From the course: Content Marketing Foundations
Setting strategic goals
- Every day, businesses publish articles, podcasts, and videos that their customers just won't see. That's because it's easy to produce lackluster content that gets lost or ignored, and unfortunately, that's what happens when many companies invest in content marketing. While it's certainly a challenge, producing remarkable content for your customers is possible when you're following the guidance of a content marketing strategy. This document is where your organization should map out how exactly you'll use content to reach your goals. Creating a strategy is an opportunity to define who, what, when, where, why, and how of your approach to content marketing. The point of this strategy is to make sure you're setting up a framework for making purposeful decisions and setting business goals to guide those decisions at every step of the process. With your goals clearly defined in your strategy, it'll be easier to set priorities, plan out each content campaign more thoughtfully, and collaborate with others. While a strategy doesn't guarantee success, I've seen many companies succeed with content marketing when they're organized and deliberate. For me, the first and most important step to starting with a content marketing strategy is setting strategic goals so the results you're looking to achieve are clear from the beginning. A strategic goal is an outcome that's meaningful for your business, easy to understand at a glance, and straightforward to measure. Some common content marketing-centric goals are establishing thought leadership, improving customer loyalty, demand generation, increasing sales, audience development, and earning brand awareness. One way to guide which goals you'll focus on and when is by being aware of the two types of goals, ongoing and campaign goals. The first are ongoing goals, which are meant to measure the results you're looking to achieve on a regular basis. For example, let's say your company publishes articles weekly, and your team would like to measure the ongoing engagement from visitors reading this content. While there are many ways to measure increasing engagement, you could look at how these articles increase or decrease the time spent on your website on a monthly basis. This is considered an ongoing goal as it's an outcome your company will likely monitor for the longterm, since there isn't an end date associated with publishing these articles. Campaign goals are another type of goal you'll set as they are directly related to measuring the success of time-sensitive activities. I recently worked with a client publishing case studies and an executive interview series as part of a three month-long launch campaign for their latest service offering. For them, a major goal of this short-term campaign was to generate 300 leads from potential customers, providing their contact info in exchange for viewing their premium content. This goal of generating 300 leads is a campaign goal because it indicates their progress of an initiative with a defined start and stop date. So, keep these goal types in mind as you think about the right mix of outcomes to focus on. And remember that no matter what your content goals are, you are more likely to achieve them with a solid content marketing strategy. So, start thinking about yours.
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