9 Content Strategy Goals For Brand Analysis and Growth

If you work in content marketing or have ever researched the topic, you’ve likely heard the cliche “content is king.” This phrase is a cliche but has a kernel of truth behind it. Content plays a significant role in reaching your marketing and business goals. But King Content is nothing without his Strategy Court. Content strategy guides your top-quality content to the right locations, to put it in front of the right audience to see the results you want. Today, we’re discussing content strategy goals that help propel your pieces to royalty status with topics like:

• What Is Content Strategy?
• What Factors Help you Choose Content Strategy Goals?
• 9 Goals To Guide Your Content Strategy
• Is There a Framework To Help You Set Better Content Strategy Goals?

What Is Content Strategy?

Image via Unsplash by @felix_mittermeier

Content strategy is a plan for content development and promotion across your entire brand. This plan is a subsection of user experience (UX) because it influences how your audience interacts with and perceives your overall brand. Strategy is concerned with how all your company’s content fits together, not just the things you produce for content marketing. Content marketing materials, like blog posts and webinars, are part of that overall strategy. But it also includes things like pay-per-click ads, promotional coupons, or even internal communications with your team or stakeholders.

Whereas a content marketing strategy is about editorial production, a content strategy is about finding data and setting up useable workflow processes to create brand-wide content that connects and tells a full story. When creating a content strategy, teams rely on audits, style guidelines, and content models to get the information they need and set up plans to move forward with implementation.

What Factors Help You Choose Content Strategy Goals?

Content strategy goals need a basis in your business operations to be effective. You can’t pull random goals from the internet or ones that work for other companies and expect them to work for yours. You need to do research into specific areas of your brand to find the right influential factors for your goals. Take a look at some of the guiding practices and data you can use to set strategy goals:

Audience Behavior

The way your audience interacts with your existing content and your brand overall is a great influencing factor for your content strategy goals. Remember, content strategy extends from UX. The entire point behind UX is to make sure people have the best experience possible on your website or when they interact with your content. That experience keeps them coming back and eventually turns them into clients or repeat customers. The way your audience behaves tells you the kind of experience they expect when they engage with your content.

Your metrics in Google Analytics, email clients, and social platforms tell the story of your audience behavior. For example, if certain pieces of content on your website have a high bounce rate, that can tell you a lot about your audience’s expectations. They obviously don’t like what they see when they make it to a specific page so they bounce away quickly. The reasons for this behavior always vary. Further research can help you figure out exactly why your audience behaves the way they do and help you set the right content strategy goals to fix them.

Search Intent

Search intent is the reason why someone conducts an online query. It tells you more than just what your audience is looking for online, but why they need it or how they intend to use it. People typically have four primary reasons for searching for content:

• Getting information about a topic
• Comparing products or services for purchase
• Finding a specific online or in-person location
• Making a purchase

If you know why people search for different types of content online, it can be easier to set strategic goals that target that intent. The better you target search intent, the more relevant your content appears to your audience, and the more they feel you understand them. That can be an enormous influence on not just getting them to click on your search results, but moving forward through the marketing funnel to make a conversion or a payment.

Learn how search intent affects and shapes not just your SEO, but the choice of goals for your content strategy with an episode of our podcast “How To Use Search Intent for Better SEO.” You’ll learn the types of search intent, along with tips to find your audience’s search intent for any piece of content, and how to optimize everything to put it in front of the right people at the right time.

Marketing Funnel Segments

Every piece of content your team creates and every type of search intent matches up with a stage of the marketing funnel. Each funnel stage also helps you predict user behavior and what your audience needs out of the content they find online. The funnel segments lend themselves to content strategy goals. For example, if you want your content to target the awareness or discovery segments of the funnel, you may create goals around brand awareness or increasing website traffic.

Overall Business Objectives

All your business goals should interconnect. No area of your business should operate on its own without working in connection with the others. Sales and marketing have a close link. Both areas influence production, and everything your team does influences growth. It’s important to remember and refer to your major company goals when setting content strategy. For example, if one of your yearly company goals is to increase revenue, you can use that as a guide to creating content strategy goals that help reach that objective.

Analysis Data

Analyzing your current content offerings and content strategy tells you a lot about what your brand is already doing to reach company goals and what you could improve. There are multiple types of audits and analyses you can run to get the data you need to influence our content strategy goals. These include:

• Content analysis: Look at how well your content campaigns perform and how useful they are to your audience and reaching business goals
• Website analysis: Show how well your website performs for key metrics like traffic, speed, and usability
• Site crawl analysis: Look at technical issues on your website that could affect your SEO and search performance
• Competitor analysis: Look at how your top competitors develop content and run their businesses compared to yours

To get started with your analysis data, request your free content marketing analysis report from CopyPress. This document helps you uncover content behavior for your brand and your top three online competitors. The results combine content and competitor analysis to help guide your production and SEO goals. This report gives an insight into content gaps, which could influence the content strategy goals you set and the actionable content key performance indicators (KPIs) used to reach and measure those goals.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

9 Goals To Guide Your Content Strategy

Content strategy goals help you understand why you’re creating content across your brand. These objectives help establish not just what you should do to produce content, but how every piece created benefits your audience and the entire organization. Here are some of the most common content strategy goals for all businesses:

1. Developing or Increasing Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is a common content strategy goal because, without it, you wouldn’t have a company. People have to know your brand exists before they check out your content or move any further down the marketing funnel. Even companies with a good bit of brand visibility still focus on gaining more brand awareness in new markets or with new generations of clients and consumers.

Having a goal of brand awareness may influence content efforts like rebranding to better target a new segment of the marketing funnel. It may also influence where and how you share content, and what types appeal best to your audience.

2. Becoming a Thought Leader

It’s a fair assumption to say that industry thought leaders are more successful than those that aren’t. Why? Because they’ve earned their audience’s trust and respect as authoritative content sources in an industry or niche. This is especially important in a world where the internet makes access to information—that’s not always fact-checked or accurate—so easy. If you don’t have your audience’s trust, you’re never going to have their money or their loyalty.

Becoming a thought leader is more than just promoting your brand as an expert in its industry. It’s about cultivating a reputation around trust and dependability. Consider thought leaders in the SEO industry. Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Moz are all thought leaders in that industry. If you want to get tips and information that are accurate or that work for your brand, you know you can trust these sources. You can make thought leadership a priority for your brand by developing long-form informational content for all your channels.

3. Increasing Traffic

One of the primary purposes of content marketing and development is to get traffic to your website or blog. Traffic is the influx of people finding your brand and web spaces through searches, reviews, and online recommendations. Getting traffic is one of the first steps to earning leads and turning your best prospects into loyal customers.

Because human behavior is, at times, unpredictable, increasing traffic to your channels is a highly strategic undertaking. Multiple factors affect how many people visit your site daily, such as the quality of content, channels and placement, and readability or user experience. These elements have to line up together to get people the most people to your site as possible.

4. Generating Leads

Increasing your traffic is great, but it’s only beneficial if you pull qualified leads from the group of people who visit. Every time your content appears in search or on someone’s social feed, that’s an opportunity to increase your traffic. But just because someone sees your content doesn’t mean they’re going to click on it. If they don’t click, they’re never going to realize what your brand offers, so they won’t become leads.

And, even if they do click, but you haven’t optimized your content or landing pages to be lead friendly, they may click away without ever exchanging their information and getting into your sales pipeline. If your goal is to generate more leads, creating content that encourages click-throughs, sharing, and conversions can help you reach that aim.

5. Converting Customers

When most people think of a marketing conversion, they think of sales. But a sale is only one kind of conversion, and it lives in the last stage of the marketing funnel. There are plenty of other conversions that don’t require an exchange of money, and they move your customers forward through the funnel to make them loyal to your brand.

Exchanging information is one option. When people share their names and email addresses or phone numbers with your brand, that’s a lead generation conversion. Once you have that information, you’re able to share content with them through email or update them about promotions or deals with your brand. The more channels of communication you have with a lead, the better your chances of pushing them through the funnel to the sales stage.

6. Upselling

Most companies offer a variety of products and services at different levels or stages to meet the needs of the customers or clients. Some people need help with just one aspect of their business or lives, while others want someone to do all the work for them. For example, a content marketing agency may have packages that strictly include blog campaigns or the creation of infographics. These packages meet individual content needs. The same company may also offer full-service packages that handle a brand’s overall content development.

The second option ensures more work and a higher payout for the agency, so it would make sense if one of the company’s content strategy goals was upselling from one-off packages to full-service ones. When upselling, limited-time offers and content that compare features among packages are two helpful ways to convince the audience to aim higher with their purchases. Ince you have people hooked, they’re more likely to stay and continue paying for the more expensive option.

7. Strengthening Customer Loyalty

Content strategy isn’t just for your overall audience or new leads. Customer retention is also a sizeable portion of your content strategy. While almost all business is good business, a one-off customer who you’ll never see again isn’t a great long-term investment for your brand or your content strategy. According to Semrush, the probability of your brand selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70%. Compare that to the probability of selling to a new customer, which typically falls between 5% and 20%.

When selling to an existing customer, you actually have to do less work and use fewer resources to make a sale. Why wouldn’t you make customer loyalty and retention a content strategy priority with those odds? One of the easiest ways to hold on to customers is to make them feel valued. Adding rewards programs or existing customer discounts or specials helps people see the benefits of not just buying from your brand, but staying an active member of your brand community.

8. Improving Brand SEO

Improving your brand’s SEO can have a direct impact on the outcomes of your other goals, like increasing traffic and lead generation. That’s because search engines are how most people find your brand and its content. It’s Google’s world and we’re living in it, so even if you create the best content in your niche, the right audience may never find it without the help of a search engine.

Some SEO basics never change, like grabbing high-quality backlinks and targeting relevant search keywords. But you also have to play the SEO algorithm game, which changes frequently with each update. Part of your content strategy should focus on staying vigilant and understanding the changes search engines make with each update. That way, you know how they affect your existing and upcoming content plans.

9. Increasing Customer Satisfaction

Providing a top-quality user experience is one of the most important goals of a content strategy. The easier it is for people to navigate your content and the better your brand makes them feel, you increase your chances of hitting conversion goals and making sales. Customer satisfaction is necessary at every stage of the marketing funnel. It goes hand in hand with search intent.

Pleasing your audience is one of the number one factors that can make or break your business’ success. If the client isn’t happy, nobody’s happy. If one of your content strategy goals is to increase customer satisfaction with every brand engagement, you’re setting your company up for success on every channel and at every audience touchpoint.

Is There a Framework To Help You Set Better Content Strategy Goals?

A content strategy framework is a plan that details all the steps your marketing, sales, and production teams plan to take to develop content for the right audience. The framework includes the hows and whys that come from content analysis and explains how each new content campaign plays a role in reaching larger company goals. Setting goals is just one part of a larger content strategy framework. Most people use the SMART style to create actionable goals with trackable results. The SMART style stands for:

• Specific: The goal isn’t vague. It tells exactly what you want to achieve y the end of the campaign or period.
• Measurable: The goal includes a numerical or data fact you can measure and track to make sure you’re going to hit the target.
• Attainable: The goal is something your company can realistically reach with your team, resources, and time frame.
• Relevant: The goal actually relates to the work your team or company does and contributes to your organization’s growth.
• Time-bound: The goal has a start and end date where you can track and measure progress.

A SMART Goal Framework Example

Using the SMART goal framework helps keep your objectives focused. When setting your content strategy goals, you can start with a vague goal and then tweak it to make it SMART. For example, if upselling is the goal you want to hit with your content strategy, that’s vague. But we can use the SMART framework to make it more clear and more achievable:

• Specific: We will encourage our audience to purchase the premium content marketing service package instead of the average package.
• Measurable: We plan to increase sales of the premium package by 5% at the end of the campaign.
• Attainable: We have the team and resources to scale sales of this package, which offers more features and personalized attention to our clients.
• Relevant: This goal pushes one of our less-popular service packages but could be more popular with better marketing and audience targeting.
• Time-bound: This campaign runs for the duration of the third fiscal quarter of the year.

With this framework, your content strategy goal goes from “upselling” to “Increasing sales of the premium content marketing package by 5% at the end of the third fiscal quarter.”

Let CopyPress Give You Top-Quality Content Strategy Insights

Setting content strategy goals helps your brand get a more cohesive overview of the plans you have to share information on all your channels and touchpoints. It primarily affects your audience and their user experience. But the strategy also incorporates your brand voice, content tone, and interactions with team members and potential partners. The content strategy guides the direction of all your brand interactions to encourage company growth and expansion.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your brand’s content through strategy, schedule a strategy call with our CopyPress team. We’ll help you understand the results of your content analysis report and determine goals that set your brand on the path to success with your audience, in SEO, and beyond.

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer

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