Setting your content goals

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Setting your content goals

- In order for your content marketing to be successful, you must set your content goals. You should always have goals for your content marketing. And they should be the first thing that you set up. Goals help you choose the right assets for your organization, design content to be measurable up front, and help you define success. A content marketing plan without goals will simply not go anywhere. So goals are critical to ensure that the content you're creating is the right content, and that you're able to appropriately define success. So what are the steps you need to take in order to set your content marketing goals? Step one, meet with stakeholders to get their point of view on goals.

You need to determine who is involved in creating content. There's most likely a variety of team, and a variety of team leaders who are involved in creating content and promoting it. So get together your marketing team leaders, sales team leaders, and customer-service team leaders. Step number two, ask yourself some foundational questions. Why are you creating content? What programs are you planning on using your content in? What are your short-term goals? And what are your long-term goals? Asking yourself and your stakeholders these questions will help you set a solid foundation for creating your content marketing strategy.

Step number three, define your qualitative goals. These are goals like brand recognition, thought leadership, social engagement, relationship building, trust. These are all extremely important goals to content marketing. So although these particular goals might not have a number assigned to them, they are critical. Step number four, define your quantitative goals. So these are goals that actually do have a number associated with them. So these might be, number of new leads, number of downloads for each content asset, specific number of social shares, percentage of leads that turn to opportunities that turn to closed deals, how much pipeline your content has generated, how much revenue.

All of these quantitative goals are measurable, and should be measured. And they should be measured in addition to the qualitative goals, so that you have a holistic view of all of your content marketing goals. How do you track your goals? You can track your goals in your marketing automation platform. This is great for tracking those quantitative goals, like number of leads, downloads, and revenue. Google Analytics is great for traffic and conversions. You want to track your social channels for increase in social shares. Your CRM tool, you could track for customer engagement.

And your content management tool, you could also track stuff like downloads and engagement. And then add your goals to a plan. Put it down on paper. You'll want to socialize your goals with your team, present it to the stakeholders, you can schedule weekly or monthly metrics check-ins meetings, and hold yourself accountable to your goals. You can't create a content plan within a vacuum. So by showing your organization that you are able to tie your content efforts to goals, you'll ultimately get more budget, and more team and bandwidth to create more content over time.

Now that we've sat down to discuss how to create your goals for your content marketing, sit down, talk to your stakeholders, ask yourself questions, put everything down on paper, and ultimately, create your plan.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/setting-your-content-goals