Content marketing is not a “do once and then forget” activity. Content marketing is like building a habit. To build a content marketing habit requires three simple and effective steps:

1. Identify your goals and objectives

Content such be aimed at fulfilling a business objective. Common objectives are:

• Increase visitor engagement
• Increase leads
• Increase awareness of your brand
• Increase sales
• Increase website visitors
• Increase customer loyalty and retention
• Improve rankings in search engines

Any content that is written for your website needs to fulfil one or more of your objectives.

2. Identify customer groups

You need to consider at whom who your content is targeted. Determine what your existing customers have in common. What do they want to know? Where can they be found on social media? What style or tone suites your audience? To what social and income group do they belong?

Create a detailed profile of your average customer and write content for that profile. Depending on your business sector, you may need to target more than one group. Your low value products may be aimed at a different customer than your expensive high end ones.

3. Evaluate

After you have made your objectives clear, and identified your audience, it helps to evaluate every piece of content.

Did your content achieve its objective? Did it engage your audience? Did they take action?

The success of most objectives can be measured accurately. For example, you can compare sales figures, search engine rankings and number of website visitors before content was added, and afterwards to see how effective it was. Obviously some objectives such as sales can be affected by more factors than web content so this needs to be taken into account.

By regularly examining your objectives, adding fresh website content and evaluating the content’s effectiveness, you will build an effective content marketing habit.

Sarah