How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business -Part 4: Content Goals
Learn how to create an effective content strategy for your business with this free video course. Part 4 of 12.
This is Part 4 of our free How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business video course.
This lesson covers how to use your target audience information to set SMART goals for your content, plus defining your business goals, aligning your content strategy with your business goals, and determining what you want to achieve with your content (e.g. drive traffic, generate leads, build brand awareness, etc.).
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Watch the video lesson below or refer to the video transcript:
Video Transcript
Welcome back to our video course on how to create an effective content strategy for your business.
This is module 4.
In the previous lesson, we looked at understanding our target audience.
In this lesson, we’ll look at setting content goals for our content strategy.
Setting content goals involves identifying what we want to achieve with our content, and then developing specific, measurable, and actionable targets to help us achieve these objectives.
Here are the general steps to follow when setting content goals:
First, identify our target audience. Understanding their demographics, interests, and pain points will inform the types of content that we should be creating.
Next, define our business objectives. We need to determine how our content will support our overall business objectives, such as driving website traffic, increasing conversions, building brand awareness, and so on.
Next, establish specific, measurable, and actionable goals: For each objective we set, we’ll need to create specific, measurable, and actionable goals that align with our objective. For example, “Increase website traffic by 30% within the next six months.”
Also, we need to prioritize our goals based on importance and feasibility. This will help us focus our resources on the content that creates the most impact.
We also need to regularly review and adjust our goals, because the digital landscape is always changing, and so what worked well before may not work as well now.
So, we need to make sure that our goals are current and feasible.
Another important area is to measure and analyze our content’s performance. Here, we can use analytics tools to track performance and measure the success of our content against our goals. This will then help us identify areas for improvement and allow us to make data-driven decisions instead of guessing.
By following these steps, we can set clear and measurable content goals that will align with our business objectives and that will help us achieve our desired outcomes.
So, let’s explore each of these areas now in a little more detail.
The first step is to identify our target audience.
We’ve already covered this in module 3, so if you need help identifying your target audience, just go back and review that module.
The next step is to identify our business objectives.
Before we can identify our business objectives, however, we should have a clear idea of our business vision, mission, and core values.
If you need help with any of these areas, then visit the URL on this screen for an in-depth tutorial.
The next step is to establish specific, measurable, and actionable goals. For each objective or goal that we specify, we need to create specific, measurable, and actionable goals that will align with our objectives.
For example, our goal might be to increase website traffic by 30% within the next six months.
We can use SMART goals to set specific, measurable, and actionable goals to help us achieve this objective.
At this point, we will also want to define the metrics that we will use to measure our results.
If you need help or more information on content metrics, visit the URL on the screen.
The next step is to prioritize our goals based on importance and feasibility.
This will help focus our resources on the content that will create the most impact.
When prioritizing content goals, it’s important to consider both the importance and the feasibility of each goal.
Importance refers to how closely the goal aligns with our overall objectives, while feasibility takes into account the resources, time, and any other constraints that can impact our ability to achieve the goal.
One way to prioritize content goals is to use a method like the Eisenhower Matrix, which separates goals into four categories based on their importance and feasibility:
So…
Important and feasible are goals that should be prioritized and tackled first, as they will have the greatest impact and can be completed with the resources that we have available.
For example, creating product announcement blog posts when new products are released or existing products are updated would likely fall into this category.
The next category is important but not feasible. These goals are important, but can’t be completed given current constraints, so we might need to put these on hold or reevaluate them later to determine if they can be made more feasible.
An example of a goal that might fall in this category is producing a high-budget video ad campaign when we’ve only been given a very low budget to create our content.
Not important but feasible goals are not critical to our objectives, but could still be achieved within our available resources.
These goals can be completed if time allows but should be given lower priority than more important goals.
For example, translating website pages into another language that isn’t critical for our target audience would probably fall into this category.
And the last category is not important and not feasible, If goals are neither important nor feasible, then just drop them. They are not important and they are not feasible.
When using a method like the Eisenhower Matrix, it’s important to list all of our goals, then evaluate each one, add them into one of these four categories, and make a decision based on the category we’ve selected.
The next step is to continually review and adjust our goals.
As mentioned earlier, the digital landscape is always changing, so what worked well before may not work as well now.
The last step is to track our goals and measure and analyze our content performance using analytics tools. This will help us identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.
So, to summarize what we have covered in this lesson, setting content goals involves steps like:
- Identifying our target audience
- Defining our business objectives
- Establishing SMART goals
- Prioritizing our goals according to importance and feasibility
- Regularly reviewing and adjusting our goals to make sure they remain aligned with our objectives, and
- Measuring and analyzing our content performance against the goals that we have set.
For more information about each of these areas, see the tutorials and lessons that are listed on the screen.
That’s all for this lesson.
In the next lesson, we’ll look at the different types of content to include in our content strategy.
Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next lesson.
- Go to Lesson 5.
- Return to the video course outline.
Tutorials
See the following lessons and tutorials for more information about the topics covered in this video lesson:
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Image: Robin Higgins. Music Bensound.
