What Does Success Look Like?

If we were to be celebrating your success 90-days from now, what would that look like? How many visits? How many leads? How many sales? I know, it’s a tough question, isn’t it?

The thing is, you can’t reach a goal you haven’t set.

So before your wheels start spinning at warp speed with all the marketing tactics you can implement, take a moment and document the goals that will serve as the foundation for your content marketing strategy for the next 90 days. Otherwise, how can you reach your goals if you don’t know what you are looking to achieve? How can you monitor your progress?

Goals is one of the areas we get a lot of questions about in regard to the Content Creators Planner. The confusion seems to be around business goals vs. content goals.  Both are important.

Think of it like this… you are using content marketing to grow a business. So you must first know what your business goals are.

Example business goals:

As they relate to content marketing, these typically fall into one of three main categories:

• Sales goals – content that aims to support specific campaigns or product-driven goals
• Cost-savings goals – content designed to increase the cost efficiency and performance of your other marketing activities
• Business growth goals – content that serves in an entrepreneurial capacity – such as creating new revenue streams or new product lines

From here, you can then create a content marketing strategy to help achieve these business goals. Your content marketing will also have goals. How else would you know what to measure and if and when you have succeeded?

Example content goals:

• Brand awareness
• Audience engagement
• Website traffic
• Lead generation/nurturing
• Increasing your marketing ROI
• Customer retention and loyalty

With each of these goals comes a different type of content marketing strategy focusing on specific audiences, leveraging different marketing channels, and communicating targeted messages. This is why it’s so critical to first figure out your goals before deciding how to reach those goals.

Let’s say your business goal is to increase overall sales in the next 90 days by 25%.Broad things you can do that impact this:

• Increase quality traffic
• Increase leads
• Increase conversion rate

More specific things we can do to impact each of these:

Increase quality traffic

• Paid traffic campaigns
• Re-engage past customers and leads via email
• Run social media contest (encourage sharing/sign ups for something)

Increase leads

• Paid traffic to a free resource
• Run social media contest (encourage sharing/sign-ups for something)
• Joint venture webinar
• Stimulate referrals and reviews

Increase conversion rate

• AB test messaging
• AB test landing page design
• AB test pricing

Other

• Offer special bundles and other value-add offers (promote via email, paid ads)

From here it is much easier to begin thinking about what content you should create!  See how that works?

At Content Creators Planner, we recommend that all goals are SMART Goals.  SMART goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time Bound

For example:

• “Increase our mailing list” is not a SMART goal.
• “Increase our mailing list by 500 subscribers who have expressed interest in product X by June 30” is a SMART goal.

Solid examples of other SMART marketing goals include:

• Increase traffic by 50% in 6 months.
• Increase sales of X product online by 20% over the next month.
• Add 1500 new subscribers to the newsletter over the next year.
• Connect with 10 people per week on Facebook.
• Increase brand loyalty on social media by encouraging fans to give at least 1 message of positive feedback per day.

OK, let’s circle back to the question I asked at the beginning, which was “If we were to be celebrating your success 90-days from now, what would that look like?”

The next 90-days are going to pass whether you plan your goals or not. You wouldn’t aimlessly get in the car to go somewhere without knowing where you are trying to go, would you?  

Taking the time to set your goals is something you do for YOU. For YOUR business. And just like anything else, the more you do this, the easier it becomes. The easier EVERYTHING becomes.

You got this!