When establishing your content goals for the New Year, you also need to lay out an effective strategy to achieve them.

Asking yourself these five questions will help you do both:

1. What do you want to achieve?

Look at your overall company goals. Are you trying to expand your brand awareness? Do you have specific sales goals? Are you launching new products or services? Create a timeline of these tangible goals with milestone marks. From there you can begin crafting a content strategy to support those goals. You can also create goals specifically for your content that include impressions; shares; and conversions.

2. Who are you targeting? 

Defining your audience is an integral part of your content goals. One of the best ways to do this is to create buyer personas based on your current clients and desired clients. Buyer personas include demographics; tastes and interests; and shopping preferences and service needs. Hubspot has a fantastic guide with free templates to create buyer personas for your business (Hubspot).

3. What types of content performed best in 2017? 

Before setting your 2018, you need to audit your content from 2017 to see how you performed. Start by identifying your highest and lowest performing content. With your highest performing content, continue to build off your success. Then evaluate your lowest performing content to see why it did not perform as well. You can then either rework the content for better quality or abandon the strategy that led to its low performance. 

4. How will you take advantage of the latest marketing trends? 

It’s hard to predict how market trends will impact your business. However, what you can do is make sure that your content strategy is flexible enough to adapt to these changes. When developing your editorial calendar for 2018, make sure to include time to review the latest market trends and create relevant content.

5. How will you track and measure your efforts?

Once your goals are set, you will need a way to monitor their effectiveness. Make sure with every piece of content you have a way to measure whether you are reaching your goals. You will need to evaluate both the goals of the specific piece of content, as well as how they supported your larger yearly goals. 

Another question you can ask is if you need support. At ALHAUS, we offer full service content management solutions to help our clients reach their yearly goals. If you need help or advice in 2018, contact us. We can help put together a customised package that will meet all your goals in the coming year.