What are your content marketing goals for 2024? If your answer is, “I’m not sure,” you’ve come to the right place. While many business owners are generally aware of the value of content marketing, they don’t know what they can achieve—and they don’t know what it takes to develop an effective content strategy.
So, what does it take?
Developing an effective content strategy starts with understanding your content marketing goals. Once you know what you want to achieve, then you can develop a custom-tailored plan and work systematically toward achieving it. No two businesses’ content marketing strategies are alike, and some are more ambitious than others. As a result, your business’s content strategy will be based on your goals—and this makes identifying appropriate goals a vital part of the process.
Creating an Effective Content Strategy Starts with Identifying Your Content Marketing Goals
There’s no better place to start than the beginning. So, how do you set goals for an effective content strategy? The first step is to understand your options. Content marketing can serve a variety of purposes, and you need to decide which of these purposes you want to achieve with your business’s content marketing strategy.
Then, once you have a general framework, you can start narrowing it down. As we discuss below, one of the most common goals with content marketing is to get more clients or customers—after all, for many businesses, this is the whole point. But, how many more can you realistically expect to achieve with your business’s content marketing budget? If you increase your budget, can you increase your return on investment (ROI)? Once you create your initial framework and have an understanding of what is achievable, then you can realistically start putting together a targeted strategy.
Finally, there is no point in setting goals if you aren’t prepared to do what it takes to execute an effective content strategy. As a result, setting goals and creating a plan necessarily go hand-in-hand. This often makes setting goals an iterative process; and, while this requires effort, it will ultimately help ensure that your business’s content marketing strategy is as effective as possible based on what you want it to achieve.
1. What Are Your Content Marketing Goals?
As we mentioned, a content marketing strategy can serve various purposes—and these are generally the starting point for establishing a business’s content marketing goals. Broadly speaking, the main objectives that can be achieved through an effective content strategy are:
- Brand Visibility Through Content – Using content to increase your business’s online presence will provide added brand visibility. If more people know about your brand and connect with its ethos, mission, or purpose (which you can illustrate with effective content), this can help you generate more business and gain traction across all platforms.
- Target Audience Engagement – When seeking to build an audience online, there is a big difference between building an audience and building the audience you need to grow your business or brand. Building an audience is relatively easy. But, if your audience isn’t interested in what you have to offer, your money and efforts will be wasted. On the other hand, if you build the right audience by setting the right content objectives and publishing the right professionally written content, this targeted audience engagement will help your business or brand grow.
- More Website Visitors – If your business model is based entirely around building an engaged audience, then a key content marketing goal will be to increase your website’s visitor count. For example, if you run an online media outlet that relies on ad revenue, more visitors will translate directly to more income. But, again, target audience engagement is critical—as visitors who don’t connect with your business’s content won’t come back for more.
- More Clients or Customers – If your goal (or one of your goals) is to get more clients or customers through your business’s website, then target audience engagement will be especially Not only do you need to get the right visitors to your website, but you also need to convince them to make a purchase or get in touch. This is a two-step process: first you get targeted readers to your business’s website with organic SEO, then you get them to take the next step with compelling website content.
- Educating Your Audience – Educating your audience is a content marketing goal that often goes hand-in-hand with the other goals listed above. Providing real value in your business’s online content builds trust—and trust is essential to forming a customer or client relationship. Professional content writing is key; and, while you will need to use keywords and other on-page SEO tools to build an audience, you will also need to ensure that these do not interfere with the human readability of your business’s online content.
More often than not, business owners will want to achieve many (if not all) of these content marketing goals simultaneously. This is very possible—with the right approach. When setting goals, scale is important; and, as long as your goals are realistic in light of your budget and time horizon, you should be able to achieve them with an effective content strategy.
2. What Will It Take to Achieve These Goals?
Setting content marketing goals and setting realistic content marketing goals are two different things. For example, let’s say you are starting a new business in 2024, and you want to have 20,000 monthly website visitors as soon as possible. Getting to 20,000 visitors by the end of January might be a goal, but it most likely isn’t a realistic one—unless you take an extremely aggressive approach that incorporates multiple digital marketing strategies. But, if you extend this timeframe, 20,000 monthly visitors becomes much more realistic, and could even become a stepping stone on the road to much greater achievements.
With this in mind, understanding what it will take to achieve your goals is essential for developing an informed strategy. Typically, this includes both an up-front investment in professionally written content combined with long-term content planning. Generally, a high-performing website will begin with a solid base, and then its content strategy will build upon this base over time.
3. Are You Prepared to Do What It Takes?
Knowing what it takes to achieve your goals and being prepared to do what it takes are two different things as well.
To be blunt, most businesses aren’t prepared to do what it takes to execute an effective content strategy on their own. They simply don’t have the in-house resources required to conduct SEO analyses, write professional-quality targeted content, and track key performance indicators (KPIs) on an ongoing basis.
As a result, for most businesses, executing an effective strategy to achieve their content marketing goals involves engaging a professional content marketing agency. With the right goals and the right strategy, working with a professional agency can produce an attractive ROI—which means that it will be well worth it to rely on a team of experienced professionals to provide the necessary organic SEO and content writing services consistently over time.
Setting Content Objectives for a Sustainable, Long-Term, and Successful Content Marketing Strategy
When setting your content marketing goals for 2024, it is important to look at all of 2024—and most likely beyond. An organic content strategy needs to be viewed as a long-term investment, and it is important to keep in mind that content marketing results will generally build upon themselves over time.
With this in mind, here are some key considerations for setting content objectives for a sustainable, long-term, and successful content marketing strategy in 2024:
- Starting with Reasonable Expectations – We’ve touched on this already, but starting with reasonable expectations is essential. If your content marketing goals aren’t reasonable, you aren’t going to achieve them, and you are going to be disappointed. This is not intended to downplay the value of content marketing—in fact, the purpose of this article is quite the contrary. Rather, it is simply intended to underscore the fact that a lot of the representations and promises you see online regarding content marketing results are unrealistic at best.
- Researching Your Competition – All aspects of professional content marketing are heavily researched-based. This applies to developing organic SEO strategies and writing engaging content—and it also applies to determining what you can realistically expect to achieve within various potential budgets. Researching your competition is a good place to start, and a professional content marketing agency should be able to give you an idea of how much your competitors are investing in making their content marketing strategies successful.
- Staying Abreast of Industry Trends and SEO Trends (and Being Ready to Adapt) – Staying abreast of industry trends is an important aspect of goalsetting. If you know what types of audiences or markets your competitors are targeting—or if you can identify new audiences or markets before your competitors—this will give you a sizable advantage. Staying abreast of SEO trends is essential as well. Google and the other search engines generally make changes to their algorithms multiple times per year, and these changes can require immediate adaptation to preserve businesses’ search engine rankings.
- Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – Establishing KPIs allows you to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy and your ROI. Of course, this assumes that you establish the right KPIs based on your content marketing goals. If you can’t measure your results, you won’t know what works (and what doesn’t), and you won’t be able to leverage content marketing to its full potential.
- Acknowledging the Value of Well-Written and Optimized Content – For many business owners, the hardest part is getting over the initial hump. They aren’t convinced that investing in content is worth it. But, the data show that content marketing is well worth it (again, with the right approach), and there is a reason why your business’s competitors are using content marketing already—and most likely have been using it for a long time.
Of course, these aren’t the only considerations involved in developing a strategy that will allow your business to leverage content for growth through 2024 and beyond. To the contrary, this is just the beginning. But, you’ve got to start somewhere—and, with a solid foundation, you can make effective use of custom-tailored website content to build your traffic, improve your target audience engagement, and achieve any other goals you may have in mind.
Tips for Achieving Your Content Marketing Goals
At this point, you are probably starting to think about your content marketing goals. You probably have a better idea of what you want out of your business’s content marketing strategy than you did before you started reading this article, and you might even be thinking about some key performance indicators (KPIs).
So, now that you are starting to formulate your content marketing goals, what are your first steps toward achieving them? While effective content marketing requires a custom-tailored approach, here are seven tips all business owners can follow to start making their goals a reality:
1. Establish a Baseline
First, you will want to establish a baseline. Your baseline might be zero—and that’s fine. If you are starting a new business or building a new website, it’s only up from here.
If you have an established website, you will need to get an understanding of your website’s current traffic, audience demographics, and conversion rates. You will also want to identify which pages or articles are generating the most traffic and conversions—it may be far fewer than you think. Then, once you have a sufficient idea of where things stand, you can start making informed decisions about your next steps.
2. Determine What is Achievable
After establishing a baseline, you will want to determine what is achievable. This relates back to our discussion about setting realistic expectations, above. Crucially, while you don’t want to set unrealistic goals, you also don’t want to underestimate your website’s potential. Again, you need to be making informed decisions when setting content objectives, as this is the only way to develop an effective and custom-tailored content strategy.
3. Develop an Effective Content Strategy
Speaking of developing an effective content strategy, once you know what is achievable, strategizing is the next step. An effective content strategy will consist of several components, including (but not limited to):
- An overall organic search engine optimization (SEO) strategy
- An on-site keyword strategy
- An on-site content plan and publication schedule
- An off-site content strategy
- A plan for monitoring performance and adjusting as necessary over time
This last component is essential. Developing a content marketing strategy is not a one-time event. A static content marketing strategy is an ineffective one. Instead, maximizing ROI from your business’s strategy will involve monitoring its performance to see what efforts are most productive, addressing algorithm updates, responding to enhanced competition, and taking various other steps to ensure that the strategy remains as optimized as possible.
4. Set Content Objectives
Each piece of content your business publishes online should be designed to serve a specific objective. If your business is publishing content without a purpose, it is most likely wasting its content marketing budget. When we write content for our clients, we put a lot of time and effort into selecting topics, researching the relevant subject matter, and crafting pages and articles that are designed to both enhance SEO and convert as many readers as possible.
5. Be Consistent
Consistency is key to increasing traffic, maintaining target audience engagement, and achieving other content marketing goals. As discussed above, a content marketing strategy will typically involve an up-front content development phase followed by ongoing content publication. During this ongoing publication phase, businesses should be regularly publishing both new articles and content updates—certainly multiple times per month, and in many cases multiple times per week.
6. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
While consistently publishing content necessarily involves developing a certain amount of content, effective content marketing strategies will prioritize quality over quantity. Quantity is important, but only to the extent that a business can consistently publish quality content.
This means that paying less for more content isn’t the right approach. Not only won’t poorly written content rank well (Google now prioritizes content that exhibits “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”), but it also won’t build an audience or convince website visitors to seriously consider your business’s products or services. Quality matters more than ever—and this will continue to be the case in 2024 and beyond.
7. Do Research and Be Prepared to Adapt
Research is essential to all aspects of an effective content strategy. So is being prepared to adapt. Creating compelling content that ranks well and leads to engagement requires an informed and multi-faceted approach that is attuned to both your business’s target audience and the search engines’ ranking factors. While creating compelling content isn’t easy, it is extremely important, and businesses that invest in professionally written content and strategic SEO will see their investments pay off in due time.
Contact Us to Learn More
If you are interested in using content marketing to grow your business in 2024 (or beyond), we invite you to get in touch. Contact us online to get started today.