Chapter 10 Filling the Funnel with Content Marketing Goals: To support our company’s overarching revenue goal, we must attract new customers, foster stronger customer relationships, increase positive word of mouth, or increase inbound leads by the end of Q1. Objectives: To accomplish our goals, we must increase social media engagement by X%, and inbound website traffic by X% by Q1. We’ll do this by creating a comprehensive, customer-oriented online resource library. We will create and publish three blog posts per week, publish one case study per month, host one webinar per month, publish one e-book per quarter, and share all of the above through social media channels. Metrics: Increase inbound visits by X per month, generate X monthly social shares of blog content, X webinar registrants, and increase e-book downloads to X per month. Using KPIs will help ensure your goals are measurable and impactful. Then, when it comes time to review, the KPIs will provide you and the rest of your organization with quantitative evidence that your content plan is working and helping to improve your overall numbers. Identifying Your Target Audience Your target audience for content marketing goes beyond demographics, lifestyles, interests, geographic locations, education levels, and values of your existing and potential customers. Instead, successful content marketing requires a deep understanding of your audience’s needs. Without knowing what keeps your customers and prospects up at night, you might as well read your next blog post to a pickle jar. Answering the following questions will help you better understand the people you’re writing for, and will help inform the types of content you should create: • How does your audience seek information? • What challenges or problems are they trying to solve? • What are their dealbreakers, in other words, what are the definitive circumstances that could repel them from doing business with you? Or, what’s already keeping them from doing business with you?