What Are Content Marketing Objectives?

Content marketing is a popular activity. But simply adding content creation to your marketing strategy doesn’t work.

Creating one-off pieces of content can’t help you effectively meet customer needs or rank in SERPs. You need a content marketing strategy to guide you, and you want to build that strategy on content marketing objectives that show you where you’re trying to get to.

Let’s dig into what objectives for content marketing look like and how you can create one for your current marketing needs. First, though, let’s consider how setting goals factors into the content creation process in the first place.

What Is Content Marketing?

At its most basic level, content marketing is a form of digital marketing that creates and distributes content as a way to reach a brand’s target audience. While this is a simple concept, the way it looks in execution can be both complex and nuanced.

For example, content marketing can take place across a number of different formats. These content types and the channels that they use include blog articles, social media posts, emails, whitepapers, demos, infographics, and videos.

With so many elements of content marketing, how do you know what to focus on as you engage in the content marketing process? 

This starts with creating a good content marketing strategy. This brings together all of your content marketing elements, weaving them into a single, cohesive roadmap. But where does that roadmap take you?

That’s where having effective content marketing goals and objectives in place can be a game changer. This breathes life into your marketing efforts and defines the purpose of content marketing for your brand.

What Is a Content Based Goal?

Goals are a critical part of running a business. As Tony Robbins puts it, “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”

With content marketing, the goals you set should consider how you can utilize your various forms of content creation to achieve specific objectives. As with most goals, these should follow the SMART goals methodology, which stands for goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Here’s how each of these impacts content marketing objectives:

At times, your marketing goals may overlap with other marketing activities. This is natural, as many of the lines can blur across various marketing initiatives. When this happens, different areas of your larger growth marketing strategy can support one another.

For instance, you might improve your website’s SEO by adding keywords while creating content. (More on that in a bit.) You could also generate a press release or guest post that enhances your brand’s digital PR. 

These are excellent synergistic bonuses. However, the connecting tissue of content with marketing goals should lie at the heart of every content-related marketing goal you set. 

With that said, you can use content to achieve many different goals, objectives, KPIs, and whatever other forms of benchmarks you use in your marketing. In fact, content marketing has the potential to impact nearly every part of your customer-facing business interactions.

To really understand what your content goals should look like, you need to consider the different objectives that you can aim for when building a content marketing strategy. 

Setting content marketing objectives isn’t a one-size-fits-all activity, though. There are a plethora of different kinds of goals that you can set. Let’s break them down and consider each one individually.

What Are the Objectives of Content Marketing?

Let’s consider some of the top content KPIs that you can target in your content marketing strategy.

• Generating leads: Content marketing can inform consumers about your industry expertise and help convince them to begin the customer journey.
• Nurturing leads: Once a consumer starts the customer journey, more detailed, middle and low-funnel content can nurture those leads and help them move toward the point of making a purchase.
• Establishing thought leadership: Quality content demonstrates your depth of knowledge and expertise in your industry. This sends the message that you’re a thought leader and can even help with your E-E-A-T quality score on Google.
• Educating consumers: Sending a thought leadership message is a good start. But good content also allows you to actively educate consumers looking to solve problems that you can answer.
• Outshining competition: When your content is shared on social media, shows up first in search results, or otherwise stands out online, it boosts your reputation in relation to competitors. It helps you stand out through superior demonstration of knowledge and resources.
• Bringing your content together: Thoughtful content creation generates a cohesive and purposeful flow of content across your brand. This avoids confusing, dissonant, or contradicting messages and keeps customer interactions positive, effective, and mutually profitable.
• Building organic traffic: Good content uses internal links and rich keywords, connects to high DA (domain authority) third-party sites, increases dwell time, and generally improves SEO. All of this leads to more brand awareness as Google and similar search engine sites recognize the quality of your content and send organic traffic your way.
• Creating a foundational audience: Good content helps you establish an audience of subscribers and followers who buy into your message and actively patronize your brand.
• Providing customer support: “How-to” articles, user manuals, and other digital self-help resources have become a key form of customer support. They allow customers to answer questions and address problems both before and after the point of service on their own.
• Reinforcing your customer service team: Along with helping customers, self-help resources take the strain off of your customer service team. This is an effective way to keep consumers happy and create a manageable environment for your support staff at the same time.
• Improving customer retention: Consumers with a positive first impression, smooth customer journey, and excellent support (all of which content can impact) are more likely to stick around.
• Enhancing brand loyalty: Retaining a customer is already excellent. When they feel you demonstrate genuine authority and industry leadership through your content, they are also more likely to become brand ambassadors who actively promote your brand to others.
• Generating synergy with other marketing activities: Content marketing can have a synergistic impact on other areas of marketing. It can help generate interest in events, support product launches, and boost SEO. All of these can be at least part of the objective of your content.

There are many individual goals that you can aim for with your content. While these may manifest in different ways, though, they generally work toward the same end goal…

What Is the End Goal of Content Marketing?

Okay, content marketing can accomplish a lot. From establishing thought leadership to generating leads to providing customer support, you can use your content to achieve many different objectives for your brand. 

But what is the end goal of all of these smaller goals? What is the larger point of content marketing?

You can answer that with one word: authority.

A quality content marketing strategy helps you build brand authority both in your industry and with the consumers that you’re targeting. 

Authority is a big deal and something you never want to underestimate. It’s difficult to build and easy to lose. It requires a slow nurturing of trust that comes from establishing a relationship with your audience. 

That process takes time, and it requires repeated positive encounters between your brand and the consumers that you serve. Consistent, impactful content can play a key role in that long-term process.

Content Marketing Also Helps With Other Larger Marketing End Goals

While building brand authority is the main advantage of good content marketing, it also can help with a couple of other primary growth marketing goals. 

One of these is visibility. Effective long-term brand visibility comes from search engine optimization. Good content that serves customers and prioritizes the reader can double as the perfect place to build out keyword and internal linking strategies.

Credibility is another side effect of high-quality content. Good growth marketers use digital PR to build up a brand’s credibility in the eyes of consumers through third-party mentions. 

This often requires creating valuable content that lives on other sites and points back to your website through links. Once again, if you can create killer content to reinforce your digital PR strategy, you can enhance your credibility even further in the process.

Why Are Objectives in Content Marketing Important?

Okay, we’ve considered what a content marketing goal is, how it factors into your larger content strategy, and what the end goal of most objectives is as they relate to content. 

But what are the benefits that come from creating comprehensive, targeted content marketing goals and objectives? There are a couple of answers to that question.

First, healthy objectives ensure that your content isn’t overly focused on one area. For instance, you don’t want to neglect your company blog and focus too much on social media content.  

Even on your blog, you don’t want to create endless 101 content pieces and ignore more complex questions that consumers might ask further along the customer journey. Thoughtful content marketing goals ensure that you’re addressing every part of the sales funnel in your content strategy. 

Second, as mentioned in the previous section, content goals also help foster authority, credibility, and trust. These three pillars work together to spark growth and improve revenue. It may not appear so at first glance, but a good content marketing objective traces its way directly back to your bottom line.

How Do You Write a Content Goal?

There are many different elements of content strategy. These work together to help you reach your target audience. 

However, for a content strategy to work, it has to focus on content marketing goals that matter for your business. How do you decide what those goals are? How do you bring precision and purpose to the myriad of content marketing objectives listed above?  

Here are a few questions to ask yourself. Use them to help you set powerful content goals.

• What are your content marketing channels? What channels do you have available? How can you use them in concert with one another to create effective, interconnected content?
• What are your marketing priorities? Are you trying to build brand awareness? Attract a potential customer? Retain customers? Your priority list can impact the kind of objectives you set and the content type you prioritize.
• What results are you trying to achieve? This is the most powerful question. What do you want to accomplish at the end of the day? If your content helps you move toward that result, it’s probably worth the investment. 
• Do you need help? Sometimes, sorting through the content clutter is challenging. You may want to hire a content marketing agency to help make sure you’re on the straight and narrow.

Ask the right questions, orient yourself with your current needs and resources, and then set SMART content marketing objectives that are designed to achieve impactful results.

Using Content Marketing Objectives to Boost Your Brand

It is always worth the effort to use objectives to guide your content. Each content marketing objective that you set has the power to help you stay focused and effective as you create content-based assets for your business. 

Use these powerful tools to supercharge every ounce of marketing effort and use your content to take your brand to the next level.