Before you look at what you’re going to create, you need to answer why you’re making it.
"Every content marketing strategy needs to start with a clear goal and true purpose."
Click To Post on
Every real blogging strategy must start with a goal that content can help to accomplish. How are you going to measure the success of your campaign? Is it with traffic? New subscribers? App downloads? Conversions? Social shares and engagement? Video views? Podcast downloads? Sales?
In his Skillshare class The New Business Toolbox, best-selling author, prolific marketer and entrepreneur Seth Godin explains the importance of understanding your why early on.
Content Marketing Strategy Seth Godin Class
“You have the freedom to make these choices at the beginning when they’re free, fast and easy. Not later on when you’ve made commitments to other people and yourself.”
It’s easy to get caught up in all the tactics of content marketing, but without a unifying strategy—a strong why, no matter what you create it will fall flat.
Understanding your goal early on will guide other important decisions as you develop your content marketing strategy.
Such as, what are we making? And where are we going to distribute our content? As Godin explains, your strategy is like building a ship. You need to know where it’s going to sail before you can start nailing planks of wood together.
As Godin emphasizes, “Matching what you build to where you put it is more important than what you build in the first place. That’s why we need to start by understanding what is this for?”
When I’m brought on to build out a content marketing strategy for b2b email lists poland of my clients, whether it’s a freelance gig or through my side project, Pro Content Marketer, we always start in the exact same place—with defining an ultimate goal and then backing into smaller mini-wins that ladder up to the bigger picture achievement.
Most often with content marketing, that ultimate goal is email signups or free trial signups.
Essentially, attracting new readers through clever blog post ideas (content), then converting them into email subscribers who can later be warmed into paying customers as the rest of the marketing team works to build relationships and make money blogging. And if you’re wondering… do people still read blogs? The answer is a resounding yes.
Once you have this larger goal in place, it’s easier to determine—based on your average conversion rates—how many readers or listeners, viewers, users, you need to attract to the content you’re publishing, in order to hit your signup goal.
The number of people you need to bring to your blog is your traffic goal.
And in order to bring in enough of the right traffic to hit your conversion rates, you’ll need to promote your blog content—landing syndications to publications, getting mentions in major industry blogs, having influencers share with their followers, and so on down the line.
It’s not an exact science per-say, but the more you execute, build a portfolio of content and promote it, the more you’ll see what your baseline returns on content marketing are and you can make tweaks & experiment moving forward.