Setting objectives for Content Marketing and Social Media

I have recently been reading an excellent blog post from Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. 

The article is entitled B2C Marketers need to give Content Marketing Time.

In the article, it outlines some of the key challenges of content marketing, in particular that it can take a year or so for a content strategy to bare fruit. You may not have the luxury of time in the constant pursuit of fast results and quarterly planning, but if you have the opportunity to plan longer term, then a content strategy is absolutely recommended by me. In B2B marketing we normally talk about the need to create thought leadership content and also to use content and social media to keep the potential customer informed and the lead warm throughout the often longer purchase process.

In B2C we may focus less on thought leadership and more on customer experience. Whether you are B2B or B2C it is crucial that you don't start to develop a plan until you have identified and segmented your target audience and of course set clear objectives for each group. I must have seen at least 5 different studies over the years where marketers have been asked to articulate what their key objectives are for social media, content marketing or digital comms and each one has been consistent. Those objectives can be broken down into 3 groups:

1) Sales related objectives

2) Customer engagement objectives

3) brand perception objectives (sometimes we combine these with the engagement objectives)

Here is a chart from the CMI article that shows from their research what the key objectives are for B2C content marketing:

You can see how this research fits into my 3 categories:

Lead generation and sales fit into the sales related objectives, brand awareness fits into brand and engagement and building an audience fit into engagement. Loyalty is a complex objective - is it about repeat purchase (sales) or advocacy (engagement)? 

I like to keep objectives simple and typically focus on these 3 groups of objectives.

To measure engagement, you need a model to track against. I use the 4 stages from my engagement model - acquire, participate, engage and share. Some models like RACE (Reach, act, convert, engage) include a sales element (convert in this case), but I prefer to keep the sales measurement separate, so that you can isolate campaigns or customers who are engaged but not buying or buying your product but not engaged with your marketing comms. 

So, to use my engagement model, you simply need to track the behaviours of your audience against the 4 steps:

Acquire their attention - effectively a measure of reach - how many people have seen the content

Participate - effectively how many people who saw it responded and visited your owned media e.g your web site

Engage - how many people have given you permission to engage e.g. opted in to receive your emails or chose to follow you on Twitter, as well as then measuring how many people went on to open the email or interact with your tweets.

Share - how many people shared your content with others e.g. how many retweets or emails forwarded on (and if you can what was the reach of this sharing. If your strategy is working, this act of sharing becomes part of the acquire process as new users are able to find your content through influential readers sharing your content with their networks.

So, what objectives do you set for content marketing, and how do you measure against them?

Comments

[Gayatri]

This article helps me in my study research; I hope will be useful for others. Those objectives are very helpful Thank you for sharing.

[nick baggott]

Thank you

[RonTina]

We know that now a days everyone using social media, that's why digital marketing helps to bring up your business. Content Marketing is one of the important factor of Digital Marketing