How to match your content formats to your business objectives

What are you hoping to achieve with your company marketing? Don’t just say more sales. The age of advertising and marketing just to make a buck is over, and brands who focus solely on making as much money from their clients as possible are being shunned and left behind. Modern business objectives should be concerned with laying the groundwork for future sales.

In other words, the brand should focus their efforts on growing their audience and nurturing their relationship with said audience, and sales will inevitably be the outcome. So, how do you select the right advertising content for your specific objectives? This article will help you to set goals for your content marketing, identify the resources you need to achieve them, and discover the best content for what you’re trying to achieve:

Set your goals

The first and logical step is to establish the objectives of the content marketing. Are these supportive of your overall business objectives? Will your targeted content have a positive impact on both your brand and the lives of the readers? Maybe you hope to drive more people to your website where you have helpful information that could be of interest to them.

Perhaps you hope to grow your database of customers who would like to get more content from you, or you want more feet through the doors of your store. Every business would like to turn a profit, but this goal (and those mentioned above) should be accompanied by other humanistic objectives. For example, a brand should also hope to establish and maintain relationships with its stakeholders, keeping two-way communication open through online content.

Identify resources

The first part was about business goals; this one is about the resources you’ll need to achieve those goals. Driving website traffic, for example, can be done through online PPC advertising, or on social media. If the webpage you’re sending people to is supportive of a humanitarian project, you’ll want to drum up support on social media and in your stores (if applicable).

Growing a database of opted-in customers can be done via social media direct mailing, or through an in-store form. Getting more people to visit a store might require roadside billboards, flyer drops, or local SEO. A brand can only craft goal-supportive content once it knows the mediums through which said content will be disseminated, and the best practices to ensure best-case scenario outcomes.

Plot the journey

Now that you know the resources you’ll need to tap into, the customer’s journey needs to be plotted out – from first sight of the brand, through to them playing their part in the fulfilment of the company’s goals. Let’s take an online shoe seller as an example. They have an e-commerce website where customers can shop for a much larger range of shoes than those in store. The brand wants to push people to their website, so their customer journey could look like this:

• Store sales staff talk about online store – give customer flyer with QR code.
• Customer scans QR code and is taken to sign up
• Once signed up, automatically send mailer with free discount voucher for next online purchase.

In the above example, the content required would be:

1. A flyer (as well as QR code)
2. Webpage content on the sign up form
3. Sign up response mailer with discount voucher

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Learn how to achieve business objectives with specific pieces of strategic content with a National Certificate of Advertising and Advanced Digital Marketing from DSM. Find a marketing course that suits your chosen career path on our career designations page, and get in contact for additional information on our qualifications!