When a new client comes to our company asking to us deliver “some content marketing,” one of the very first questions we ask is, “Why? What is it you want to achieve?” And we develop a program around those goals. Every customer has different objectives. Some want better search engine results. Some want more visitors to their website. Others want more engagement on Twitter. Still others just want to improve their online reputation because they are planning to sell their company and they need to establish a larger online presence in order to support a higher price. And, if you drill down to the “whys” of the matter, you will probably find that a company’s goals relate to expanding the number of prospects and customers they have, supporting the purchasing process and strengthening relationships with a community.

What’s more, every answer should, in most cases, ultimately relate to the fact that we are trying to make money here. What’s the impact of all this content marketing noise on the bottom line? I invite you to be wary of the marketing world to some extent: marketers usually love this stuff. We love the processes and we love the elegance of the digital world. We love website development and we love building communities. A lot of us love metrics and a lot of us love words, images and audio clips.

We are enchanted by consumer behaviour and we are intrigued by where marketing is going. There are whole magazines that follow the careers of up and comers in the marketing world. We are immersed in the actions we take and the knowledge we have. But if we can’t keep the end dollars in mind, we shouldn’t play this game. At the end of the day, for most Business-to-Business (BtoB)—and most Business-to-Consumer (BtoC) businesses, content marketing is about making money. In some cases, such as with organizations that have charitable objectives, it might be about influencing behaviour. But there still need to be goals that relate to measurable results. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

We’ll look at what to measure in our next blog in this series.