How do you align your content marketing goals with your business objectives?

These points are critical and need to be discussed with your clients. The average local business will not be able to operate its business and manage its social media content. Suppose you are working with small to medium-sized businesses. Make sure you are keenly aware of their mission statement and their goals. Make sure you take the time to write the brand book for them and give them a clear explanation of the terms and the purpose of the book. Ensure the owner and employees are ready to make changes to optimize your online content efforts. There needs to be consistent communication between you and the core team. Building smaller businesses can be extremely rewarding, but it can be challenging if not done correctly.

Aligning content marketing goals with business objectives involves a strategic approach. Start by clearly defining business objectives, such as increased brand awareness or lead generation. Tailor content strategies to directly contribute to these goals. Utilize the KPIs aligned with business objectives, such as website traffic, conversion rates, or social media engagement. Regularly analyze data to measure content performance against established goals. Ensure seamless collaboration between content and business teams, fostering a cohesive strategy. By establishing a direct connection between content efforts and overarching business objectives, organizations can optimize their content marketing for meaningful impact. Hope this helps!

User Generated Content (UGC) can play a major role in achieving business goals. UGC can successfully connect awareness, growth and engagement in one campaign. While at Visit Detroit, the tourism booster for Detroit, we created a culture that grew our instagram followers and hashtags exponentially. It was a photo campaign called #DepictTheD and it asked users to “Show Detroit through their lens”. While intended to increase tourism and positive perceptions of Detroit, more locals adopted the cause, vying for THEIR 15 mins of fame. Each week, we chose and announced a winner, highlighting their work on our social media pages, in our newsletter, etc. Eventually, the movement grew to daily features, amassing 46,000+ photos in 2 years.

It’s a good place to start with understanding what content marketing can actually do for the different stages of the funnel. Then create your goals for those different areas and start creating and distributing content. At the end of the day you have to create the right kind of content for your target audience and start getting it out there to see any results.

Another way to set your content marketing goals is to align them directly with an upcoming marketing campaign. That way your content stays consistent with your overall business goals.

Talking from a B2B perspective, conversions is, in many respects, the only metric that matters here. Getting lots of impressions but no conversions to click throughs? Getting lots of traffic/page views but no conversions to a CTA such as filling in a form? Then your content isn't working - it's not reaching people who are interested in your product/service and at the right stage of the buying cycle. Once you've got conversion measuring in place, then you can start to look at cost per lead and more.

If you're tracking conversions, then GA is really all you need. GSC, GA and SEMRush are my go-tos for monthly reporting showing how our site and content is performing in terms of its SEO goals. And we also use social platforms' in-built measurement tools to understand what content forms and topics are performing well.

Set up a reporting cycle for your landing pages and/or blogs. Define what you'll report on, and for how long. And then define a threshold at which you'll take further action - and what those actions are likely to be. Make those adjustments, begin the reporting cycle again. Rinse and repeat until content is performing as you want it to (or until you admit defeat - that the SERPs are too competitive!)