It’s impossible to overstate the importance of goals in content marketing. Goals give your content marketing efforts a shape, a direction, and a purpose. They provide you with a way to quantify and evaluate your results, and to measure them against the broader goals for your company and brand. Content marketing goals help keep you from wasting your marketing budget, or spending it on things you don’t really need to be spending it on.
It is important to note, though, that not all content marketing goals are created equal; just because you’ve set some benchmarks for your marketing efforts, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re valuable or helpful.
It’s worth taking some time to think about your content marketing goals, and to make sure they’re really worth fighting for. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your particular content marketing goals:
- First, are your content marketing goals meaningful? That is, are they relevant to your brand’s overall goals? Do your content marketing goals reflect what the company needs?
- Are your content marketing goals specific? Saying you want to get more website traffic is a good start, but it’s not really enough; if you get even one more person to visit your website, does that make your marketing successful? Set a goal for how many new hits you want to get, how many more Facebook likes, and so on.
- Are your goals time-bound? Saying you want 300 new Facebook fans is one thing; saying you want them within a week’s time is better.
- Can your marketing goals be measured? If not, then they likely aren’t worth having. Focus on things you can quantify in some way—inbound traffic, conversion rates, Twitter followers, retweets, Facebook engagement, and so on.
- Are your goals realistic? You want them to challenge you, to stretch you—but not to be impossible. Set goals you can actually reach.
The goals you set will shape your campaign, and ultimately determine whether your content marketing budget is wasted or well spent.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Evaluating Your Content Marketing Goals
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