Your business depends on its content to drive organic traffic to your website, generate sales, grow your email list, and more. People won’t trust your brand or invest in it without learning more about it first, which is why your content marketing strategy must be actionable and practical.

Around 63 percent of marketers say their biggest content challenge is driving traffic and generating leads. Content is something that businesses across all industries struggle with in some form. If you don’t take the time to study your current strategy to create a better one, then you can’t expect to reach your goals and improve conversions.

Here are a few tips to help you create solid goals for your business content.

Review your analytics

Before you take any steps to create new goals for your content, you need to conduct a thorough analysis. You can’t know what needs to change if you have nothing to go off of. Knowing where your website and its content stands with readers tells you what you need to do next to reach success.

Thoroughly review your website analytics to see what parts of your site are gaining traction and which ones remain stale. For any website to thrive, it needs positive engagement from its users. Unless your website is new, you should have enough analytical data to make conclusions about what the next steps are for your content marketing strategy.

Pay attention to the webpages that garner lots of engagement and return visitors. What are they about? How long are they? Why do they resonate with your readers? Do the same with your poor-performing content to see where gaps exist so you can eliminate them later.

Assess the gaps

If you have content that doesn’t perform well with your target audience, then that means there are content gaps in your current strategy. To find these gaps, you have to actively search for and identify them, which isn’t always an easy task. However, you can use your audience and competitors to help you.

Take a look at your competitors and their content to see what works for them and what doesn’t. Study their content like it’s a valuable piece of research you need to improve your brand. Pay attention to their topics, writing style, keywords, and target audience. Who are they writing for? What content garners the most engagement and recognition? How do they promote their products and services organically through their content?

Use your target audience to learn more about what they want from you and how you can give it to them. Create a customer survey to ask them specific questions that will bring you closer to an effective content marketing strategy.

In your survey, you can ask users questions like:

  • What kind of content are you most interested in?
  • What do you need help with? What are your pain points? How can our brand bring you solutions?
  • What do you love or hate about our products?
  • When consuming our content, what makes you stay or leave?

Set SMART goals

There are different types of goals you can set for your content marketing plan, but you’re best off going with SMART goals.

SMART stands for goals that are:

  • Specific: What you’re trying to accomplish, who you’re targeting, when you want to reach your goal
  • Measurable: What metrics you’re going to use, how you’ll measure and track your progress through KPIs or other criteria
  • Attainable: Goals you’re realistically able to reach and aren’t out of the realm of possibility
  • Relevant: How relevant your goals are to the overall bigger picture
  • Time-based: Setting goals within a time frame so you reach them faster

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Whether your content goal is to create an email marketing strategy that grows your email list or to improve your blog posts, you need an organized method to see results. If you fail to cover the bases of your new and improved content marketing strategy, then it’ll continue to have gaps. Setting SMART goals ensures that you’ll see positive results and growth at the end of your campaign.

Conclusion

If your brand is going to produce content that resonates with readers and increases conversions, then it needs the proper goals set in place. These steps are sure to help you and your team come up with a smarter plan for your content that helps your business achieve its marketing goals.