When you think about goals for a content marketing strategy, one of the things that immediately comes to mind is sales and ways to improve them.
As with paid campaigns, where there is the possibility of choosing a campaign goal such as website visits, impressions or sales, content marketing allows marketers to choose a goal to aim for with their content — sometimes not as formal and measurable as in paid campaigns but very important nevertheless.
One central aspect to keep in mind is that different pieces of content should have different goals; after all, they reach people in different ways, and some content is more useful in engaging with specific audiences and achieving different goals.
Here we highlight some of the most common goals to explain them briefly and help you understand when to choose them:
1. Awareness: Raising awareness of a specific brand is certainly one of the best-known goals for content marketing strategies. It means that people know your brand even if they may not know exactly what you do but have heard about it.
This is the first step of the purchase funnel and happens before real interest is shown.
2. Engagement and loyalty (link): Managing relationships with your target audience may be a difficult process to accomplish.
Focus on your clients and make them the core of your business, ask them questions, make them feel that they matter to you and manage that relationship over the long term. A happy customer will talk about your brand with other possible customers and that will always help you grow.
You will realise that there are some customers who repeatedly read your posts and enjoy your content — something that provides a feeling of fulfilment and the determination to keep going and produce more content.
3. Education: Content marketing is a precious tool to help customers understand your product/service. This may seem very clear to someone who has been working inside an organization for a long time and has deep knowledge about what the company is doing. If the marketing effort is targeting a big group of people then keep in mind that this group is likely to have different levels of knowledge about some subjects.
The content posted does not actually need to discuss your product features in detail. It can explain many different things that help the user understand the product, such as your motivations for selling it and why it is useful.
4. Talent scouting: Some content may be used with the clear goal of getting in touch with possible future employees and discovering talent amongst your audience.
Writing about different technologies used by a company or the countless adversities it faces may look like interesting challenges for young, talented people who are looking for opportunities.
Posting content when the company is present at a specific event is also a good way to let your possible future workers know where you are and to come and talk to you about current job openings.
There are many more goals that content marketing strategies can try to achieve but these are the ones we consider to be most relevant.
Personalisation and tailored content are key, so marketers should aim to design the whole piece of content around what they want to achieve, as it is a great way to obtain better results.
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