What Goal is Your Marketing Content Achieving?

When I was growing up, my father used to tell me, "Just focus on doing one thing—and do it right." That advice holds true today for B2B marketing content. Every single content asset you produce must have a goal. If it has more than one goal, it's likely going to fail to accomplish what you set out to do.

Content goals are many, but here are a few:

• Enable your prospect to understand a concept that relates to solving a problem important to them.
• Provide insight on an industry trend that could impact their business in the future.
• Prove that the risk a prospect perceives as related to the solution is actually lower than they thought – especially when working with you. 
• Inform them about how their peers and competitors are handling the issue.
• Show them how to build a business case.
• Simplify the perceived complexity of implementation.
• Relate a solution to business objectives they have a stake in achieving.

Those are only a few, but perhaps you've noticed the nature of a content goal is based on  audience benefits, not the call to action. Content goals are related to takeaways. The point is that if your content achieves its goal, the call to action becomes a natural next step (provided it's aligned with the goal).

If you create content that's designed with more than one of these goals in mind, you either create such a complex piece of content that your audience needs to get out their hip waders to get through it, or you've skimmed the surface of each goal and ended up providing nothing intrinsically valuable. 

What happens is that we want everyone to engage with our content. We're not happy with a targeted audience because we still think marketing is a numbers game. We think 300 views is more valuable than 50 really engaged viewers that we can motivate to take next steps with us.

Maybe it's that "do more with less" attitude that's permeating the business environment. But, it doesn't work with content. It also doesn't work with buyers overwhelmed with information who are looking for the answer they need to a specific question they have during their buying process.

If you think they're going to troll through pages of content to find that one nugget, you're mistaken. They don't have time. They'll hit the back button and enter a new search query in about 7 seconds if they don't get the orientation they need.

Each content asset should be designed to do one thing—and to do it right based on the audience it's designed for. If you can do that, you'll see that your content all starts working together to produce highly engaged prospects more likely to convert into sales opportunities.