Let us ask you a question first: how is your content marketing strategy working out for your business?
If your answer is a “Not very effective” or a “Not sure about that” then you are not alone. In fact, around 57% of businesses don’t analyse their content marketing strategy or unaware of how to measure its effectiveness.
The main reason for this is they have established a content marketing strategy for their brand without defining goals or objectives for their brand. You need to determine the aim of your content marketing, are you producing content for like & shares? Do you wish for it to go viral? Or do you want to amp up your search engine rankings?
In case you have any of these goals in mind then that might be a reason why your content marketing strategy is failing.
In this article, we are going to discuss how to set up real growth-related goals that will give a granular result about your content marketing performance.
Setting up growth-oriented goals for your business
The content marketing goals for your business must be growth-related and designed specifically for your entrepreneurial ambitions.
However, if you are unable to achieve them, then your approach towards those goals might be at fault. Let’s have a look at some of the content marketing goals that your brand should have.
1. SEO Rankings
Google is a great barometer to determine the success of your content. If the content that you create gets enough likes & shares and climbs in Google’s search rankings then you’re creating the right type of content
The Google search engine has content standards that are difficult to please. This means that only the best pieces will be able to reach in the top 10, top 5, and top 3 rankings. It depends on who is providing the most contextual information regarding a specific topic/keyword that the user is searching for.
If your content meets the above criteria 100%, then you’ll earn top rankings. The result being, That you’ll get a lot more qualified traffic to your business website. In case your content’s not ranking then your business is missing out on those leads who are most likely to bring their business to your brand.
2. Conversations & Engagement
Now that you’ve managed to attract qualified leads, it’s time to convert them to your business objective. This is achieved by nurturing the leads with highly personalised and contextual content.
Achieving your content marketing goals starts with great content. If you’re just pushing out content just for the sake of it, you won’t grow.
Here are A few examples of how your business can engage with the leads
- For people reaching out to your sales team through channels like chat, email, etc. you can start the conversation with helpful emails regarding your products or services and how the users can avail them quickly & efficiently.
- For social media, you can interact with them by sending links to similar blogs or sending messages in their inbox.
Based on these communications you can determine the lead’s interest level and how close they are towards doing business with your brand. The important thing is how effectively you apply your content to nurture those leads from the awareness stage to the next stage of consideration
3. Sales & Revenue
Let’s get down to brass tax, the actual performance of your content marketing can be ascertained by the actual sales results from the above connections and conversations? It’s time to quantify your results.
You’ve attracted qualified leads with content, analytics with giving you the metrics on the traffic and audience engagement. Match that against your sales to get the crystal clear picture of your Digital marketing performance.
Discuss with your salespeople and If you see growth in this area then your content is giving huge benefits for your business.
Few tips on Generating Growth from Content
Generating awesome content is crucial and to add the cherry on top there few things you can do to make your content marketing strategy rock solid.
Consistency is the key!!
Now great content is going to boost your Google ranking, However, you need to keep delivering quality content to stay that way.
Producing great content builds trust with your audience so keep hitting that checkpoints and you’ll get them hooked. Plus your brand reputation will be through the roof!!
Link Your Content to Services
What’s the use of delivering top-notch content if it doesn’t tie back to your product & services? The whole point of any content marketing strategy is to nurture the leads along the buyer’s journey until it’s finally time to seal the deal.
That’s where CTA’s (calls-to-action) come into the picture. There should be at least one CTA in every piece of content that gets published. These are really helpful in directing the users to the next step and also gives you insights on their interest levels.
Engage with Conversational Content
Starting off conversations with interested readers based on your content is a great way to boost your ROI. These aren’t about getting all salesey but more about building relations with the audience by providing helpful information.
Chatbots play an important role in handling a large volume of conversations during the long hours of the day. But nothing can empathetic, friendly & personable human response – having empathy to turn interests into decisions leading to a sale.
And Lastly…
We hope you’ve found our take on content marketing useful and in case you need some help in setting up growth goals for your brand than just drop us a line and we’ll get in touch with you ASAP