The Five Goals Every Content Strategy Should Have

Creating a proper content strategy is imperative to maximizing your marketing, yet we’d argue that it’s equally important to create appropriate goals for your strategy.

When discussing content goals, there are a few common ones that come to mind like generating sales and building brand awareness. However, today we want to share five ideas that might not be top-of-mind but always make the cut when we put together a content strategy.

What are the five content marketing goals you should have?

Continuously build trust with your audience

Yes, we stated the obvious. If your target audience does not trust you, it’s safe to assume they will not buy from you.

Trust is more important than ever with the continuous stream of content bombarding consumers on a daily basis. To help weed through the clutter, consumers are more likely to read and view content from brands they trust; they don’t have time to consume everything so trustworthiness becomes a gatekeeper to consumption.

This means every piece of content you throw out into the world should be created with the goal of building trust. With each market, trustworthiness will most likely look different. Our recommendation? Decide what it means for your product or service and stick to it.

Demonstrate understanding of your prospect’s pain points

There is a difference between correctly understanding what struggles your target audience is experience and properly demonstrating that understanding.

Here are Worbix, we knew our target audience struggled with content, but there seemed to be a disconnect between our understanding and our means of communicating that understanding.

After several brainstorming sessions and throwing our ideas on the whiteboard, it became clear where the miscommunication was and we altered our message and offering.

Going forward, all our content will include portions of that messaging so we accurately and clearly demonstrate that we hear our prospects and comprehend their struggles.

Define the product or service benefits so they clearly align with the prospect’s pain points

Being able to adequately understand and identify their problems is great, but building trust and generating leads comes with clearly communicating how your company can help.

For example, we were communicating to our customers an in-depth look into the technology behind the content. Yes, this is a great feature of Worbix and something we pride ourselves on, but that didn’t matter to our audience. Their struggle is with the content itself, not the way it’s distributed.

By changing our messaging to focus on their struggles and how our product can solve their problem, we shifted the focus from us to them. This is key when trying to build trust with your audience. It also helped further drive home how clearly we understood their needs and our ability to help.

Develop consistent messaging across all platforms

Staying active on social media is important and imperative for building brand awareness. However, if you’re not consistent with your messaging and style across the various channels and platforms, then you’re missing a giant opportunity for building trust and understanding.

If your audience sees you on Twitter saying something and then hops over to Facebook and sees messaging that doesn’t align with what you are saying on Twitter, trust plummets.

It’s easier than ever for your target market to connect with you on the Internet and for them to spot inconsistencies across your channels. Establishing branding and messaging guidelines for each platform and channel is vital to maintaining consistent content and building the right awareness with your audience.

Improve your customer retention

With the development of online shopping and social media and individual shops like Etsy, consumers have an endless amount of options when looking to make a purchase. Add to that the various review sites like Yelp and it’s also just as easy for a brand to be completely annihilated by one negative report.

This means that it’s even more critical for companies to put in place proper retention plans. If a customer doesn’t feel valued or loses trust in your brand, they will more than likely have several other options to choose from.

Retention plans can include follow up ‘thank you’ emails, amazing support, coupons for future purchases or discounts for referrals. The goal is to make them feel like they matter and their business is appreciated.

Final thoughts

If you haven’t gathered this by now, proper and clear communication is key to a successful content strategy and should be a goal with every piece of content pushed out.

Creating goals for your content strategy is no small feat but we hope these five objectives will give you a great starting point to building a successful content strategy.