Four Factors in Developing Marketing Objectives for Your Custom Content Plan

A custom content strategy without marketing objectives is like preparing for a camping trip without a known destination in mind. If you prepared for Death Valley but hiked Everest, all of your warm weather preparation would be of little value.

There’s a big difference between objectives and strategy. Objectives are what you want to achieve, and strategy is how you get there. Factors that go into forming strong marketing objectives include:

• Knowing your audience;
• Understanding what resources you have available;
• Assessing the landscape;
• Digital marketing objectives.

Knowing Your Audience
If you want to reach 30 percent of the 55-year-olds in the Midwest, understanding some of the background on potential readers will help you hone in on your objective. If you determined that 45-year-olds are actually a better audience for your content, you’d need to change your objectives and not just your strategy. Having a good understanding of how your audience consumes content will influence your objectives.

What Resources Do You Have on Hand?
Knowing what you can do with the resources you have on hand will influence your objectives. You might have to revisit your objectives as you develop a strategy, or set an objective to gain more resources once you’ve developed your strategy. You have an objective to reach Kindle users and determine that you’re going to have to develop the expertise or form a partnership in how to publish your content on the eReader before publishing.

Landscape Assessment
Without knowledge of the wider market, your objectives might lead your company down a dead end. If you’re running a grocery chain and competitors are just about to open up a line of organic products, and you are doing the same, your objectives for your content will have to be different because of the changing competitive nature of the market. Having a good understanding of how the marketplace is changing will influence your objectives. For example, the eReader market is changing rapidly. The number of competitors using E Ink technologies is growing beyond the Kindle and mobile solutions on cell phones and new devices like the iPad. You may decide to offer digital subscriptions to your printed content, and set an objective of exchanging print subscriptions for digital to keep costs the same for an individual subscription.

Planning for Digital Objectives
SEO rankings, engaging influencers in social media and earning media on the Web are all digital objectives you will have to achieve with your custom content marketing plan. But to set those objectives, you have to understand the importance of how each digital reality affects the design of your program. Search engine rankings are very important in digital objectives. Google has been called "the home page for every Web site," and if you don’t have an objective to gain rankings on the keywords your audience is searching on, the objectives for your content may miss the mark and not get you to the place your business needs to be.

Posted By: John Cass

Comment(s): 5  |  (+) Add a Comment

ipad gadgets said on 18 Jun, 2010 at 4:39 AM
This is really brilliant and unraveling. Ideas so wide open.

John Cass said on 17 Mar, 2010 at 2:16 PM
I think there's quite good evidence that there will be a significant market for iPads and other tablet devices. The combination of the app store and a device that can provide different services appears to be creating another niche in the marketplace.

Max Pfennighaus said on 16 Mar, 2010 at 5:53 PM
I completely agree. Speaking for myself (and my clients), I just can’t justify building program components for something I only *hope* will be a game-changer. But I will be keeping an eye on it.

-Max

John Cass said on 12 Mar, 2010 at 5:46 PM
Hi Max, thanks for your comment. I think a position on the iPad all depends upon your audience and your client's audiences. If you believe they will use an iPad, it's time to start thinking about creating content for an iPad.

Max Pfennighaus said on 12 Mar, 2010 at 4:13 PM
You nailed it. Speaking of landscape assessment, I'm curious about your position on the iPad. I've written a little bit about it myself, but I'm wondering how much you think we should be worrying about it. Thanks for a great post.

My two cents:
http://notstoppingbelieving.com/2010/03/no-ipad-for-me/


Max Pfennighaus
ACD Interactive, ISM

@mxpf
http://notstoppingbelieving.com
http://ismboston.blogspot.com

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