Whether you pay for content marketing services or manage it yourself, it is important that your actions align with your goals. Another way to say it is that goals are everything in content marketing. The goals you set for marketing campaigns dictate everything from the content you create to how you distribute it.
Marketers new to content marketing tend to focus on one or two basic goals to start with. Then they build on those goals to establish and reach new ones. Over time, a thoughtful and well-developed content marketing strategy reaps good rewards.
Content Marketing’s Primary Goals
If you were to ask several marketers about their goals for content, you would probably get a variety of answers. One marketer might say his primary goal is improving SEO performance. Another might say she is targeting brand loyalty. Here is the takeaway: there isn’t a single goal for content marketing. There are multiple options. So marketers have to determine what’s most important for each campaign.
Here are the most common primary goals content marketers pursue:
- Improving SEO performance
- Increasing website traffic
- Improving customer loyalty
- Driving sales revenues
- Generating new leads
- Growing email subscribers
- Building online credibility
The experts at Salt Lake City’s Webtek Digital Marketing say that enhancing SEO performance and driving traffic tend to be the primary goals agencies start with. Their reasoning is simple: it’s nearly impossible for organizations to reach all of the other goals of content marketing if potential customers aren’t finding their websites. You have to get visits before you can concentrate on those other things.
Goals Direct Content Type
Understanding your goals should lead to a better understanding of the types of content you want to focus on. Let us assume your primary goal is to boost SEO performance. That means ensuring that your website does well on Google.
Google can account for all sorts of content served up on websites and social media platforms. But at the heart of what the search engine does is text-based content. So to start with, a fair amount of your content should be blog posts, guest posts, informational articles, customer reviews, and so forth.
Once you have established good credibility on Google, you might want to move on to the goal of driving sales revenues. This goal is aimed squarely at a particular demographic. What if that demographic responds more to videos and social media posts than text-based content? You shift your focus to those other content types.
Aligning Goals With Business Objectives
A key thing to avoid with content marketing is to maintain goals that are separate from your broader business objectives. In the end, whether you pay for content marketing services or handle content in-house, your goals for that content should support your business objectives. Otherwise, your efforts amount to pulling on the company rope in another direction.
This is where having multiple goals comes into play. Your primary goal for content marketing might be driving traffic to your site. Driving traffic takes center stage because you understand that people need to know your business exists before they can purchase products and services. But ultimately, driving sales is the broader business objective.
You can incorporate that objective into your content. In so doing, you can create content that aligns with both goals simultaneously. Your content can be optimized for SEO (to drive traffic) while also being optimized for conversion (sales).
Goals are everything in content marketing. Any agency offering content marketing services without first establishing clear goals isn’t doing right by clients. Ditto if you are handling content marketing yourself with no goals to shoot for.