The Importance of Aligning Content Marketing With Business Goals

Posted by pratik mache on July 19th, 2021

Content marketing has become the new buzzword in the marketing space. Every B2B business does “content marketing.” Often, there’s no strategy involved, and even if there is, it doesn’t align with the overall business goals. 

Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies out there, provided that it synchronizes with your business objectives. 

Here’s all you need to know about driving business growth with the help of content marketing. 

Realize Your Long-Term and Short-Term Business Goals

The first step in devising a content marketing plan is to define your business goals. These include B2B sales and B2B marketing objectives. For example, if you’re a SaaS company providing HR management software. 

Your short-term business goals can be:

• Increasing organic traffic
• Growing email subscriptions
• Generating trial users

Similarly, your long-term objectives can be:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing revenue by a certain percentage by the end of three years
• Increasing customer retention

Once you realize your business goals, develop a content marketing strategy that enables you to achieve these goals quickly and cost-effectively. 

How Content Marketing Enables Business Growth?

As the business environment continues to become more competitive, B2B companies are looking for an effective and cost-efficient way to achieve consistent growth. This is where content marketing can help a lot.

Content marketing enables business growth in three ways:

• Increases Visibility: B2B sales and B2B marketing rely significantly on numbers. The more people you reach, the more leads and conversions you’ll generate. Content marketing is highly effective in increasing your online visibility across multiple channels. 
• Increases Trust and Authority: As decision-makers are becoming increasingly independent when it comes to decision-making, B2B providers need to increase trust and establish authority and thought-leadership. Content marketing enables you to build credibility and authority online, thereby attracting more customers and driving business growth. 
• Generate Qualified Leads: B2B Content marketing is directly associated with improved lead generation. Furthermore, a strategic content marketing approach can go a long way in nurturing those leads and building meaningful relationships with your prospects. 
• Increased Conversions: In the end, it’s all about the bottom line. Content marketing is known to increase conversions, revenue, and profitability. It also shortens the sales cycle and helps your sales team convert leads quickly.
• Offers Better ROI: Content marketing delivers a better return on investment (ROI) compared to other traditional advertising methods. Hence, you can get better value from your marketing dollars. 
• Competitive Advantage: Content marketing gives your business a massive competitive edge over other companies that rely on paid ads and other traditional marketing tactics. You can reach more customers and build authority in your niche. 

Why Is it Important to Align Content Marketing with Overall Business Goals?

In most companies, sales, marketing, and customer support departments work in silos. Strategies are formulated independently, which often leads to a disconnect. A misaligned content marketing strategy simply means poor ROI. 

Now, how can you ensure that your content marketing strategy is in sync with the overall business objectives? Here are some techniques that can get you started!

• Make the marketing team a part of the operational planning process from the start
• Continually track progress based on meaningful metrics
• Keep your expectations as realistic as possible about deliverables
• Involve key stakeholders in your content marketing plan
• Ensure seamless collaboration between sales and marketing departments

A solid content marketing strategy can undoubtedly facilitate business growth and directly impact your business. But for content marketing to be effective, it must align with the business goals. Therefore, B2B organizations should ensure that their sales and marketing teams work together to synchronize content marketing with the broader business strategy.