I am going to start this lesson by sharing with you a little secret:

In content marketing the key is to think as a publisher.

What does it mean? It means that you’ll have to find the best avenues to continuously produce valuable, engaging content as cost-effectively as you can, while you are trying to develop a large, loyal and active audience base. And of course, it also means that you’ll have to think as a business owner, one that knows exactly what he is trying to achieve.

Content marketing is about a lot of different efforts and end-goals. It can be about revenue generation, list-building, thought leadership, brand awareness, personal relationships, etc. According to Content Marketing Institute …

The #1 content marketing goal for B2C businesses is sales - 83% -, followed by customer retention, loyalty and engagement - 81%.

But no matter what the end-goal is, you’ll have to define upfront what success looks like for you and how you are going to measure it.

So, take your time, think it over and make sure that you have your own clearly and precisely defined content marketing objectives. Once you have some clear goals you’ll be able to measure them and that will give you the ability to objectively evaluate your results in order to improve your overall content marketing strategy. So, keep in mind: having clear goals is literally vital when you are developing a content marketing strategy for your business!

One more thing … You’ll have to define both quantitative and qualitative goals for your content marketing.

The quantitative goals are goals that actually do have a precise number associated with them (50 new leads, 100 finalized sales, 200 downloads, 300 new fans, etc).

The qualitative goals are goals that actually don’t have a specific number assigned to them (social engagement, trust, brand recognition, etc).

Wrapping it up

Defining your content marketing goals is the very first mandatory step in any content marketing process.

Obviously, certain decisions are simple, others feel like guesswork. But that’s OK. In order to test your plan you are going to need a good starting point, so don’t overthink it. If you don’t have better options, make an educated guess and you’ll have the possibility to refine your strategy anytime if you find that your original approach isn’t giving you the wanted results.

Of course, frequently changing a lot things and elements in your overall content marketing won’t help you at all in developing a content marketing strategy for your business.

My recommendation: craft the best plan you can, stick with it for at least six months, then analyze your results. If your strategy is working keep it up. If not, create a refined, tweaked plan for another six months period.