Content Marketing Series: Setting Goals
Content is an anchor for every marketing strategy I’ve ever done. It gives your audience something to engage with and helps them feel connected to your brand. But for your content to resonate with the right people, you need to understand who “the right people” are and what you want them to do next.
In case you missed it, you can check out the first blog in our content marketing series here. Now, let’s take it a step further by laying the foundation for your content marketing strategy — defining your goals and target audience.
Aligning Content to Marketing Goals
Successful content marketing isn’t just about creating pretty pictures, catchy memes, or viral content. The purpose of content marketing is to attract and engage your audience. To accomplish this, content needs to first align with the larger marketing goals. Content drives outcomes for marketing just as marketing drives outcomes for the business.
CMI data show how impactful content marketing is for B2B marketers based on various goals:
While brand awareness is the top goal that content marketing can achieve, marketers can apply content to a range of other use cases. At Prime 8, every piece of content has multiple uses and supports multiple outcomes.
Much of our content strategy is about credentializing our capabilities. We also use it successfully for brand awareness and educating our audience about our approaches and best practices on a given topic.
Developing content is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. That’s why before setting your foot on the path, you want to be clear about the outcomes you expect your content to deliver to the larger marketing effort.
At Prime 8, I’m always thinking about the customer experience, so when I’m laying out my content goals, I’m focused on my prospect’s journey from the time they first hear about our brand until they hire us and become a repeat customer.
Let’s take a deeper look at how we do it.
Mapping Content to the Buyer Journey
The risk in content marketing is putting out content that your audience doesn’t relate to. If they don’t relate to it, they won’t engage with it and you’ve missed a relationship-building opportunity.
Mapping content to the buyer journey is one way to mitigate this risk, achieve your goals, and optimize your budget. I’m sure there are marketers out there who don’t use this strategy, but I can’t imagine spending a penny of my content budget without it.
Your audience needs different things at each stage of their buying journey and well crafted content can address those needs in specific ways.
Here’s a quick guide to how content maps to the buyer journey.
Stage 1: Brand awareness. At this top-of-funnel stage, your goal isn’t to sell. Rather, it’s to present your brand in a favorable light. Content should be a light read or visual that presents information in a concise, no-pressure manner.
Data shows that prospects consume an average of 13 pieces of content before they reach a buying decision. This means that brands need broad coverage and a high volume of content at this stage to improve brand recall and generate interest.
Stage 2: Consideration. For prospects with a specific problem, the consideration stage must help them weigh their options and/or solve their problem. At the middle of the funnel, your audience is trying to figure out whether you’re the right solution for them.
At this point, your goals should align with ensuring the prospect is a good fit for your product, and if so, give them a reason to consider you.
Stage 3: Decision-making. These prospects are at the bottom of the funnel. They’re standing at the cash register, ready to buy. They’re comparing options, looking at pricing, and reading reviews. Content at this stage should focus on action, personalization, and persuasion.
Content provides customers with information, messages, and maybe even something they need at that moment. They can learn what they need to know about your brand and decide whether to continue engaging with you.
Your content should be designed so that every customer, no matter where they are in their decision-making process, is offered relevant, helpful information and a choice in how they consume it. Additionally, specific content types align well with specific steps in that journey.
Here are some examples.
Pro Tip: A good rule of thumb when planning your content is to include a variety of types as well as a collection of subjects tailored to the stage of the buyer journey.
The good news is, well-designed content types can flex to serve multiple stages of the journey. Because my resources are always limited, my mantra for content is “recycle, repurpose, reuse.” As an example, you’ll find consideration-stage content in our ebooks.
Let Prime 8 Help You Improve Your Content Strategy
Every content strategy contains multiple moving parts that should be developed together for ideal alignment. Creating a strategy where all parts work together requires the ability to see the forest and the trees.
Prime 8 consultants specialize in both the strategy and the execution of digital marketing, including content. We take into account the big picture goals and nuances — like the buyer’s journey and customer personas — that affect the outcomes of your content marketing efforts.
If you’d like to explore how we can help, reach out to us. If you’d like to explore consulting as a career, check out working with Prime 8 to learn more.
Next in series: Defining Your Audience
