Documenting your content marketing goes beyond the surface of what content you’re creating. You need to ask yourself why you’re creating it, whom you’re creating it for, what channels you’ll use to support it and how it will support your content marketing strategy.
Ask yourself – What is the Goal of This Content?
Choosing the right topics and setting the right organizational goals for your content starts with setting a strong foundation and gaining a solid understanding of your business goals. Why do you have a content marketing strategy in the first place? For many B2B and B2C companies and brands, the leading goals could be lead generation, increasing brand awareness, driving engagement, you name it. This is a good starting point, and depending on the goals and needs of your particular organization, various types of content marketing are available to choose from.
Use Analytics & Social Media Insights
After looking back at the organizational goals for your content marketing strategy, make use of your analytics to pinpoint what your audience likes. If you ever feel stuck choosing the right topics for your content, select your top-performing content pieces and try a new spin on an old favorite.
You can also access your social media insights and analytics to make informed decisions when brainstorming new content ideas. Once you’ve identified your top posts, see if there is a common topic or theme among them. Does a particular content type (e.g. text, image, video) consistently perform better than others? You may also want to analyze the level of engagement (e.g. likes, comments) on these posts.
Ask the Audience
Asking your audience is another tip to help you choose the right topics for your content. At the end of the day, your audience is the people engaging with your content, so it’s important to know what type of content they are craving and want to see.
There are multiple ways you can go about this. It can be as simple as setting up a poll or posting a question on one of your social media channels. Ask your followers what type of content they want to see and leave room for open-ended replies.
The role of the customer is changing and it’s time to allow your audience to play a part in shaping your content marketing strategy.
Define a Digital Marketing Goal for Every Piece of Content
For each content piece you create, evaluate the topic and see how it stacks up to each of your organizational goals. This will also help you select the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and measure.
For instance, if lead generation is your leading organizational goal, the content goal should be aimed at appealing to the customer at different stages of their buying journey. In this case, content types could include creating e-books, white papers, or case studies. If sales are also one of your top organizational goals, it’s important that the content you choose moves the sales needle. Good content that moves the sales needle doesn’t just inform, it builds trust.
It’s important that the topics you choose align with your organizational goals in order to deliver an effective content marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Mapping out and choosing the right topics for your content marketing strategy takes strategic planning. Get to know what content performs well and what your audience engages with the most. Don’t forget to document your content marketing strategy and make tweaks along the way as content trends evolve.
Choosing the right topics is fundamental to developing and driving an effective content marketing strategy. For help with your content marketing strategy, contact us today.
Huge thanks to Cheryl Baldwin at WSI for helping with today’s article.
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