Content Marketing Objectives Are The Bridge To Your Goals

Actionable steps to achieve your goals.

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What are your objectives for your content marketing?

Are they written down in an easy to understand plan? Or are they swimming around in your head still? Maybe you haven’t given it a thought because you’re unsure of how content marketing fits into your business…

No matter what stage you are, learning about objectives, their difference between goals, and how to set objectives will always help your content marketing efforts.

Objectives vs. Goals

If you’ve already set your goals, you may be thinking you can skip objectives. Goals and objectives may sound like synonyms, but they’re really two totally different concepts that compliment each other.

To make it short and sweet, goals are a general change in mindset and direction. Objectives are a series of concrete, action steps to achieve a goal.

Goals are the big picture. Objectives are a short-term, specific plan of attack.

Goals

With goals, you change your focus with a shift in mindset. When you change your focus, you change your mindset. And when your mindset changes, your thinking changes.

Goals are the destination you want to arrive at. You project yourself into the future as a person you want to become, an achieved landmark, or fulfilled desire.

Goals accomplish the following:

Defines your destination
Changes the direction to move toward the destination
Changes the mindset to adjust and support a new direction
Gives an urgency to create tactics

Objectives

Goals can easily become fantasy without any plan of action. It’s why so many New Year resolutions are abandoned. There are no tactics. No road map. No specific actions to get to that new destination.

If your goal is to lose fifty pounds this year, some of your objectives may be going to the gym for an hour three times a week. Another objective is to lose one pound a week, four pounds a month, to reach losing fifty pounds a year. They are specific.

It’s possible for objectives to influence goals. When a series of objectives are completed, goals can be raised or lowered accordingly.

Why Content Is Crucial

For your content marketing goals, your online content will play a central role in your objectives.

Just take a look at some of the goals that content is crucial for:

Increase your revenue
Spread brand awareness
Drive more traffic to your site
Generate sales leads
Convert more leads to customers
Improve retention
Drive upsells

Thought leadership

A brand becomes an authority when they consistently provide educational, relevant, interesting articles to their audience. Studies show consumers are more convinced when a brand provides helpful, honest, and unbiased information. The takeaway is customers trust content marketing more than any other forms of marketing. As a thought leader, people will see your content as the most credible.

Subtle marketing

Consumers today are very resistant to push marketing tactics like sales and promotions. These days, they very much prefer to do their own research and come to their own independent conclusions. Providing helpful content plays a subtle role in lowering consumer’s defenses and making them more receptive.

Soft influential marketing

Being an established thought leader has another benefit – your content also establishes you as an Influencer. Your influence may be so strong that your competitors use your content for reference. Any products you release will be more readily accepted by the market.

Improve brand loyalty

Customers deeply appreciate when your products deliver what they want as well as educating them through your branded content. Doing something as simple as this creates long term loyal customers that can be brand advocates on social media.

Support selling

One of the biggest impacts of content marketing is support selling. When your customers are already well-versed and educated in your products and services before ever talking to a representative. That means less support time, an easier sale, and a happier customer.

Content Marketing’s Objectives

Creating content is understandably crucial to any content marketing objective you may have. Now that we have that covered, what exactly ARE those content marketing objectives? At Content Marketing Strategy, Sarah Goliger writes about how to translate content marketing goals into key performance indicators (KPI).

According to Klipfolio, a key performance indicator is “a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.” KPIs are a tool to help reach objectives. And as we saw earlier, you are one step closer to achieving your goals when you reach your objectives.

KPIs show whether something you are doing is working or not. That means KPIs are only as useful as you measure it.

Let’s say your goal is to increase brand awareness. The objective to get there would be to share one funny video a week. Your KPI for measuring success would be how many social shares the video received.

Here are just a few more examples of some goals, their objectives, and KPIs.

Goal: Drive more traffic

Objective: Run a monthly Outbrain or Taboola campaign to promote your blog content on other sites

KPI: Number of blog visits per month

Goal: Generate sales leads

Objective: Offer an eBook in exchange for a lead’s contact information

KPI: Number of leads generated from each piece of content

Goal: More upsells

Objective: Email exclusive, personalized deals to existing customers once a week

KPI: Revenue from upsells

Time To Define YOUR Objectives

You’ve learned the definitions and seen the examples. Now it’s time to plan YOUR objectives. But, wow, where to start? There’s so much more to content marketing than creating content.

Successful marketers:

Document their content marketing strategy
Are realistic about what content marketing can achieve and how long it will take to see results
Focus on content measurement

KO Marketing suggests following a simple 1-2-3 process:

1. What do you want your content to do?

Make sure you’re creating the specific content that will lead to your desired customer action.

2. Create a well-documented plan of how to achieve your content objectives.

A goal without a plan is just a wish. It doesn’t have to be super fancy. Just take what you’re thinking and lay it down on paper.

3. Develop a fall-back plan.

Overcome uncertainty by by planning ahead for it. Have a series of options you can do if you see a dip in your objectives like optimizing top performing blog posts or increasing content production based on SEO keywords.

To inspire you with objectives to pursue, here are some of 2019’s content marketing trends:

Establish authenticity
Develop a personal connection
Continue investing in long-form content
Diversify with multiple content formats
Embrace social commerce

Word Up:

Content marketing is the most effective form of marketing today. Planning goals is your ticket to get the most out of your marketing. Combine those goals with objectives to really see a viable, successful future.

Without objectives to measure solid results, you are creating content for content’s sake. Whatever your objective may be, content will play a pivotal role (it is content marketing, after all).

In general, content marketing objectives look like running a monthly campaign, releasing a gated eBook, and emailing personalized coupons.

With the objectives you set for yourself, you really can’t go wrong with pursuing those typical content marketing objectives. Or if you want to stay ahead of the game, set an objective trending for 2019 like developing personal connections or establishing authenticity.

(T) The Major (T)rending Topics For 2019

(R) Everyone Is A Brand And Online (R)eviews Decide Your Reputation

(E) What’s Trending In (e)Content

(N) The (N)aked Truth About Your Online Privacy

(D) Surprising (D)ata Predictions For 2019

(I) Stay Ahead Of 2019 With These 11 (I)ntelligent Trends

(N)etwork Personalization And Humanization Create A Human-Centric World

(G) New Kids On The Block: (G)eneration Z And The Future Of Tech

(T)Trust Makes The Online World Go Round

(O) Content Marketing (O)bjectives Are The Bridge To Your Goals

(P) Online (P)rivacy Trends: Your Data Is A Big Deal

(I) 2019 – The Year Of (I)nventions, Innovations, Progress, And Ideas