Gooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllsssssss!
All of your marketing will be better if your goals are clearly defined, but I'd like to focus on your content marketing goals. You do have content marketing goals, right!?!?
Your content marketing goals should be tied to your overall business objectives, which may include:
- Increased sales
- Increased profits
- Increased market share
If we want to help achieve any or all of these business goals, we need to identify some content marketing goals that will help us do so. Let's do it!
Increase Brand Awareness
Every business wants to be known in the marketplace. That's one of the primary functions of marketing. We want prospective buyers to know that we're an option and ideally, the best option. Therefore, one of your content marketing goals should be increasing brand awareness.
There're a multitude of ways to grow your brand awareness with content marketing, such as:
- Increasing your high quality website traffic (think SEO)
- Increasing quality inbound links
- Social discussions
- Increasing views of documents, infographics, videos and other content
To measure this content marketing goal, you can evaluate each of the items listed above over time. Remember, if you can't measure it, it's not a very solid goal. Some metrics cover intangibles, but inbound marketing and content marketing are highly measurable.
Increase Leads Generated
If you want to increase sales, profits and/or market share, you definitely want to increase leads. You may even want to take this a step further and specify that you want to increase high quality leads generated.
To increase the number of leads we generate, we need to have mechanisms on our web properties to capture leads such as:
Again, for this to be one of our goals, we need to actually measure these items.
- How many inbound leads are generated each period with landing page forms offering content?
- How many generic email list opt-ins occurred in a time period?
- How do these numbers compare to last period?
- What worked best?
- What can we do to improve?
- How did these numbers impact the business objectives we're working towards?
Increase Participation & Engagement
The web truly is a network of networks. Both technically and figuratively. If we can get exposure in the right networks through engagement with our content marketing, we can benefit from the network effect of built awareness.
So how does engagement happen? Engagement means that someone took an action around your content marketing. It could be as substantial as downloading high quality content and becoming a lead, but it could also be as simple as:
- Social engagement such as a like, retweet, favorite, +1, share or comment
- Responding to, forwarding or clicking-through your email content
- Linking to your content
- Commenting on your blog or social update
If you guessed that you should be measuring and comparing these items, you are correct and deserve a sticker. Take a look at what gets you the most engagement and do more of that type of content marketing. Maybe it's videos or infographics or ebooks or checklists. Whatever works best, do more of it.
Engagement leads to better awareness and further reach with the network effect of the web.
Customer Loyalty and Retention
Guess what the easiest sale to make is? A repeat sale to a happy customer. You don't have to sell them. They are already sold. You don't have to woo them. They are already wooed.
All of that being said, why wouldn't you have a consistent content marketing goal around reaching your existing customers to improve loyalty and retention?
Some great metrics for measuring loyalty and retention include:
- Volume of content consumed by current customers
- Number of social shares, referrals of content by existing customers
- Retention rates
- Referrals
Ready...Set...Goal!
I hope you now have a solid foundation to set some content marketing goals and measure them. Remember, your content marketing goals she be supportive of your overall business objectives.
Your content marketing goals should also be measurable, measured regularly and improved. Don't spend too long spinning in the mud if your data shows something's not working. Be sure to give it a fair shake though,
What are some of your content marketing goals? Additionally, what goals have been easiest to achieve/hardest to achieve? Let me know in the comments below!
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