Content Strategy Archives

KPI stands for “key performance indicator.” These are more than generic goals you aim for as a business. They are specific, targeted objectives with quantifiable value.

Good KPIs are clearly associated with metrics that allow you to understand if and when you hit them. “Growing revenue by 6%” is a business goal. “Increasing sales conversions by 6% by the end of the quarter” is a KPI.

You can apply KPIs to any part of marketing — including content. But what do content marketing KPIs look like? Let’s break it down.

What Are KPIs for Content Marketing?

Businesses use KPIs to achieve specific results. In the case of your content marketing strategy, the overall objective of any piece of content is to provide value for the consumer.

However, there are many other ways valuable content can positively impact your brand, such as building authority, credibility, and visibility. When you dig into the details (which is necessary to establish effective key performance indicators), content marketing KPIs can take a variety of forms. Your content marketing goals may include:

Increasing organic traffic
Ranking higher in SERPs
Generating leads
Identifying, researching, or expanding your target audience
Moving a potential customer down the sales funnel
Improving conversion rates (such as sales or email sign-ups)
Customer retention

For any of these KPIs to work, they must be fleshed out, properly defined for your specific marketing activity, and tracked over time.

How Do You Write a KPI Statement?

As a content marketer, if you want your KPIs to be effective, it’s best to formally write them down. You can create effective KPI statements by taking the time to consider each KPI before you decide what the specific objective is that you’re trying to achieve.

Begin the process by reviewing your content marketing strategy. This is your roadmap that considers your larger content-related goals as well as the tactics, resources, time-tables and other factors that go into achieving them.

Once you’ve considered your overarching goals, you need to define what it would take to turn them into reality. This criteria is essential if you want your KPIs to be effective. It’s helpful to remember the SMART acronym. What are the Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based details that can turn each broader goal into a series of targeted benchmarks?

You also want to consider the data that you have available. What information do you already have, and what additional information can you gather?

For instance, if you’re trying to increase email sign-ups, how many do you currently have? How many new sign-ups did you get last month, in particular? This kind of past data helps you gauge how many more sign-ups you can aim for and reasonably expect to achieve as a future KPI.

Once you’ve taken all of this into consideration, decide what KPI or KPIs you specifically want to measure. Write them down, along with things like metrics to track and the time within which you want to reach the goal.

How Do You Set KPIs for Content Marketing?

Understanding how digital marketing KPIs work within engaging content is one thing. The tricky part is applying that knowledge to your specific content strategy. If you want to figure out the best KPIs to track for your marketing efforts right now, ask yourself the following questions:

What are you trying to achieve with your marketing? Again, always start here. What is your larger content marketing campaign and its goals and objectives? Do you want to build brand awareness? Close sales? This is ground zero for every KPI.
Do you need leading or lagging KPIs? Leading KPIs are initial goals that project potential future outcomes and dictate the direction your marketing needs to take. Lagging KPIs are indicators that consider past performance and measure them against preferred benchmarks.
What areas are you addressing well already? There are many areas of content marketing. Which ones are working? Is your social media performing well? Are your email marketing efforts seeing good user engagement? Has your keyword ranking improved? KPIs can help anywhere, but identifying what is already working helps you focus on the trouble spots.
What areas need work? Where is your content underperforming? Did a recent blog post flop? If that’s the case, you can set KPIs for writers to beef up your SEO, add CTAs, or otherwise improve the text. Whatever the situation, build your content KPIs around areas that need improvement.
What marketing metrics do you have in place? How can you track your content marketing ROI? Google Analytics can help with things like traffic and content performance. Social media has analytics built right into each platform. Identify how you can measure each KPI over time.

Use these questions to personalize your KPIs and align them with the specific content marketing goal you’re trying to achieve as a marketer right now. If you’re still struggling to set effective KPIs, working with a content marketing agency can help.

Setting Content Marketing KPIs That Work

Content KPIs can take on many forms. At the end of the day, though, you want them to serve as specific, data-backed stepping stones that help you move toward your larger objectives — both with your content and your overall growth marketing strategy.

Use them to keep you focused not just on larger goals but on each content-related benchmark and achievement that keeps you moving in the right direction.

21st-century marketers have a buffet of content options to choose from. Every time a marketer engages in the content marketing process, they have to choose what kind of content they want to develop to achieve their current goals.

This can be tricky, as various kinds of content tend to serve different purposes. They can also require different skill sets and tools.

This makes understanding each content type is an essential step in the content creation process. Let’s break down why content is important in the digital marketing world. We’ll also explore what content options are out there and the many ways they can help a content marketer reach their target audience.

Why Is Content Important in Digital Marketing?

Content is a powerful, multi-functional digital marketing tool. Technically, marketers have always worked with content.

However, marketing in the technological age has given birth to a myriad of unique types of content in digital marketing. Blog posts, emails, podcasts, videos, infographics — the list goes on.

Marketers can use these to develop intricate content marketing strategies. These can provide a roadmap that guides them through the vast and overwhelming online marketing world.

From the consumer perspective, content is important because it helps with every stage of the customer journey. Content can help bring brand awareness to a brand and its offerings. It can inform users, encourage sales, and even provide customer support after the point of purchase.

While content is powerful, once again, it’s only effective if a marketer is using the right content marketing type for each situation.

What Are the Types of Content in Content Marketing?

There are many different types of content. Some of these, like blog posts or video content, were already listed above. Other content marketing examples include social media, guest posts, ebooks, demos, case studies, email marketing, landing pages, and user-generated content.

While understanding each individual option is important, it’s also essential to understand the function that each of these plays in a larger content strategy. Below is a list of several overarching categories that content covers. The same kind of content format can function in multiple categories, such as a blog post serving as an educational and self-help marketing asset.

Marketers should be well aware of these categories whenever they go to create content. That way, they can ensure they are using the best content types and formats to reach their intended consumer audience.

Educational blog content provides information and value to your end user. This includes a lot of written content, like blog posts and instructional PDFs. It can also consist of audio and video content items, like infographics, how-to videos, webinars, and podcasts.
Community-building content helps develop engagement and trust with your target audience. It often consists of interactive content, such as social media posts and email marketing.
Gated content uses lead capture forms to collect willingly provided consumer information. In exchange, those individuals gain access to subscriber-only whitepapers, ebooks, videos, emails, product demos, and other unique assets.
Outreach content helps brands reach a potential customer. It can consist of email blasts, social media through influencers, guest posts, and other third-party-driven content activities.
SEO content helps a search engine find a brand’s content and connect it to users with related queries. You can optimize any piece of content, but blog posts (which permanently live on company websites) are most often given the SEO treatment.
Paid content is content that you promote as an ad. A company pays a certain fee, usually for each click. They can apply this pay-per-click (PPC) format to various content types, such as blog posts, or visual content such as graphics or videos.
Off-site content lives on third-party websites as a way to promote a brand outside of its own online assets. This includes sending emails directly to inboxes, writing guest posts for industry publications, and posting social content.
Self-help content is similar to educational content. However, in this case, you craft it to answer user questions. This informational content often helps existing customers without the need to reach out to a customer service representative.
User-generated content comes from consumers. It serves as social proof, and often consists of social posts, feedback, and reviews and can serve as an excellent testimony to both a brand’s products and customer experience.

The variety of content available doesn’t just boil down to different formats and lengths. Each type of valuable content serves a distinct purpose in the content marketing process, and managers should always be aware of the kind of content they need for each project.

Being Purposeful With Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content strategy is a complex and nuanced field of business. As time goes on, it only promises to become more complicated, too.

As you craft everything from short social posts to lengthy videos and whitepapers, remember to be deliberate. Create a content marketing campaign to back up your decisions and an accompanying framework to keep track of your content marketing resources and guide the creation process.

If things get too overwhelming, you can also invest in a content marketing partner to help guide you through the process and breathe life and purpose into every piece of content that you generate.

A content plan (or content marketing plan) is the way you plan on creating digital marketing assets for a larger content strategy and framework. It takes the wider concepts of your content plan and focuses them on specific tactics and actions you can take to turn concepts into reality.

Every content plan is different. It should take into account existing marketing vision, current goals, and whatever digital content trends are popular at the moment. If you’re trying to come up with a content plan for 2024, you’ve come to the right place.

Let’s break down how to develop a killer content marketing strategy. We’ll look at what kind of content to create, review what is trending, and consider a 10,000-foot overview of how to pull together an effective content plan this year.

What Content to Create in 2024

Every year has its own content marketing trends. As artificial intelligence comes to play an increasingly outsized role in the content world, marketers can plan for another dramatic shift in the kind of content they’re creating moving forward.

Over the next year, the biggest trend is going to be a shift away from generic content. As AI provides more answers without the need to leave SERPs, basic “101” pages will become irrelevant.

Instead, content creation trends will focus on two things: being helpful and educating audiences.

The former includes genuine thought-leader pieces and unique industry opinions. The latter relates to things like “how to” articles and self-help infographics and videos.

Speaking of videos, moving pictures also seem likely to remain in vogue in 2024, as well. The enduring entertainment and engaging aspect of videos of all forms remains a powerful way for marketers to get their messages out to the world.

Demand Gen Report adds that interactivity is also on tap. Demos, quizzes, industry-specific calculators, and even simple click-through embedded links remain important priorities in 2024.

What Are the Biggest Marketing Trends in 2024?

Okay, so helpful and educational content, videos, and interactive assets are all important types of content right now. But what are the actual marketing trends of 2024 that are driving these needs?

We have already touched on the biggest one. AI really is the trend that is behind most content creation right now. Content creators everywhere are looking for ways to utilize AI with their content.

Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) — which the company intends to complete testing just in time for 2024 — will also be a big factor throughout the year. Learning how to rank in search results and make the most of potentially throttled click-through traffic will be a defining challenge of the next twelve months.

Google’s Helpful Content System is also going to factor heavily into the coming year. As AI puts pressure on content creators to clean up their content, Google’s automated content rating system will aid in deciding what content is “helpful” and what content, well …isn’t. The tech giant updates this system from time to time, and savvy marketers will be following those changes closely as they seek to use the information to improve their organic marketing strategies.

What Should Be Included in a Content Plan in 2024?

Considering the content types and trends above, how should you build a content plan for the year? Here is a quick overview that you can use as a content plan template or a content roadmap to help you get started.

Begin With Your Content Strategy Framework

This is a 10,000-foot view perspective of your content marketing that holistically considers things like your organization’s vision, mission, and values, as well as your marketing goals, plans, and tactics. Use it as a reference point to start the more detailed content creation process.

Set Specific Content Strategy Goals for the Current Year

These should align with your larger content marketing strategy, keeping long-term goals in mind as you seek short-term gains in the next twelve months.

Establish a Content Strategy Plan

Your content plan is where the rubber hits the road. Remember, there are many forms of digital marketing, from search engine optimization to influencer marketing. What are the marketing strategy components you need to promote your brand effectively right now?

Should you create a pillar page and supporting topic clusters on your company blog to educate your target audience? Is it time to embrace more interactive content, such as user-generated content, quizzes, or demos? Should you finally invest in the equipment to create proper video content? This is where you make the detailed decisions.

Get on a Schedule

A year is a long time to create content. From social media to blog posts, guest posts to email campaigns, you want to structure how you release all of your content. A content calendar can help you spread out your efforts and allow them to build on each other over time.

Plan to Assess

You may love your content plan heading into the year. But you can’t be certain it will align with actual trends or search engine changes as you go along. Take the time every few months to assess if your content is doing well and gather feedback on the user experience of your audience, as well. Iterate and optimize to ensure your content is performing how you want it.

Building a Content Plan for 2024

Content marketing strategies give you a reason and focus for your content marketing. But you need a solid content plan to put those concepts into action. If you don’t have a content marketing strategy (or framework, for that matter) already in place, you can work with a content marketing agency to help you build one.

In 2024, your content marketing plan should focus on a few key things. AI is in the spotlight. Helpful content is a necessity. Video is effective. Interactive content is encouraged.

If you can factor these elements into a thoughtful and fleshed-out content plan, you can enter the new year with confidence, knowing you’re making the most out of the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.

As marketers develop their website content marketing strategy, it can be challenging to know what kind of content they should use. The issue isn’t coming up with enough ideas so much as choosing from the plethora of options available.

As you flesh out your content marketing strategy, you want to consider all of the different forms of content out there. Only then can you effectively choose which ones fit into your marketing plans.

Let’s take a look at the different types of content marketing available and how you can use them to reach your target audience, educate them, and ultimately encourage them to take action.

What Is Content Marketing in Digital Marketing?

Before considering individual types of content, it’s important to remember the purpose of content marketing in the first place. Too often, marketers focus on content creation and have content strategy take a back seat.

However, you always want to start by thinking of how your content factors into your larger digital marketing strategy. At Relevance, we consider a strong growth marketing strategy to focus on three areas: authority, credibility, and visibility.

Content marketing helps with all three of these things. Its biggest contribution is in the area of authority. Quality on-site content shows your audience that you know what you’re talking about and are a thought leader in your industry or niche.

Content also helps establish credibility through digital PR efforts, such as a guest post. On-site, informational content can enhance SEO, too, by helping with keywords, link-building, and technical SEO strategies.

What Are Examples of Educational Content?

As AI becomes a bigger factor, the quality of a brand’s content is coming into the spotlight. Strong SEO is no longer enough. You have to create great content that genuinely educates, offers unique insights, and provides value for the reader.

The good news is that Google has provided guidance on how to make good content that will rank. To do this, the search engine has established its E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) guidelines. A content strategy example that follows E-E-A-T could be a company blog post that provides insightful information from a certified professional on your staff.

For those comfortable with digging deeper, the search engine giant also provides Helpful Content Updates. These aid in generating “helpful, reliable, people-first content.”

What Are Types of Content Marketing?

There are many different elements of a content strategy. Each content type below provides its own value as part of your larger content marketing strategy. Let’s consider each one and how it can help you achieve your marketing goals.

Onsite Content

This is the “big one.” Your onsite content is the content that lives right on your own website. It doesn’t require a social media outlet, third-party publication, or even an email service. This content is fully in your control.

Onsite content can take on many different forms, each of which is helpful in its own way:

Blog posts; provide both short- and long-form blog content that can be newsy, opinionated, and filled with thought-leadership concepts.
Resources; such as “how-to” posts, supplemental information, and technical guides can provide easy-access self-service support for your existing customers.
Case studies; are powerful testimonials that summarize and demonstrate past success for future customers.
Infographics; condense large amounts of information into short-hand, easy-to-understand visual images.
Sales pages; provide bottom-of-funnel product and service pitches that seek to close sales.

Onsite content is one of your best long-term forms of content marketing. It can be intensive and expensive to set up. However, once created, content that lives on your site can continue to deliver traffic and provide CTAs in perpetuity with minimal maintenance.

Gated Content

While much of your on-site content is free, there are certain kinds of content that you only want to give people when they’ve taken a specific action. This is called “gated content.” This includes things like:

Whitepapers; that provide long-form, in-depth content for serious consumers with a pre-existing base of basic knowledge.
Ebooks; that dig deeper into brand-related topics and demonstrate strong, intimate knowledge of your industry.
Demos; that provide interactive, hands-on experiences with your products or services.

An example of gated content in action could be receiving an ebook after signing up for a newsletter or submitting a request for a demo. These are important in-depth marketing steps that help move people who are already considering making a purchase toward the bottom of the sales funnel.

Using the Right Types of Content Marketing

As you consider the different elements of content strategy that you want to use, keep this list in mind. To create effective content marketing, you need to analyze your customers, marketing goals, resources, and so on. Then, consider what kind of content fits into that framework.

Should you invest in content marketing blogs to inform site visitors and lead them down your sales funnel? Do you need social media marketing content for off-site lead generation or to help you retain existing customers?

As you identify the different components of content marketing that you need, assemble them into a content creation plan. If the whole thing gets too confusing, this can be a good time to work with a reputable content marketing agency like Relevance to keep your content educational, effective, and up to date. They can help you generate high-quality, effective content that can build your brand’s authority in the eyes of the world, your industry, and especially, your target audience.

Content pillars are a great way to organize and centralize your content creation. They provide focus and synergy to your content marketing strategy by unifying your content behind a select series of themes that are central to your brand.

While pillars are popular, they can be overwhelming to pull together. How many pillars should you make? What topics should you choose? How long should each pillar be?

Let’s go over a few pillar post examples to help understand how to determine your content pillars before you pour all of the time, effort, and resources into making them.

Pillar Power: Using Pillars to Revolutionize Content Strategy

Let’s start with a quick reminder of why pillars are so important for a successful content marketing strategy. A pillar is an extensive resource that covers a key theme of your brand.

The primary pillar itself covers this theme holistically but not necessarily in detail. Instead, it serves as a central focal point for that overarching topic within your brand’s marketing assets and resources.

How Do You Organize Content Pillars?

Pillars should never stand on their own. On the contrary, they should be at the center of a cluster of content that relates to the same key topic. This pillar and cluster strategy is a key part of building an effective content pillar strategy.

The pillar cluster model surrounds pillar content with a variety of sub-pillars and smaller articles that flesh out the subject in greater detail. These should connect with one another using internal linking strategies, and everything should link back to the primary pillar at some point.

From there, content marketing teams can create things like email and social media content that support, link back to, and tie into the pillar. The end result is a tight-knit group of content assets that vary in size and scope while simultaneously focusing on a key theme for your brand.

How Many Content Pillars Do You Need?

As you build a content pillar strategy, one common question is how many content pillars you need. Should you make one main pillar for your whole site? Do you need dozens spread across countless topics?

The answer lies in between these extremes. If you focus all of your content on a single pillar, you restrict your marketing message too much.

At the same time, you shouldn’t make too many pillars. Pillars, with their clustered supporting content, are resource-intensive, elaborate endeavors. They require a lot of time and effort. On top of that, you don’t want to spread your primary messaging too thin by taking on too many themes at once.

With that in mind, it’s wise to aim for around three to four main pillars for a brand. Build each one out with care and maintain it as a central content cluster to boost your brand’s authority and emphasize what makes you unique.

How Long Should a Pillar Page Be?

If you look at content pillar examples, you’ll find that they’re generally long. Really long. How long? Most pillars run at least a few thousand words in length.

Some marketers will recommend a content pillar strategy example with pillar pages that go well past the 10,000-word words. But the truth is, that’s excessive. Realistically, aiming for around 3,000 words per pillar is a good goal.

Focus on briefly covering all of the main topics related to each theme within that 3,000-word resource. From there, you can create shorter sub-pillars (usually around 2,000 words) and blog articles (1,000 words or less) that reinforce and elaborate on your original pillar’s message.

How Do You Determine Your Content Pillars?

If you’re uncertain how to choose your content pillars, here are a few steps to help your team narrow your choices:

Start with considering the needs of your target audience.
Gauge your industry and consider what unique selling propositions (USPs) make your brand superior to the competition.
Review your mission statement and company vision.
Think through what topics, services, and themes currently convert well for you.
Choose the top three or four things that you want to help your brand to stand out.

If you find that you’re struggling to boil your focus down to a specific number of themes, even with these steps, you may want to find a content marketing agency to help. Working with an experienced third-party content partner early in the development and planning process can ensure that you invest in the best themes for your branded content library from the start.

As you come up with each topic, these become the central 3,000-word pillars for each cluster of content you create. Once you have them set in stone, you can conduct keyword research to flesh out related topics you should cover. Plan out a content calendar, too, and integrate everything with your social media strategy and other content-related efforts.

Determining the Right Pillar Topics For Your Brand

As you size up your content marketing goals, remember to keep pillar pages in mind. From on-site content strategy to social media marketing, the synergy pillar content creates can supercharge your efforts every time you create content. It can keep that content focused on what matters most as you seek to show consumers why your brand is special and can provide uniquely effective solutions to their problems.

Everyone says content is king — but what does that regal reign look like in real life? The answer is tricky.

While content may remain a critical part of the marketing toolkit, it is in a constant state of evolution. Let’s consider what content marketing looks like a quarter into the 21st century, along with a few examples.

Why Content Marketing Is Important

Content marketing is a powerful way to build a brand. Marketers can use a thoughtful content marketing strategy to build credibility through third-party mentions. They can use it to provide self-help content that streamlines customer service. A fleshed-out content strategy also creates a starting point for strong SEO.

Above all, a strong library of content can build your industry authority. Google’s new E-E-A-T content standards are amplifying the need for content that is built on:

E-E-A-T sets a high bar for quality content. It means only the best pieces of content with unique industry insights and helpful information will be considered helpful to consumers and, therefore, rank in the SERPs.

What Are Content Marketing Examples?

Okay, content marketing is important. But what does it look like? The answer is a lot of things.

There are many elements of content marketing. This can make envisioning the content marketing process a bit challenging. Here are a few content marketing examples to help picture this all-important strategy in action.

Blog Posts

A blog post is one of the most iconic examples of written content. These are on-site pieces of text-based information that can also include images, infographics, and even embedded videos.

A blog post can cover anything from a piece of industry news to a deep dive by an SME (subject matter expert) on your staff. This valuable content is created to attract customers (more on organic traffic further down), in order to demonstrate your industry authority and increase brand awareness.

Social Media Posts

Social media content is another classic example of digital content marketing. This form of visual content is off-site and lives on a third-party social media platform.

A social post could be a short tweet on X (Formerly Twitter). It could be a picture of your products “in action” on Instagram. It could even be a piece of video content from an influencer on TikTok or YouTube.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful content marketing example you can use across your sales funnel. You can set up drip campaigns that provide a slow and steady set of automated emails for new subscribers. You can also use emails to send bottom-funnel sales pitches and CTAs to your target audience.

Most of this list consists of primarily B2C marketing examples. However, email is a powerful tool that works just as well for B2B content marketing interactions.

Podcasting

Podcasts are fun and relevant forms of engaging content that are becoming more important in larger content strategies. Marketers use them to communicate information in a relaxing and relatable way.

Podcasts can be very short — some are only a few minutes. However, they are often used as long-form content. A podcast could consist of a CEO providing updates to customers or a roundtable discussion (which is excellent for demonstrating industry authority). You can even turn a webinar into a podcast.

What Is an Example of an Organic Strategy?

While there are many examples of content marketing, organic content marketing primarily takes place on your website. A pillar page is a great example of an organic strategy in action.

A pillar page template usually follows a format that consists of:

A primary “pillar” page that addresses a key pain point or keyword and is a few thousand words long.
A handful of “sub pillars” that tackle topics closely related to your pillar.
A couple of dozen shorter blog articles that answer specific questions in relation to either your pillar or sub-pillars.

For an organic strategy to work, you should create great content in a scheduled timeline (i.e., don’t take years to make a single pillar). You should also invest in internally linking every piece to the original pillar, sub-pillar, and other relevant areas of your website.

The Importance of Content Synergy

There are many different types of content marketing, and it can manifest in countless ways. However, just because you have options doesn’t mean you can build your content strategy flippantly.

Effective content marketing can’t happen in a vacuum. It has to be part of a larger growth marketing strategy and vision. Growth marketing focuses on your customer at all times and uses data and analysis to track progress over time.

Content marketing factors into a good growth marketing plan alongside other key pillars, like digital PR and SEO. When you combine these — like using SEO keywords in your content or linking to an on-site “how to” in a PR guest post — you can create synergistic results that build your authority, credibility, and visibility.

Using Content Marketing to Crush Your Marketing Goals

A successful content marketing campaign is an invaluable part of a growth marketing campaign. Content creation together things like search engine optimization and digital PR. It also provides quality content for customers to use as they work their way through your sales funnel or return in search of self-help customer support.

Content marketing is important — but it also requires focus and strategy. Use the marketing strategy examples above to discover which forms of content marketing are best for your brand and its audience. If you need help as you go along, consider recruiting a good content marketing agency to help guide the process.

A good content marketing strategy has a lot of moving parts. Marketers use these strategies to bring together various forms of content and use them to help reach marketing KPIs as well as larger growth marketing goals.

SEO and content marketing can answer a variety of digital marketing needs. These span the gamut from building brand awareness to educating consumers to lead generation and so on.

Regardless of the specific form it takes or the purpose it serves, in most cases, for content to be effective, it must convince a consumer to take action. When content aims to do that, it becomes conversion content.

What Is Conversion Content?

In marketing, a “conversion” takes place when you convince a consumer to take a desired action. A good content conversion example is clicking through an email link. This is a form of traffic conversion meaning it leads to traffic for your site.

Other forms of conversion could be clicking on a link in the SERPS or sharing a social media post. Often, conversions on your website take place in relation to things like signing up for a newsletter, asking for a demo, or even making a purchase.

Creating content that converts — i.e., conversion content — is a powerful way to use your content strategy. As you create content like a blog post or podcast episode, you always want to provide value for the reader.

However, as you help answer reader needs and address their pain points, you can also naturally encourage them to take certain actions (like those listed above). When you can create effective content that resonates with your target audience and convinces them to take action, it becomes high-converting content.

How Do I Create Content That Converts?

So, how do you create high-converting content for your site or marketing strategy? The simple answer is that it depends on each situation. The current needs, resources, audience, and many other factors will dictate the kind of CTAs you want to include in your content.

That said, there are questions that can help you narrow your options and ensure that you optimize each piece of content to convert. Here are some questions you can use as a conversion content filter:

1. Does your content focus on being helpful?

This is ground zero for content in 2024 and beyond. Google’s latest updates (including their Helpful Content Updates and E-E-A-T content guidelines) have put the bulk of the focus on how content helps its users.

What is the value proposition of each piece of content that you create? How does it help its intended audience?

2. Are you trying to be a solution?

Along with educating and providing information, you need your content to demonstrate your authority. A good brand aims to be a thought leader and a pioneer in their industry.

If your ambition is to be at the forefront of thought in your niche, how is your content fulfilling that promise?

3. Do you know your audience?

Your content doesn’t help you if it prompts the wrong people to take action. To avoid that from happening, always stay up to date on your market research.

What does your target audience care about? What are their pain points, issues, and the search terms that they’re using to address them? Use these to direct the content that you create and the CTAs that it contains.

4. Are you thinking through the funnel?

Creating content should never be an activity that happens in a vacuum. It should be part of a larger conversion funnel.

Always ask where in the funnel a piece of great content belongs. How does it help guide a user through the buyer journey, encouraging them with the right kind of top, middle, and low-funnel information needed to take the next step?

5. Are you revealing (most of) your hand early?

Converting content shouldn’t be cloaked in mystery. You aren’t playing games with your audience. You’re helping them.

The best way to do this and incorporate a CTA is to reveal most of your hand early. Provide enough information to satisfy the user’s initial inquiry. Then elaborate on that and demonstrate your deeper knowledge. Use this process to guide them to a greater revelation (and a correlating call to action) further down the page.

6. Are you being direct and intriguing?

You usually want to be specific, especially with CTA copy. Don’t be vague or use confusing, unexplained jargon. Instead, utilize simple words, clear phrases, and images and visual content when possible.

It’s a good idea to write for younger audiences. You can use a tool like Hemingway to see what grade level you’re writing for. Aim for 8th grade or lower — that will allow 85% of adults to read your text without trouble.

7. Are you asking questions?

The Socratic method (teachers asking questions to students to help them learn) is a powerful way to educate. This prompts responses and primes a reader for action.

Use questions throughout your content, and don’t forget to use “you” language. Speak to the reader. Show them that you understand.

8. Are you tracking your content?

If you want your content to perform, you need to show up in the SERPs, encourage the clicks, and otherwise get consumers to act.

To understand that this is happening, you need to see the data. Use analytics tools like Google Analytics that track each lead and conversion to ensure that your content is performing. If it isn’t over a period of several months, make tweaks to improve it.

Creating Content That Converts

Learning how to create content that converts takes time. Start by mastering the process of creating high-quality content that targets readers first and ranking in a search engine second.

From there, use the questions above to consider how your content fits into your larger content strategy. What CTAs should it have? What actions do you want to encourage your readers to take? If you need help answering these questions, consider partnering with a content marketing agency.

Those are the questions that will turn good content into valuable content that doesn’t just perform well. It converts.

Digital marketing is a vast and complex field of business. From paid ads to search engine optimization, emails to social media, there are many ways marketers can use the digital world to promote a business.

Most of these channels utilize content in one form or another. In fact, marketers love to throw around the term “content marketing” as a part of their larger marketing strategies.

But what exactly is content? What is its purpose in marketing? How does content marketing strategy really factor into your marketing efforts?

Let’s consider the purpose of content as a marketing tool and the number one biggest objective that all content marketing should seek to achieve.

What Is the Purpose of Content?

The term “content,” when it’s used in marketing, references a wide range of varying types of content. Different content platforms and formats include a blog post, sales pages, social media, email marketing, demos, videos, and podcasts.

This wide range means the purpose of content tends to vary depending on how it manifests. A blog post, for instance, can educate consumers while attracting organic traffic and generating leads. An email can nurture those leads and encourage sales. A podcast can build brand awareness and establish authority.

As a whole, content functions as a key part of a marketer’s toolkit. It represents the medium through which they channel various forms of information and messages to consumers. When you create content with this in mind, it takes on a bigger role than simply presenting information. Purposeful content functions as part of a larger content marketing strategy.

What Is the Main Objective of Content Marketing?

With so many forms and uses, it’s easy to wonder what the primary content marketing objectives are when you use content to promote a business. While there are many important factors, though, one stands out above all the rest: providing value to consumers.

Content varies in complexity, from basic top-funnel topics meant to build brand awareness to complex mid- and low-level pieces designed to nurture leads and close sales. Throughout this process, though, the need to be genuinely helpful and provide real value for your target audience remains a top priority.

Google has made this abundantly clear in recent years. The brand’s Helpful Content system and updated E-E-A-T content quality standards emphasize the need for every piece of content to provide clear, clean, and accurate value for its intended audience.

Secondary Content Marketing Objectives

Content development should always start with and center on creating content that provides value to the reader. The need for high-quality content is ground zero in the content marketing process.

However, it isn’t the only purpose that content serves. Good content that educates, informs, and satisfies users creates the infrastructure within which you can achieve other marketing goals.

For example, a holistic blog post can also build brand visibility if well-optimized for SEO. This helps your brand stand out in the Google search engine SERPs.

Content marketing can also build an audience through email sign-ups. Self-help content can provide quality customer service solutions that encourage customer retention and loyalty.

What Is Your Content Marketing Objective?

Knowing that content marketing focuses on readers first and everything else second is important to keep in mind as a general rule. But how does it apply to your specific marketing needs? How do you decide what your content marketing goals and KPIs are?

This is an important question to answer, as it functions as a central part of your content marketing strategy. This strategy should weave together each marketing goal with the resources, plans, and platforms that you have available to create content. Obviously, you need to identify those goals if you’re going to do this effectively.

The best way to clarify your objectives is to start with your larger marketing goals. What are you trying to accomplish with your content right now? Are you focused on lead generation? Brand awareness? Building authority? Generating revenue? To help you build an effective strategy that helps accomplish these goals, consider hiring a content marketing agency. They can be the experts you may need to help crush your goals.

Once you’ve identified this, consider how you can create effective content with the proper optimization and CTAs to achieve those objectives. As you do so, make sure you are still creating value for your reader with every piece and at every step.

Creating Effective Content Marketing Strategies

It’s difficult to create an effective content marketing strategy without an end goal. Too often, content is created haphazardly or for one-off occasions without a content strategy in mind.

If you want every piece of content to perform at peak quality, though, you need to identify your content marketing goals and stay focused on them as you go along. This starts with the number one objective of always creating real value for your reader.

As you satisfy this requirement, consider what other goals you’re trying to achieve. Do you want to improve organic traffic? Build your email list? Close sales?

These secondary KPIs are always easier to achieve when you have the main objective of value creation in mind from the start.

A content marketing strategy is a popular promotional tool. When marketers create content marketing strategies, they always include some form of content creation in the mix.

But what is the purpose of content? Why is it such a critical staple of content strategy? What are common content marketing objectives, and how do they help your overall digital marketing activities?

Let’s take a look at some of the prime benefits of content marketing and consider four of the main purposes behind why you want to create quality content for your brand.

What Is the Benefit of Content Marketing?

Content marketing can have a powerful influence on many different areas of business. One of the most important benefits of content marketing is its ability to serve as a traffic and lead generator that offers genuine information, advice, insights, and solutions for a potential customer.

A good content strategy amplifies this value by using content to build a brand’s authority. The ability to build authority through thought leadership and demonstrating experience and expertise is a primary pillar of a good growth marketing strategy.

What Are the Four Main Purposes of Content Marketing?

Authority and consumer value may be primary benefits when you look at content marketing from a 10,000-foot perspective. However, when you zoom in, there are more specific ways content marketing goals can impact a brand.

Let’s consider four of the main purposes behind effective content marketing.

Content Marketing Informs and Educates

Content marketing resources may be a great place to include keywords and backlinks, but at the end of the day, their most important purpose is to provide informative and educational value for readers. This isn’t just theoretical, either. Google has made it clear through its recent updates that satisfying user needs and offering unique, valuable perspectives is the top priority for the search engine.

Content marketers are following suit by ensuring that all of their content marketing resources are directly benefiting consumers who engage with them. That doesn’t mean educating consumers is the only goal here. (There are still three more things on this list, after all.) But at this point, the ability to inform and educate is central to all content creation.

Content Marketing Builds Topical Authority

A main content marketing objective for most growth marketers is to build authority. We already touched on this briefly in the content marketing benefits section above.

However, it’s worth revisiting to dig a little further into the term “authority.” According to Forbes contributor John Hall, “The best way to establish topical authority is to create interrelated content that approaches a topic from multiple angles using multiple pieces of content.”

The takeaway here? Building authority and customer loyalty is something that happens at a topical as well as an industry level. You can send generic vibes that you’re an industry leader, but that will only get you so far. Your content allows you to show off that leadership in distinct and specific ways.

The quality and details you can include in a quality piece of content (whether that’s blog posts, a guest article, an email, a social media post, or anything else) are one of your best bets to show consumers that you know your stuff. This requires focusing on individual topics and answering niche questions as well as big-picture items.

Content Marketing Converts

Let’s start by clarifying the header of this section. Good content marketing converts.

When you create content, you can use it to encourage consumers to take action and move toward accomplishing your business goal. This can be anything from signing up for a newsletter to asking for a demo or even making a purchase.

When a user takes a desired action, it becomes a conversion. This is one of the most beneficial elements that content can do for your brand. It allows you to orchestrate specific activities while simultaneously offering genuine value to consumers.

It’s important to remember that high-converting content takes time, patience, and skill to develop. Invest in content performance analysis. Track the right content performance metrics. Get your finger on the pulse of your conversion rates so that you can ensure it is helping you achieve your marketing goals.

Content Marketing Helps You Perform Well in SERPs

If you haven’t picked up on this by now, effective content marketing is multi-faceted. High-quality content can answer user questions, build brand authority, and provide CTAs at the same time. It can also quietly (and critically) boost your brand awareness.

Content marketing helps your brand’s online visibility through good SEO. Search engine optimization ensures that your content is keyword-rich, contains a healthy amount of links, and is technically optimized — all without sacrificing user value and readability in the process.

When you’re able to implement SEO in your content, it helps you perform well in SERPs. This means your content ranks higher and is more likely to attract organic traffic, which is a cost-effective way to build a brand and achieve important marketing KPIs.

Amplifying Your Content by Understanding Its Purpose

Content is an important part of any 21st-century marketing strategy. But you can’t adopt a “Field of Dreams” approach and expect success. A successful content marketing strategy aims to understand the purpose behind each piece of content that you create.

Take the time to understand how your content can build brand authority, boost SEO, educate, and convert. This allows you to craft each asset for optimal performance. You can take the time to add keywords, include CTAs, and demonstrate detailed and unique perspectives. Consider hiring a content marketing agency if you need some assistance when creating your strategy.

Above all, it allows you to provide real, applicable value to your target audience as you seek to answer their questions and direct them toward your brand’s solutions (i.e., your products and services) for their larger problems.

Creating great content is a laborious and complicated process. You want your content to provide value for the reader while also helping you meet your marketing goals.

If you’re assembling a content marketing strategy that will work for your brand, you don’t want to skip steps or leave things half-done. Let’s go over some of the most important areas and elements of content strategy that can help you find a repeatable content creation structure and supercharge your next growth marketing campaign.

Why Is Content Marketing Important Today?

It may be changing, but content marketing remains more relevant than ever before. It is one of the best ways to inform and educate audiences. It is also a great way to build brand awareness and establish authority through thought leadership. Even credibility, developed through a good SEO strategy, benefits from (and often hinges on) quality content.

If content marketers want to use this powerful marketing medium to reach a target audience, though, they have to think twice about their content marketing objectives. Past content marketing strategies are quickly becoming dated.

Things like advances with AI and Google SEO updates are shifting content marketing objectives. Many of the types of content marketing that a content marketer uses will remain the same. However, the way they’re used and how they fit into content strategy make a huge difference in whether a campaign features effective content marketing or not.

One way to maintain high-performing content is to remember the most important areas of content marketing so that you can address these every time you create an asset for your marketing efforts.

What Are the 6 Areas of Content Marketing?

Let’s consider six of the most important content marketing objectives to focus on. These specifically pertain to content marketing and the content creation process.

If you’re fleshing out your content development plans, here are half a dozen key areas you want to have in mind as you prepare to generate a library of content marketing resources.

1. Content Strategy Is Your Foundation

You may want to dive into the creation process, but make sure you have a rock-solid content marketing strategy in place first. This functions as your plan of action.

A good content strategy aligns your resources with your goals and ensures that everything you make has a purpose. You want this in place first so that you can use it as a roadmap to keep you on track as you go along.

2. Content Creation Must Be Purposeful and Holistic

Once you have your strategy in place, it’s time to make the actual content. Don’t treat this step lightly. You may have a personal vision for your content, but how does it fit into your larger strategy?

What is the purpose of each content type? If it’s written content like a blog post, what part of the funnel does it help? If it’s a social media post, does it reflect your industry authority? If it’s a podcast, is it brimming with unique educational insights? As you write, illustrate, and record valuable content, make sure each item has a clear purpose.

3. Content Distribution Gives You Momentum

Most pieces of content will focus on a single distribution channel. A “how-to” article, for instance, will live on your company blog. However, that doesn’t mean you can only promote it in that space.

You can also distribute your content through various channels. From ads and social media to emails and newsletters, look for ways to push new blog posts in front of more faces. This gives it a better chance of seeing content marketing success right out of the gate.

4. Repurposing Content Optimizes Its Effect

You can also repurpose content across different customer-facing channels. Repurposing might feel a lot like distribution, and they are similar. But there is a key difference.

Repurposing existing content represents an extended creative cycle. In it, you repackage content in different formats (such as summarizing a blog idea or quote into a social post). This indirectly extends the lifespan and reach of each piece of content you create.

5. Analyzing Content Reveals Weak Links in the Chain

Once you’ve strategized, created, distributed, and repurposed your content, it’s time to analyze its impact. You can use tools like Google Analytics and native social media or newsletter analytics dashboards to see how well your content performs. Consider things like organic search engine traffic, link clicks, time spent on page, and other conversion metrics.

The goal here is two-fold. First, you want to see what content performs well. Second, you want to identify what content falls flat on its face.

6. Optimization Helps You Improve

Once you’ve analyzed your content, it’s time to optimize it. (Pro tip: this can take time. Search engine optimization, for instance, can take half a year to start generating organic traffic. Be patient!)

You can optimize both lagging and engaging content. For the latter, consider ways you can integrate CTAs and otherwise improve on content that is already buzzing. For the former, look for ways to update calls-to-action, links, format, keywords, technical SEO, and other factors to get things moving in the right direction.

Focusing on the 6 Key Areas of Content Marketing

The digital marketing world is a vast and intricate place. Content is just one part of that world, but it remains an essential one.

If you want your brand’s content to make a difference in your business goals, you may want to consider working with a content marketing agency. They can use the elements listed above to create a clear, repeatable, and successful content marketing strategy so that every piece of content is a comprehensive contributor to your larger marketing efforts.