When you go out on the street, do you know in advance where you are going and why? This question can be extrapolated to marketing, as every campaign should be aware of what it aims to achieve before it starts. In this sense, every action within content creation should be linked to one or more marketing objectives. In turn, these are based on the company's overall goals, usually related to profitability.
It is important to check whether your content marketing efforts will be rewarded. To do this, consider the four questions below before you go ahead with your strategy. They will also help if you are thinking of joining content marketing, but have not yet started.
To ensure that your content marketing work meets your company's objectives, you first need to be specific about what goals you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. To do this, it is essential to write your objectives according to the SMART criteria. Let's look at what each of these acronyms consists of:
An example of a SMART goal would be: get a minimum of 20 visits to each blog post in the first month. As you can see, it meets each of the criteria and reveals that this is a small brand that is just starting out in content marketing. Once this goal is reached, the company could set another one like this: get 50 leads created by the content offer in one month. Thus, goal after goal, the company will optimise its strategy to achieve the highest possible profitability.
With the requirements for goal setting learnt, you might ask yourself another question: why is it so important to set SMART goals in marketing? We can see it:
With your objectives clear, it's time to ask the second question.
The ultimate purpose of this type of marketing is to attract new customers by adding value to their brand experience with quality content. But, in order for your target audience to find your materials relevant, you need to make sure you are specifically targeting those people. If your company has not yet established its buyer persona, you can solve this by downloading our guide on this topic.
In this regard, it is important that you design an editorial plan paying attention to three key elements of content marketing: subject matter, copywriting and design:
In addition to reaching your audience, make sure your content has an impact on them by telling stories that generate emotions and satisfy users' needs, thus creating a bond with your buyer personas that will facilitate the final conversion.
To achieve your more or less ambitious objectives in terms of customer acquisition, you must create content adapted to each stage of the buyer's journey (the basis of inbound marketing). Remember that a contact who has just arrived on your website is not the same as one who has been receiving your newsletter for months.
In this way, you will be able to offer adapted material to any of your contacts at any stage of their journey. The objective is to attract their attention, improve their experience with the brand and pave the way for them to become a customer. To do this, you must enrich each of the four stages with specific content:
Thus, by offering diversified content, you will make it easier for a new contact to become a customer. To do this, do not forget to use different formats and dissemination channels (without forgetting the video), include calls to action (CTA) and links or hyperlinks in your articles to enrich their passage through your company.
For your content strategy to be aligned with your brand's objectives, it is essential that you are able to measure the impact of your campaign. Otherwise, how will you know if you have obtained successful or less than expected results? What is the point of setting initial objectives if at the end you do not know if they have been met or not?
For this, it is important to know the metrics you will use to analyse your content marketing campaign. And not only at the end of your objectives, but also during its development. Tracking is essential to be able to adapt to the needs of the campaign and try to redirect your efforts to optimise them. In other words, the goal is to improve your strategy and check what works and what does not.
Platforms like HubSpot offer many useful tools for your content strategy, so decide which metrics you consider relevant and how you are going to calculate them before reporting results.
Ultimately, your content marketing strategy should always keep in mind the specific goals of this campaign, but also the overall goals of your company, so that you optimise time and resources and provide a better experience for your potential customers.