Your content marketing is the key to attracting new leads and progressing current leads, yet most teams are very haphazard about the individual pieces of content they create.

Your campaigns won’t achieve their best results if you’re not creating content with the goal in mind.

So, how can you make sure you’re creating content with the goal in mind?

In the third post of this series, How to Improve Your Content Marketing Results, I discussed that the next step to meeting your content needs was to be intentional about the content you are creating. This means having the purpose, goal, medium, core messaging and channel in mind throughout the content production cycle. In this post I explained the difference between purpose and goal. The purpose is to ensure that you understand at the highest level why you are creating this content, whereas the goal is more specific.

In this post I want to dive deeper into determining the goal of content and how that impacts your rhythm and intention, both from an overarching marketing perspective and an individual content piece prospective.

Marketing Goals

Your annual, quarterly and monthly marketing goals obviously should be indicative of your content marketing goals. While also somewhat obvious but often overlooked, your marketing goals should also dictate the rhythm of content production.

Example goals:

● Improving site traffic
● Drive more conversions from your blog
● Improve email click-through

Let’s look at how the goals above would impact your content goals and rhythm.

There are, of course, several different ways you could improve website traffic, but the more amazing content you create, the higher your website traffic will be. Neil Patel provides detailed stats of the differences of doing two, five or six blog posts a week in his own blog post, How to Grow Your Blog to 100,000 Visits a Month Within 1.5 Years. He explained that KISSmetrics grew their traffic 18.6% by going from five post per week to six and he states that he could drive a million visits a month by producing three posts per day. The point I’m driving toward is that there isn’t an exact number of new pieces of content that is optimal for you to grow traffic. The more content, the more traffic, so you have to decide how much content you are comfortable committing to create.

Driving more conversions from your blog is similar to improving website traffic. There are several ways you could improve your conversion rates and you should do those, but no matter how low or high your conversion rates are, the more post you have, the more conversions you will have. Again, there isn’t an optimal number, so you have to decide how many posts you are comfortable committing to. Personally, I don’t like to post fewer than two posts per week for a B2B company’s blog.

Unlike our previous two goals, improving email click through does have a more or less set number of content pieces that could be used. Most B2B companies are sending a set number of emails per month and a portion of those are used to promote things that could not be replaced by new content pieces. For example, let’s say you send one email per week. Two of those emails are used for promoting webinars and two are to send a newsletter. We could test improving email click-throughs by replacing one of the newsletters with a guide, eBook or whitepaper.

Now let’s use the above to look at how intention is intertwined. Our overall stated goals are to improve site traffic, drive more conversions from your blog, and improve email click-through. Let’s pretend we are focusing on these three goals because we think they are the three best tactics for improving sales accepted leads and we are trying to grow SALs (sales accepted leads) by 50%.

Now, when we are writing a blog post we know our purpose is to attract more ideal prospects and convert them into an SAL. This would inspire me to think about our core messaging and customer benefits and how those align to customer problem scenarios. I would brainstorm a topic around that problem scenario. Then I would incorporate a call to action that is most likely to entice the reader to convert. Webinars are one of the highest converting campaigns for many B2B companies, so I would add a CTA (call to action) for the webinar. Finally I would make sure my topic, customer problem scenario and webinar CTA are all aligned. More readers will convert if the webinar CTA topic and blog problem scenario topic in line with each other.

While that seems pretty straightforward, it is a mindset that I see a lot of B2B marketing teams missing. Too often you see blog posts about how some high-level, non-customer-centric topic is like some out-of-date TV show or riding a bike. You need to ask yourself, do your customers care how some industry topic is like MASH or riding a bike?

I hope this has inspired you to take a candid look at how your team is creating content. Is your team’s content production a little bit haphazard? Could you be a little more goal-oriented?

What are some other aspects of content production about which you see people forgetting to be goal-oriented?

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