What Is One of the Main Goals of Content Marketing?

Here’s a question we ask our clients all the time:

Why do you want to create content?

The answers we get not only help us understand our clients’ goals, but also if they get the purpose of content marketing.

A lot of them don’t have a content marketing plan. They’ve just heard that if you churn blog posts after blog posts, then you will get at the top of the search engine results. But, if you are producing content just for the sake of it without a real content marketing strategy behind it, then you are just wasting your time and resources.

Every piece of content you put out there should have a goal, be it to drive traffic, engage your target audience or educate potential customers about your products or services. But, you need to think bigger than just this. You also need to understand what each article you publish can do for your brand, more specifically how it can work towards your marketing goals and how it can benefit your wider business goals.

Let’s find out more!

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The Purpose of Content Marketing

If you want your content marketing efforts to work, then you need to align them with your business goals. That’s the only way you can create content that truly serves a purpose rather than just something for your audience to mindlessly scroll through.

Of course, if you are creating content as a way to express yourself creatively, then you don’t need to worry about business and marketing goals. But, if you are creating content to promote and grow your business, content marketing with a clear and defined purpose is a must.

So, here are a few content marketing goals you should be focusing on.

Content Marketing Goals

1. Increase Your Brand Awareness

If your business is rather new, then one of the main goals of your content marketing efforts should be to increase your brand awareness (or, in some cases, to change the way your brand is perceived.)

It’s important to note that brand awareness doesn’t refer only to whether your audience can recognise your brand name or logo, but also if they know what makes your business unique. And, for them to be able to name those distinctions, you need to create content that conveys the value of your products or services and make it clear to your audience what sets you apart from other similar businesses.

2. Earn Your Audience’s Trust

When you create high-quality content that highlights your expertise and thought leadership on a particular topic, you establish yourself as a leader in your industry.

Here are a few suggestions that can help you build trust and convert prospects into loyal customers.

• Create educational content that focuses on answering your audience’s questions. This will make your brand credible and authoritative.
• Create types of content that provide solutions and knowledge.
• Provide your content free of charge. The purpose of content marketing isn’t to sell but to create a long-lasting relationship with your audience and eventually turn them into loyal customers.

3. Boost Your Rank in the SERPs

If you want to drive traffic, then you need to earn a higher position in the search engine results. In the old days of SEO, it was enough to create articles, stuff them with keywords and links from spammy websites to rank high. Nowadays, however, the quality of the content matters more than how often you publish your blog posts. Of course, you need to be consistent. You can’t improve your ranking if you only post content once every Blue Moon. But, at the same time, if you create content because your director wants to see three blog posts published every week, then you are not putting your resources to good use.

4. To Improve Team Performance

We know what you are thinking: what does my team’s performance has to do with my content marketing goals.

It’s quite simple, actually, once you understand that each person’s actions and efforts can contribute to achieving your marketing goals. For example, if your new SEO colleague keeps making mistakes that affect your goals, then that’s a problem you need to address.

It’s not easy to measure how everyone’s efforts, from your sales team to your customer service squad can directly affect your marketing goals, but it’s an endeavour worth taking. With team reviews and performance evaluations you can help your team better themselves and work together to reach your goals.

Over to You

Content marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it’s in a direct relationship with other aspects of your business. Once you understand that and how your content marketing efforts can elevate your business, you will be able to create content that serves a tangible purpose and not just posts blog posts for the sake of it.

If you need help creating content that can help you achieve your business goals and grow your company, the team at Australian Internet Advertising is more than happy to embark on this journey with you.

Reach out to us now, tell us about your business and your vision and let’s start working together.