If you’re reading this blog I’m sure that by now you’ve done some research and have heard the phrase, “Content is King.” Well, for most it’s a fact. For those to whom the phrase rings true, content marketing is a major component of ongoing digital marketing strategies. Establishing well-defined content marketing goals is the critical first step in developing a successful content strategy to drive business growth.
But what makes it worthy of such a title? Creating unique, high-quality content that is engaging and useful adds value to your products and services, results in high impact value for SEO, encourages customer engagement, and most importantly, helps you achieve your business goals.
Content marketing isn’t just about generating as many words as possible, however. If you want to build a successful content strategy, it helps to start by setting goals. In this post, I’ll talk about the five content marketing goals worth pursuing, and why you’ll want to pursue them.
Let’s take a look at what valued content – meaning text, video, surveys, podcasts, images, infographics, webinars, and whatever content is relevant to your business – brings to the table, and how to achieve these goals.
Setting Content Marketing Goals
As you set content marketing goals, consider the following elements to add to your agenda:
Goal #1: Brand Awareness
Developing brand awareness is the most common goal for content marketing. By generating fresh original content that your consumers find interesting, is relevant, and offers value, it establishes your brand as a voice that exhibit expertise and authority.
Goal: Help your prospects and customers get to know the true you.
Goal #2: Drive Traffic and Generate Engagement
To drive traffic to your content, a blog for example, start with a headline. Did you know that according to copyblogger, 80% of people will read your headline and from that 80% only 20% of people will continue reading the rest of the blog? Testing headlines (like you would an email subject line) can help you learn what is most attractive to your audience.
Goal: Measure the clickability of your blog headlines and adjust as necessary.
Goal #3: Generating Prospects and Sales
Content that creates brand awareness – check – This same content will have the potential to generate new leads [and increase sales].
Good content focuses less on sales and more advertorial – Think of the 80/20 affect – 80% educational, 20% sales. This encourages engagement minus the overwhelming sense of being pitched to. Driving consumers into product-oriented content can have a negative effect on their relationship with the brand, whereas good editorial fosters the relationship as they move from consumer to brand advocate.
Goal: Spend 80% of content space on helpful, answer-oriented content for your audience.
Goal #4: Customer Education Helps Develop a Loyal Audience
The biggest growth potential in most businesses comes from building a stronger relationship with your existing customers. When you’re consistently creating useful, interesting and relevant content that educates your audience, they will start to trust you, and in return to attract new consumers.
How do you go about this? Make your products and services work better by pairing them with useful, user-friendly content and providing value outside of your product offering. Start by writing down the questions you often hear from clients, and generate articles from these questions that will be valuable to your audience.
Goal: Engage your sales team and your support team to make sure your content answers the questions they’re asked most often.
Goal #5: Build Trust and Authority with Search Engines
SEO can help you rank at the top of Google search, which in return help put your business in front of prospects, increase cash flow, and encourage existing clients to spend more money. But it’s not just about being able to use the right keywords or having metadata descriptions it also requires. Here are some tips on producing high-quality content that will significantly impact SEO and search engine ranking –
Content Calendar – Let’s start off on the right foot. Exactly what it sounds like, a content calendar is a way to structurally map out upcoming content, blog posts, videos, and social media items. To help you get started, click over to A Free Content Calendar for SEO and Social Media in 2018, where my colleague, Brian Roseman, expands on the importance of having a content calendar and even has one for you to download and put to good use!
Publish unique, original content – Consistently creating and publishing 300-500 characters of unduplicated and specific content creates authority and opens up opportunities to building a great backlink profile. Also, it will ensure by having unique content, your website will not receive a duplicate content penalty from search engines. Bottom line, more specific content leads to higher ranking for relevant queries, better UX (user experience) and increase in conversions.
Leverage link outreach to build brand trust and authority – When sites link to your site is one of the most important ranking factors you can apply to your website. When Google sees another site trusting yours, it increases their trust as well. Internal links to other relevant websites helps your site rank organically for relevant search terms and keywords.
Keyword Research – A higher ranking keyword ultimately exposes the brand to more digital consumers searching for content in its industry. If you want to expand building a reputation with search engines with the use of a content strategy, click over to Dave Anderson’s How to Create Content Marketing Strategy that Customers and Search Engines Will Love.
To generate content for your website that brings value to not only your customers and prospects, but also search engines is key for success. By following the steps above, you will be on the right track to building strong brand awareness, and ultimately meeting your business’s content marketing goals.
