Content marketing creates and distributes valuable, relevant, and consistent content that your customers will enjoy and learn from. It reaches potential customers and builds awareness of your current offerings.
How do you know if you’re reaching potential customers and building awareness of your current offers? By setting and analyzing goals.
Don’t create content for the sake of creating content -- that’s a waste of your time and resources. Content marketing must have clearly outlined and measurable goals in order to produce ROI.
Creating a strong content marketing place will help you achieve your B2B sales goals. Here are 3 tips:
1. Determine Your Needs & Gaps
2. Set SMART Goals
3. Fulfill Your Goals
When setting goals, first determine what your biggest needs are.
Once you identify your needs, use analytics to figure out where your current marketing strategy is falling short. Analytics will help assess website traffic and social media data, plus assist with A/B testing. Creating a rock-solid content marketing strategy can increase revenue and lead generation.
Having an attainable, concise set of goals will benefit your content marketing strategy. A content marketing strategy produces optimal ROI when you set SMART goals.
A SMART goal stands for:
The key to setting SMART goals is to put real, measurable numbers down, then hold yourself accountable for the results. The results should be your best friend throughout this process. Using these results, you can modify and improve your content marketing strategy to best fit your business's needs.
A vague goal, like “get more leads,” has no real way of succeeding or failing. How many leads is “get more” exactly? One? A hundred? Using the SMART acronym, you can easily turn “get more leads” into a concrete goal. Let’s try “an increase of 15 online leads by the end of next month.”
Your goals should make you push yourself to achieve them, yet be realistically achievable in a chosen time frame. They should also be relevant to the needs you previously determined.
As you continue to set goals, track what is and isn’t working for your customers and your company. For example, if your audience responds better to social media than email, you might want to focus your efforts on social more than email.
Your continuous improvement toward fulfilling (and surpassing) your goals relies on knowing what works and what needs adjustment.
You can’t have an effective content marketing strategy without a clear understanding of your goals. Understanding your content marketing strategy inside and out will positively translate to the work you do. All aspects of your strategy, from social media to lead generation, will reap the benefits.
If you continuously revisit the original purpose of your content goals, you’ll create more meaningful content. You won’t have to create content just for the sake of creating content. Both you and your prospects will benefit from this.
Achieving your sales goals is plausible with a a strong content marketing plan. Learning how to properly develop and achieve these plans is crucial to the success of your B2B sales goals.
Do you want to learn more about content marketing? Download our free Content Marketing Essentials for Modern Lead Generation guide!
(Editor's Note: This article was originally published in February 2017, but was updated in November 2020.)