There’s no question about it, content marketing is today’s marketing. It’s what everyone in the marketing world is talking about, and has been talking about for the last couple of years. And with good reason: within one broad banner, content marketing encompasses almost every aspect of marketing, client engagement and brand promotion. It makes sense, then, that content marketing has been touted as the “must have” strategy for businesses, and many have jumped onboard the content marketing train. In fact, 72% of marketing teams already plan to, or are already doing content marketing, and 77% of marketers intend to increase content production in the next 12 months
However, it’s not always as easy as just starting content marketing and having instant success. As many marketing teams might have discovered, content marketing is not an “instant gratification” activity, with 51% of marketers saying their content marketing efforts are only somewhat effective. It takes time to build momentum, and without a strategy it is easy to get lost in producing lots of content without direction, and not seeing the kind of results you’ve been assured will come your way. You might be losing motivation with it after several months of hard work and seeing little or no success from your extra efforts.
But with the right strategy in place content marketing is extremely effective, as long as you efficiently create and execute a content marketing plan. Creating brilliant content in a variety of forms (e.g blog post, infographic, video) and marketing the content on social media sites offers a relevant and cost efficient way to connect and communicate with a highly targeted audience. To make sure your content marketing is successful, you need to start by setting yourself goals.
Decide what you want to accomplish
Before you jump straight into content production, stop and think: what do you want to achieve here?
High quality content serves three purposes: it positions your business as an authority, or thought leader, on your subject matter; it attracts readers and keeps them engaged by providing them with information that is valuable to them; and it helps your site to rank well in search engines, in turn leading to more visitors to your site and increased visibility of your brand.
When creating content, you need to remember that this is why you are creating content and you need think about what you’re trying to achieve with it. It’s important to decide what you want to accomplish before you decide how you’ll accomplish it, therefore you need to start by setting some content marketing goals. Goals will give you purpose, destination and direction and help ensure you achieve what you set out to achieve.
What’s your aim for developing a content marketing strategy in the first place? Why do you want to produce content? What will it add to your business? Know your goals before you start planning and producing to give your content focus and clarity. The biggest mistakes companies make (especially those just starting out) is creating content for the sake of creating content. Everybody else is doing it, so you should too, right? If you proceed with this attitude you’re probably not using your content effectively and you will be wasting time on efforts that aren’t delivering results for you.
Set concrete, achievable goals
An effective way to set your goals is to set a series of specific milestones for yourself, under one overarching goal. If you only have one general goal, like “get more traffic to the website”, your efforts can become chaotic, unorganised and unproductive. But if you set yourself a series of measurable and, importantly, achievable goals, you can focus on meeting them one at a time.
It can be difficult for marketing teams to measure success of their content marketing efforts, particularly in B2B industries like law or financial services. This is because unlike a sales team it can be tricky to set monetary targets to hit. But you can set your own targets to benchmark against. Be as specific as you can and name ideal outcomes. For example, your main goal could be:
- Deliver 20 new marketing qualified leads each month to our sales team.
You could then have smaller milestones, that will assist you in achieving your main goal. For example:
- Post three pieces of content a week on our blog
- Get ten interactions on social media posts a week
- Create one infographic every two months
- Create and promote two downloadable resources each month
Working towards little milestones like this instead of focusing on big goals is a lot less daunting for those embarking on a content marketing path and it helps keep you focused. The milestones you set should be achievable and when you hit them, team morale will be boosted, encouraging you and your team to stay focused and on track to achieve that main goal.
