How to Align Your Content Marketing Strategy With Audience Goals

Whether you’re part of a marketing team, or you’re a one-man brand, aligning your content marketing efforts with your audience is an important part of the overall brand strategy of your brand.

In fact, 81% of business to consumer marketers agree that their organization is concentrated on creating content that builds loyalty with customers, according to recent research done by Content Marketing Institute. It was also evident that content marketers increased spending on content creation more so than other areas of content marketing in the last 12 months.

So, the question is, how can you effectively create content that helps both you and your audience reach your respective goals?

Photo by manotang.

While content production is a simple concept to understand, aligning content value to consumer goals can often be viewed as an abstract or a complex system of interaction. Brands are investing more time and money than ever, in hopes of optimizing the experience for their audience, with things such as A/B tests, feedback surveys, extensive data analysis, and more.

However, smaller brands and start-ups might not have the perks of doing extensive amounts of tests and research about their audience, and this is perfectly OK because the data will come in as the brands become more experienced with creating content. A simple way to get more in touch with your audience is by making an effort to connect your brand content with their personal goals.

In this guide, I will describe the concept of alignment as an exchange of value between a brand and its audience, which ultimately leads to shared gains.

To align your content marketing goals with your audience, it is important to first define the expectations from both sides, and then follow up with a map of the feasible paths to reach the target.

1) Define your content marketing goals

To define the goals, let’s separate a branding strategy from content marketing strategy for a moment. While your branding strategy should consist of brand…