2September 2023
Content marketing delivers a host of benefits for businesses across all sectors. It increases visibility, positions a business as an industry leader, and drives high-quality traffic.
To maximize the value of content marketing, a business must set clear and measurable goals. These goals could be to increase brand awareness, build credibility, or generate leads.
1. Understand Your Audience
When businesses understand their audience, they can create messages that will resonate. They can also identify the best content formats to use. For example, a blog post is an effective way to promote products and share industry news. It can also help build brand awareness and credibility.
Businesses can further develop their understanding of their audiences by performing a customer analysis. This will help them identify the key issues that their customers face. Businesses can then offer relevant solutions to those issues.
Businesses should also map their content to the different stages of the buyer journey. This will ensure that the right content is served to each customer at the right time. For example, a potential customer may need a checklist or how-to video before they make a purchase.
2. Know Your Goals
Whether you’re new to content marketing or a seasoned pro, setting content goals is essential. It gives you a clear path to success and helps you document your team’s efforts. According to Semrush, 78% of marketers who felt their content marketing was effective had documented goals in place.
Goals for content marketing vary from business to business, but some common ones include generating leads, building brand awareness, and increasing customer engagement. To achieve these, it’s important to understand the business objectives that you’re attempting to reach.
For example, if your main purpose is to establish yourself as an expert in the industry, producing quality content that earns links can help you achieve this goal. It will also help your content stand out from the competition.
3. Create a Strategy
A content marketing strategy gives your team a clear vision of what you want your content to accomplish and can help you develop content that supports your business goals.
Creating and documenting a strategy makes sure your team doesn’t have its eggs in too many baskets. It also allows you to refine your goals and processes.
For example, if you find that some of your content isn’t performing well, make a note of it and consider whether it could be better placed in one of the other quadrants. This can save you time and resources and improve your overall content marketing performance. Also, be sure to include competitor research in your strategy. This should be a regular part of your marketing process, ensuring you always have the latest and greatest tools at your disposal.
4. Create Great Content
When done well, content marketing positions businesses as experts in their field. This is important, especially for a new business that needs to build trust and a strong reputation, or an older company looking to prove that they are still relevant in today’s market.
This can be done in a number of ways, from blog posts and social media to videos and gated content like whitepapers and webinars. Businesses should keep a close eye on how their content performs and adjust as necessary.
It is also important to remember that just because a piece of content performed well at one time, it may not perform the same way in the future. This is why it’s important to continually measure and identify opportunities for improvement.
5. Measure Your Performance
Once you’ve set your goals and established your KPIs, it’s time to start monitoring your progress. This will help you determine how well your content is performing and whether or not it’s helping to meet your business objectives.
Typically, you can monitor your performance by looking at the metrics provided by your social media account or website analytics tools. However, keep in mind that these are often fairly basic metrics and should be interpreted carefully.
One of the most important metrics to measure is your lead generation rate. This will help you see if your content is truly helping to fill your marketing funnels and generate more revenue for your business. To do this, you’ll need to create content that encourages readers to share their contact information, sign up for your newsletter, or contact you directly.