How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy: Objectives and Audiences

Work smart! Every successful marketing initiative must begin with a strategic set of goals and a clear objective.

If you don’t understand what you need to accomplish, your initiative will have a lower chance of success.

This is why it’s extremely important to create marketing strategies and roadmaps that help entrepreneurs and marketing specialists create a strategic framework, into which they can easily group and prioritise ideas, goals and tasks, and achieve the best results. And today we want to talk about this topic more!

What is our goal?

Whether the goal is to acquire new customers and increase revenue or to facilitate public relations and customer service effectiveness, identifying tactical objectives and the steps to reach them is essential for success. So, each company should identify its overall business goals for content marketing, including end goals such as an increase in leads and sales, media overage, social engagement, or better search traffic and brand awareness.

All of those business objectives are worth reaching, but the more important issue is to tie marketing objectives together with overall organizational goals. The process of establishing marketing goals starts with a good understanding of current business performance and efforts to acquire and retain customers.

Common focus areas in an online marketing strategy can include the following key performance indicators:

– search visibility
– web page links
– social shares and links
– the number of visitors to the company’ website
– newsletter, blog and social content subscribers, friends and followers
– comments and other measures of engagement

The simplest thing to do is to assess the online marketing strategy for what has been successful so far and what needs some improvement. For example, a review of the website analytics may show a steady increase in search traffic. However, the quality of that traffic should be improved in terms of leads, sales, and profitability.

In order to tie marketing goals to overall business goals, a company should analyze how well its website is currently performing and contemplate what the overall business goals might be for the future. It is easier to look at each business goal separately, understand its focus (on revenue, retention, or service) and see how it can be related to the content and what kind of content marketing tactics can be applied for achieving this goal.

As for identifying marketing-centric objectives, a company should think about the specific aims it wants to accomplish through content, so that this will ultimately lead to overall business goals, for example:

– to elevate brand perception
– to drive customer engagement
– to provide better customer service
– to increase customer retention
– or to build a bigger referral network

The point is that as soon as a company understands its overall business goals, it can easier map them to supporting marketing objectives.

Who is our audience?

If a company aims to create a more effective content marketing strategy, it should become more sophisticated in the understanding of its customer needs, behaviours and preferences. It means that a company should optimize for its customers by researching and segmenting customer data with the purpose of developing customer personas.

But what is a persona?

A persona is an archetype, composite picture of the real people who buy, or might buy, products like the ones the company sells.

Particularly, the idea of personas is based on a representation of common characteristics of prospects and buyers that can draw from a wide range of data sources of different types and preferences for content search, consumption, and engagement.

Insight into customer needs will help to develop a more relevant and effective content marketing approach. By using these fictional characters and knowing what they care about, marketers can do a better job of creating relevant content that can be easily found on search engines and social media websites. This is extremely important because it inspires prospects and buyers to buy and share.

The range of activities intended to reveal groups of customers with common characteristics includes:

1. Identifying customer attributes
2. Collecting data
3. Analyzing and creating segments
4. Creating profiles
5. Identifying keywords and content types
6. Incorporating persons with content

The sources for data collection can be:

– demographic info (location, age, income, job title, etc.)
– psychographic info (goals, needs, challenges, priorities, etc.)
– surveys
– analytics
– blog engagement
– social media listening, etc.

A company can translate its understanding of customers needs and business goals into a specific content plan that identifies the relevant content mix, keywords, topics and desired outcomes across the customer buying cycle. How to create a content plan? We will share this information in our future blog post — stay tuned!