8 important content strategy goals to consider
1. Informative Purpose
When it comes to content strategy, one crucial goal is creating informative content that genuinely resonates with your audience. Informative content provides valuable and relevant information that educates readers, helps them solve problems, or answers pressing questions they may have.
This type of content should be well-researched and presented in a way that is easy for the reader to consume. Whether it’s through blog posts, infographics, or videos, the main aim is to provide useful knowledge that can improve the lives of your target audience.
Investing time and resources into developing informative content will make you an authority in your industry, leading to increased trust from your audience and a boost in search engine visibility.
Take a look at how company XYZ shares helpful tips on their blog, exploring ways readers can save money while shopping online:
- Offer price comparison tools
- Teach consumers about cashback opportunities
- Share coupon websites and promo codes
- Explain different types of sales events
- Suggest free shipping promotions
- Provide insider info on upcoming deals
2. Entertaining Purpose
In addition to being informative, content should also entertain your audience. Entertaining content keeps readers engaged by offering a fun and enjoyable break from their everyday lives. This can help build brand awareness, loyalty, and foster emotional connections that ultimately lead to conversions.
The key to creating entertaining content is understanding what your audience finds amusing. Once you know their preferences, tastes, and sense of humor, you can use various formats like quizzes, games, quizzes, listicles, or memes to entertain and engage them effectively.
It’s important to strike the right balance between entertaining and informative content since a mix of both ensures you cater to different audience needs, enhance user experience, and increase the likelihood of your content being shared.
For instance, take a look at how company ABC incorporated entertainment into their content strategy by creating an engaging video series about the adventures of their mascot. This series managed to grab viewers’ attention while subtly promoting the brand:
- Mascot’s funny antics episode
- Behind-the-scenes look at creating the mascot
- Exploring the mascot’s world
- Interactive games featuring the mascot
- Fan art contest for the mascot
- User-generated content related to the mascot
3. Engagement-driven Strategies
A successful content strategy aims to facilitate meaningful interactions with readers through engagement-driven tactics. Interactive content encourages conversations between your brand and its audience, helping you better understand their needs, preferences, and pain points – all valuable insights that can inform future content decisions.
Engagement-driven content includes polls, surveys, quizzes, contests, and user-generated material, as well as tailored responses to comments on your website or social media platforms. By inviting your audience to actively participate in your content creation process, you build trust and foster a sense of community among your readers.
Remember that when developing engagement-driven strategies, it is essential to measure the success of your efforts. Track user engagement metrics like time spent on page, click-through rates, shares, and comments to evaluate what resonates with your audience and refine your approach accordingly.
See how company JKL uses hashtags to create engaging conversations and encourage user-generated content from its audience:
- Ask questions with a custom hashtag
- Create theme-based hashtags for followers to use when sharing their experiences
- Host photo contests and encourage sharing with a specific hashtag
- Monitor and respond to questions or comments tagged with the branded hashtag
- Feature fan content on brand accounts
- Analyze trending information and user sentiment through hashtag tracking tools
4. Lead Generation and Conversion
Whether your goal is to generate and nurture leads or drive online sales, a targeted content strategy is imperative. This involves creating content that guides your audience through different stages of the buyer’s journey and moves them toward making a purchase or any desired action.
High-converting content can be achieved by understanding your target audience’s pain points, preferences, and buying behaviors. Then, tailor content pieces that provide solutions while highlighting the value propositions of your product or service.
For effective lead generation and conversion, your content must have clear calls-to-action (CTAs) guiding visitors towards the next step, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, downloading an e-book, scheduling a demo, or completing a purchase.
Consider how company MNO optimized their website content to drive conversions by offering valuable resources to their prospects:
- Offer downloadable whitepapers and case studies
- Provide free webinars and video tutorials
- Include email sign-ups for newsletters with exclusive offers
- Highlight benefits of products/services using customer testimonials and social proof
- Utilize persuasive language and clear CTAs
- Use gated content to capture potential leads’ contact information
5. Brand Building
Another essential goal for your content strategy is strengthening your brand’s identity. High-quality, consistent content that reflects your brand voice and core values helps craft a unique persona that distinguishes you from competitors.
A robust content marketing plan focused on branding should involve building awareness, credibility, and loyalty among existing and potential customers by consistently delivering messages that convey your brand story and positioning. This, in turn, fosters emotional engagement with your audience, making them more likely to rave about your offerings and recommend your business to others.
To excel as a brand-focused content strategist, pay close attention to branding elements like tone, messaging, visual aesthetics, and consistency across all content channels. Additionally, always make sure that your created content aligns with the unique mission and vision of your company.
Note how company PQR tailored their content strategy for effective brand building:
- Producing branded storytelling through videos
- Maintaining a consistent tone and message across various channels
- Sharing stories of their product’s positive impact on customers
- Engaging with online communities relevant to their industry
- Collaborating with influencers who share similar brand values
- Leveraging humor and entertainment to create memorable content
6. Thought Leadership
A thought leadership-driven content strategy aims to position your company or key team members as the go-to experts in their respective industries. By showcasing your in-depth understanding and expertise, you build credibility and trust among your target audience, eventually influencing their purchasing decisions in your favor.
Thought leadership can be established through sharing original insights, identifying emerging trends, conducting research, providing opinions on breaking news, or offering solutions to complex challenges. Moreover, presentations, conferences, and guest blogging opportunities can be leveraged to expand your brand’s reach and spread your thought leadership further.
However, remember that the primary goal is not just creating content that showcases your authority but also delivering genuine value to your audience. In other words, prioritize sharing knowledge and insights that truly help your readers, rather than just promoting your business.
See how company STU established thought leadership by addressing industry challenges and providing valuable insights:
- Publishing in-depth blog posts about untapped market segments
- Collaborating with prestigious publications for guest posts and opinion pieces
- Creating proprietary research and exclusive data-driven reports
- Engaging with industry influencers through social media discussions
- Speaking at conferences or events related to the industry
- Hosting interviews with industry experts on their podcast
7. SEO-focused Strategy
No matter how great your content is, it will have limited success unless it’s found easily by search engines like Google. This is where an SEO-focused content strategy becomes essential: it involves optimizing your content to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs), driving organic traffic, and attracting relevant audiences to your website.
An effective, SEO-based content plan entails conducting keyword research, crafting detailed yet succinct meta titles and descriptions, structuring content for optimal readability, using header tags, embedding internal/external links, and incorporating multimedia or visual elements.
Moreover, you should stay informed about search engine algorithm updates and best practices for on-page and off-page SEO to maintain a successful SEO-focused content strategy over time. Lastly, ensure that your content delivers value to your audience, as user experience plays a significant role in achieving higher search rankings.
Notice how company VWX optimized their blog content for SEO without compromising the user experience:
- Identifying long-tail keywords relevant to their niche
- Incorporating keywords naturally into the content
- Creating share-worthy headlines along with keyword-rich meta descriptions
- Curating high-quality backlinks from reputable sources
- Using header tags and proper formatting for enhanced readability
- Periodically updating older content to remain relevant and authoritative
8. Performance Measurement and Optimization
Last but not least, monitoring your content’s performance and continuously optimizing it is crucial to achieving success. This involves tracking metrics like unique visitors, dwell time, bounce rate, conversion rate, social shares, and search rankings to understand how well your content strategy is resonating with your audience.
Furthermore, using data-driven insights from marketing platforms, you can identify the types of content that perform best, as well as the factors impacting your content’s success or failure. Using these insights, revise your content plan accordingly and make necessary adjustments to ensure continuous growth in engagement, reach, and conversions.
Ultimately, irrespective of your content marketing goals, you must monitor the results and adjust your approach based on data analysis. Empowered with valuable insights, you can then refine your content strategy to amplify its impact effectively and deliver consistent, compelling experiences for your audience.
Check out how company YZA implemented a performance measurement process and improved their content marketing efforts as a result:
- Analyzing user engagement metrics on Google Analytics
- Conducting A/B testing for headline variations
- Monitoring social media performance via native analytics tools
- Deriving actionable insights from email marketing reports
- Periodically conducting content audits to identify low-performing assets
- Retargeting visitors who consumed top-performing content as part of their paid marketing strategy
| Content Strategy Goals | Key Objectives |
|---|---|
| 1. Informative Purpose | Educate and empower users, establish credibility within the industry |
| 2. Entertaining Purpose | Capture audience attention and foster emotional connections |
| 3. Engagement-driven Strategies | Promote meaningful interactions and user-generated content |
| 4. Lead Generation and Conversion | Increase number of leads or sales through tailored content |
| 5. Brand Building | Foster brand awareness and loyalty by crafting a unique brand story |
| 6. Thought Leadership | Position your business as an authority within your industry |
| 7. SEO-focused Strategy | Optimize content for search engines to drive organic traffic and visibility |
| 8. Performance Measurement and Optimization | Analyze performance data and revise content strategy accordingly |
