queries.

There are a number of factors that contribute to a website's topical authority, including the quality and quantity of its content, the number of backlinks it has from other websites, and its social media presence.

A content marketing objective to be a thought leader will lead to becoming an authority in search engines.  

This means when you produce new content, it will rank higher in search results, and rank faster.

Completely Cover Topic

As a content marketing objective of establishing thought leadership, you will need to produce enough free content on a particular subject that others think of you as a resource center.    By the time you are finished, it should be hard to find anything else published on your subject.

A Comparison of Content Marketing and SEO

Content is one of the most important parts of both search engine optimization (SEO)and content marketing. This is because they both rely heavily on words, phrases, and images that describe or represent a product, service, or idea. This is also where there are differences between SEO and content marketing.

The first difference between SEO and content marketing is that SEO focuses on the search engines while content marketing focuses on your audience.

SEO can boost traffic to your website, but it isn't as effective at helping you establish a relationship with your audience. This is where content marketing comes in. Content marketing helps you establish a relationship with your readers so they trust you and rely on you as a source of information.

This is how SEO and content marketing work together: traffic from organic search results can lead to page views and time spent on pages that increase your chances of converting visitors into customers.

Help Existing Customers

One of the content marketing objectives that is often overlooked is to help existing customers.  No doubt one of your business goals is to help current customers to find success.  

‍

How - To and Support Articles

A great practice to get into from the early days of your business is create content any time your customer runs into difficulty.  

One way to support your customers is with "How-To" articles. These are especially important to solve frequent problems you hear about from current customers.

Another way to support your current customers is by creating "Support Articles". This includes frequently asked questions (FAQs), troubleshooting, product manuals, and tutorials for using specific features of your product.

This support content helps your customers find the information they need because it's helpful, easy to find, and reliable. This is why support articles are also a great way to introduce new features, or get feedback on how you can improve existing products or services.

Increase Customer Life Time Value

By producing a blog post and other great content to help your customers.  You enable your content marketing team to help your current customers.  The more satisfied your customers are the more they will use your products and services.  This will in turn lead to increase Life time Value (LTV).  

This should be at the top of your marketing and business goals because it is much less expensive to sell to current (happy) customers then gain new customers.

‍

Thrill your customers and turn them into promoters

Content can also be used to create brand advocates by delivering value and telling stories.  Content marketing helps with customer engagement by providing useful information for regular customers as well as new prospects.  

The most important part of the marketing strategy is to thrill customers.  When you thrill a customer they will become a vocal advocate for your business. This will help with many content marketing goals.  Such as lead conversion, increased LTV, and establishing thought leadership.  

Give Them What They Need

You should tool your website, and all channels to give customers the relevant information they want and need.  As quickly as possible, wit h the least amount of effort possible.  

This way they will always have a positive impression of how easy it is to get solutions from you.  

Keep Them Engaged

Most businesses are only concerned with engaging with prospects. What few include in their content marketing plan is creative ways to engage current customers. Find  creative ways to keep customers engaged with your brand.

Also it would be a great idea to make sure that you are emailing them also things they want and need. That way when they get an email they will open it.

Another good idea is to use incentives for referrals.  For example , give a percentage of the sale back to your customer.  

This way you get in front of them again, and they feel like they are getting a freebie in addition to a great product or service.

Content marketing is a great way to help your current customers while also increasing your life time value. There are many different goals that you can achieve with content marketing, such as increasing pageviews, time spent on pages, and conversions. You can also use content marketing to help existing customers, increase customer engagement, and thrill customers.

‍