Setting & Reaching Content Goals

Getting your content marketing right isn’t about finding out how successful your strategy currently is. It’s about making your content marketing strategy better and using it to achieve business goals. Only by knowing clearly where your content marketing is working and where it’s falling short, will you ever be able to turn your content into a powerhouse that drives growth.?

The Importance of Setting Goals for Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you’re having trouble measuring the worth of your content marketing, you’re not alone. Only 39 percent of marketers believe they are somewhat successful at tracking ROI.?

Even if you create the best piece of content the world has ever seen, it won’t move the needle for your business if it doesn’t serve your business goals.

But making sure that all the moving pieces of your content strategy are fitting into the bigger picture can be difficult. That’s why setting goals for your content strategy is so important for your business.?

5 Steps to Setting Your Content Strategy Goals

To take some of the mystery out of the content marketing goal-setting process, follow these steps below:

1. Set SMART Goals - SMART is an acronym, outlining five attributes that make for good goals.?

• Specific: SMART goals are precise and use real data, like “10% higher engagement” or “2-day delivery”, not vague, qualitative language like “more engagement,” or “better content.”
• Measurable: SMART goals must be measured.? Creating brand awareness is a good idea, but unless you can measure it, it’s not a SMART goal. Something like “increase quarterly web traffic by 10% in one year” is more clear and more defined.?
• Attainable: SMART goals aren’t meant to be completely out of your reach. While it’s great to have goals that stretch and challenge your team, they still need to be realistic.
• Relevant: Your content goals also need to align with your overall business goals. Ask yourself, “why is this goal important? How does it contribute to the company’s bottom line?”
• Time-bound: SMART goals must have a time component. An open-ended goal with no cut-off point becomes impossible to measure. Craft your goal in terms of days, weeks, months, quarters, etc.

2. Assess Where You Currently Stand - If you’re going to set realistic content strategy goals, you first have to take stock of where you are. If you don’t have a content strategy in place, that’s okay. But it’s important to know where you’re starting.

If you do have existing content, spend some time analyzing it. If you’ve been doing content marketing for years, your existing catalog should be fairly full. Which pieces are getting traffic? Which ones aren’t? Are you turning visitors into leads at a rate that’s competitive for your industry??

If you’re not pleased with your conversion rates, you’ve already identified a potential area for growth. If your overall rates are okay, drill down deeper into the content, looking at what’s converting well and what isn’t.?

5. Set a Date - Set a target date for the completion of the goal. You want to find a date that is itself attainable: something challenging, but not impossible. To do this, estimate first what your goal should take as far as hours worked. Spend time thinking about what sorts of obstacles you’ll face in achieving the goal, and factor those into your timeframe.

6. Devote Resources To Your Goal - To succeed in your goal, you must devote the appropriate resources or people to your endeavor. Far too many marketing teams create goals without ever creating a cohesive plan to meet them. When the month, quarter, or year has passed and the goal remains unreached, they wring their hands and wonder why.

You need to allocate real people and real hours to the completion of the goal. If you find you don’t have the resources needed to meet all the goals you set, it’s back to the drawing board, because your goals aren’t realistic.

7. Follow Up and Track Performance - This one is arguably the most important and most overlooked. It is vital to establish KPIs (key performance indicators) and know exactly how you’ll measure success along with keeping track of how your team is doing against the goals.?

When it comes to tracking measurement through KPIs, you’ll want to aim for content marketing KPIs like conversion rates, newsletter open rates, audience reach, and customer engagement data. This is collected from your sales sheets, website, social media channels, customer surveys, and more to create valuable, meaningful metrics that allow you to measure and track your performance.

While the overall process of setting and sticking to goals can seem a bit overwhelming, you’ll discover that setting clear and concise content marketing goals is both beneficial and helpful to your business’ success. And of course, if you have questions or want to chat about anything content marketing, we’d be happy to sit down with you. Book your free strategy call with Onya today!