How To Align Your Content Strategy To Your Business Goals

Content strategies are meaningless unless they are aligned with your business goals. So how does a marketing department and the C-suite make sure the two are aligned? We’ve got you covered with these 5 steps to align your marketing strategy with your business goals.

1. Share your business goals with the marketing and/or content team. This step may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many times it doesn’t happen. Not everyone realizes that good marketing is only good if it is connected to the business.
2. Don’t start with the creative. The best creative is grounded in data. Who are we trying to reach? How big is the target market? What motivate them? How do they behave? What else do we know. When you start with the data instead of the creative, you may not get the most creative creative, but you will get the most effective creative.
3. Build personas. Every great content team should understand the buyer persona. When you keep the persona at the forefront of your thinking, you increase the chance of influencing your target buyer.
4. Create context; not just content. Great content – about your company, your products and your services is helpful. Content with context is even better? What does that mean? Don’t just create content that informs; create content that motivates and inspires. Think about what else your audience cares about – in addition to your business, and serve it up.
5. Now add creative. Once you understand the business objectives, the research and the audience, then you can get creative and make sure you also create content that entertains.

For some inspiration, check out MM. La FLeur’s M Dash and American Express’ Open Forum. These two companies know how to align content strategies to business goals.