Four Goals for Content Marketing

What kind of content should you create for your audience? The key to answering this question is first to identify the goal for that content. What do you hope the content will achieve? The goal determines the type of content you'll create.

Goal - Raise Awareness of Your Brand

A common goal for content is to raise awareness of your brand. You put this content out into the world in as many places as possible where your target market hangs out, and hope they see it and click the link to find out more about you.

The purpose of this content is to expand your reputation, build brand visibility, and start building trust and credibility. Examples of content for this goal include blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, videos, infographics, and images that are public and posted in as many places as possible. It introduces you and shows that you know what you're talking about by offering something helpful or valuable to your target audience.

Goal – Generate and Qualify Leads

You might create content with the goal of generating and qualifying leads. This content helps you determine which people in your sales funnel are potential buyers you can make offers to.

At this point, the audience member knows who you are. They're trying to see if you have something more to offer. They're wondering if you're worth their time. Content here could be reports, cheat sheets, courses, resource lists, email messages, and other content that uniquely solves one of the audience member's pressing problems.

Goal – Build Strong Relationships

Your goal might be to build strong relationships with your audience. They may have already purchased from you or they may still be future buyers, but a strong relationship will keep your audience loyal to you and create repeat customers.

This content should solve problems but also be more personalized. It should be exclusive for your audience and highly unique. You're most likely to be using a personal channel for giving them this content, such as email messages, social media content, or webinars. This content not only gets results, but gets the best results. Often, the audience member is at the point of evaluating the results of what you've taught them.

Goal – Earn Revenue from Your Content

You may be producing content whose purpose is to generate revenue. You might do this through selling the content directly, or producing promotional content that sells a product or service.

This content needs to be high enough quality that it's worth the customer paying for. You have to demonstrate well-established authority on your topic and offer unique solutions. Promotional content needs to explain the benefits of the product and the product should deliver on these benefits.

Creating a Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy

Chances are good that your comprehensive content marketing strategy will include more than one of the above. For example, you need content to get people into your sales funnel, and then more content to build relationships, which then leads to paid content. Make sure that each piece of content you create is aligned with a specific goal.