“I want to generate leads.”
“I want to become a thought leader.”
When you ask someone what the goal of their content marketing is, you’ll probably get one of the above answers. If they’re in really bad shape they might answer, “All of the above.” (Which really means, “I don’t know.”)
In fact, the answer should always be “it depends.”
While it’s good to have an overall idea of what your content is trying to achieve, it’s far more important to define the goal of every single piece of content within your overall content strategy. Unless you drill down into the goal of each piece of content, your “content marketing goal” will just end up in a file labeled “2023 Content Marketing Strategy” that doesn’t get looked at until it’s time to update it for 2024.
Every piece of content needs a goal because every piece of content should be building off an interaction before it and leading towards the next stage in the relationship. That doesn’t mean that every blog needs to convert your visitor into a lead. The goals can still be very different.
For every piece of content I create, whether it is for a client or for Monomyth, I fill out this Content Blueprint:
- Goal:
- Target Audience:
- Transformation:
- Where the reader is coming from:
- CTA/What you want the reader to do:
- Overall Campaign:
Let’s go over each piece of this blueprint to help understand their importance and how they’ll shape the actual blog, whitepaper, email or other piece of content.
Goal
This is the basic summary that the rest of the blueprint will follow. What is your goal? It should be as specific as possible. “Thought leadership” is not a good answer. “Building authority in network servers and growing network server email list” is better. “Measuring interest in network server topic for creation of a potential whitepaper, gathering feedback on topic and collecting emails of people who want to be notified if the whitepaper is created” is perfect.
While your overall content marketing goal might be to “build authority and grow email list,” a single blog article or other piece of content isn’t going to accomplish that goal for you. Giving each piece of content its own more specific and measurable goal will help you understand how it will fit into your overall strategy and allow you to tailor the content to fit that goal.
Target Audience
Most content marketers understand the importance of clearly defining your target audience so I won’t spend too much time on it. If you have multiple buyer personas, each campaign should focus on just one – maybe two – of them. In general this means that each blog, video, infographic or other content in that single campaign will all have the same target audience.
Transformation
Next you want to define how you want your audience to transform while they consume your content. What is the purpose of the article?
In a minute, we’ll talk about how your content fits into the buyer’s journey, but that’s not what this section is for. This section is for determining the value your audience will get from your content. Even if you eventually get them to click on your call-to-action, if they keep leaving your content without learning something or thinking about something in a new way, they’ll eventually stop interacting with you.
This tip came from a Pat Flynn video on productivity tools. Buried inside “My Top 5 Productivity Tools That Can Make You Better, Faster & Stronger” is a really powerful outline for creating blog posts.
Where the Reader is Coming From
“I don’t know where I’m going, but I sure know where I’ve been…” -Whitesnake
Okay, here I go again. Now it’s time to talk about the buyer’s journey.
When you start your blog or other content, it’s important to know where your reader is most likely going to find it. If it’s a whitepaper they downloaded from your website, they’re probably familiar with your company and a little further along in their research process. If they’re just stumbling across your article on Medium they may not know you and may only have a very basic understanding of the topic you’re covering.
Understanding where the reader is coming from is important – not only for tailoring the complexity and depth of your content – but for creating something more engaging. If most of the people attending your webinar or reading your Facebook post have engaged with your brand in the past, you want to make sure you use more familiar language so they feel like a relationship is beginning to form (and it is).
What You Want the Reader to Do (the CTA)
Unlike Whitesnake, it’s not enough for you to just know where they’ve been, you need to know where they’re going. Putting a CTA for a whitepaper about lead nurturing at the bottom of a blog post about lead nurturing isn’t enough. The blog and whitepaper should work together as a continuation of the conversation.
For example, if your reader is coming to you from a Google search they are most likely in the early stages of solving a problem. Your blog article’s Transformation should be guiding them towards the solution to that problem, but your blog should also have the goal of teasing a deeper level of knowledge or opportunity. “Here’s the answer to your question, but this is just a symptom of your bigger problem, which can be solved by downloading…” or “This is a simplified answer to get you started, if you need to learn more…”
Overall Campaign
This will be the field that gets changed the least often. A single campaign could have dozens of pieces of content associated with it. It’s important to list it so you are never missing out on the ultimate goal of why you are writing this piece of content.
For example, if you’re planning to launch a new product next month, your campaign may include many smaller pieces of content such as blogs, videos, whitepapers and webinars to generate interest in the new launch. If you are writing a blog for that campaign, the CTA may be sending them towards a webinar, but you also want to keep in mind that the final goal is finding the ideal customers for your product.
If a piece of content doesn’t work towards that final goal, it shouldn’t have a place in your overall campaign.
Unfortunately, many companies are creating content without a very specific goal in mind. This is especially true for marketing agencies that are selling content and pricing their services by the single piece of content.
That’s what I put down as my Transformation goal for this article. I hope after reading this, you’ll think about the content you or your marketing agency is creating. Is it all working towards a very specific and measurable goal? Or is it working towards “thought leadership” or “lead generation”?
That’s my hope for you. So what’s my Call-to-action? This article is the first in a new campaign teasing the upcoming announcement of a new Monomyth Marketing program. There’s a way to improve on how most agencies provide marketing services to their clients, and I’d like to show it to you.
If this is something you’d like to learn more about, please subscribe to our blog or sign up for our email list in the sidebar! I promise anything we post or send you will have a clear value to you before anything else.
