When planning your digital marketing strategy, it is essential to decide on your goals and what metrics are important for your business. Why do your website, blog and social media accounts exist? Content marketing and social media engagement are often time consuming and labour intensive so identifying your objectives will help you focus on activities that have a bigger impact on your business.
Setting Objectives
Brand Awareness
Does your content marketing strategy reflect your brand image? The key is developing a good mix between content that is interesting and useful to your audience and content that subtly promotes your brand. Admittedly, this can be tricky and is more of an art rather than a science.
Lead Generation
Lead generation aims to shape your audience’s perception to stimulate demand for your products or services. You can benefit from content marketing by fostering interest in your brand. Focus on building a database of consumers by encouraging online registrations on your website.
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is establishing your brand as a trusted adviser. It creates more value for your brand and supports your business by influencing buying decisions within your industry. It requires focusing your content on issues or topics that you have expertise in. Thought leadership is about long-term results and genuine relationships. It helps customers reach their goals while also creating wealth for the company.
Direct Selling
Sending too many “buy” signals on your blog or social media can turn off followers and fans, the trick is to identify how and when to send the correct call to action. Badgering or manipulative messages often fail and even generate a negative impression of your brand or company. By knowing your prospect intimately, you will be able to send the appropriate messages that matches where they are in the buying cycle.
Customer Retention/Loyalty
It is often said that it is more costly to acquire new clients than to retain existing ones. Customer loyalty must be one of the priorities of content marketing. Create content that help you engage and build lasting relationships with customers. The marketing landscape has shifted tremendously and companies have now taken on the role of publishers of their own content. Indeed, it has become a content marketing arms race and if you are not actively engaging your existing customers, someone else will.
Metrics for Success
Web Traffic
Web analytics such as Google Analytics give very insightful information on content consumption behavior. Metrics may include total visits, unique visitors, time spent on site, and bounce rate. Find out how often your content is read. Which sites or links did they come from before visiting your site? How many people are subscribing to your newsletter? Are they leaving comments and interacting with you? If you are investing in paid search, your investment will be tied to cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition.
Social Media Sharing
A social media management tool such as Hootsuite is a very convenient way to stay on top of social shares. Social influence may not be as critical to B2B companies compared to the consumer goods and services industries. However, social shares can help you rank better in Google’s organic search as this is factored into your page rank. The dollar value of your offering will determine if time and effort spent on social media is a worthy investment. Admittedly, it is difficult to determine the monetary value of a “like” or “share.” If your goal is simply to promote brand awareness then social media is a great way to distribute your content assets.
SEO Ranking
Search Engines are often the primary sources of traffic for any site. Is your content enhanced for SEO? You may be creating awesome content but it is not formatted using effective SEO techniques, then it may not be crawled by search engines. One tool that can measure your SEO keyword rankings is MOZ. The better your SEO rankings, the greater the chance to be found by users. Keep in mind that the main goal is conversion. Ranking high on popular keywords that don’t convert to sales won’t mean anything for your business. Learn how to get started on SEO here.
Conversions
The true test of an effective marketing campaign is of course increase in profitability. It would be easy to correlate your content marketing efforts to sales if you have a CRM system. It will confirm if your audience truly converts to sales. Your CRM data can also be a goldmine of information about what type of content actually contributes to conversion. You can then adjust your content marketing strategy to reflect the type of content that is most effective.
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