How can you tell you’ve picked the wrong content marketing goals?

Think about what you’re trying to accomplish with your content plan. The top-of-mind outcomes you measure your productivity by.

Is productivity measured by activity? As in “Our goal is to create more ebooks, blogs, LinkedIn posts, webinar recordings, and videos.”

Or is productivity measured by outcomes? “Our goal is to increase sales and revenue by delivering unique insights to our ideal prospects.”

Neither of these goals is right or wrong. They exist on a continuum, from short-term sub-goals to long-term big picture outcomes.

The challenge with content marketing is that it’s too easy to hyper-focus on the trees and lose sight of the forest. Getting stuck following a default process (“post on LinkedIn every day”) that may or may not be the best way to achieve the real goal (“move more of our ideal prospects into the sales funnel”).

“We can get so fixated on a goal that we miss the bigger picture. And when we lock into a particular goal too quickly, we blind ourselves to alternate routes forward that might have been better and easier.”
(Dan Heath, Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working)

So, back to the original question: How can you tell you’ve picked the wrong goals for your content marketing?

Dan Heath offers a simple but effective approach: Ask yourself “What’s the goal of the goal?”

Imagine you’re planning your editorial calendar for the next six months. Typical questions you’re trying to answer may include…

• What topics should we write about?
• Should we focus on writing more articles or pivot to creating videos?
• What if we started a podcast?

These types of questions are all about deciding on which sub-goals to focus on. But are they the right ones? Who knows.

Without clearly identifying the goal of the goal, you won’t have the context needed to assess which sub-goals make sense and which don’t.

Going back to the examples above…

Start with the goal of the goal. (“Deliver unique insights and ideas to our ideal prospects.”)

Then go back and reframe each question based on that high-level goal.

• “What topics should we write about?” becomes “How can we discover what topics, questions, and challenges our ideal prospects are most curious about?”
• “Should we focus on writing more articles or pivot to creating videos?” becomes “How can we find out which content formats our ideal prospects prefer?”
• “What if we started a podcast?” becomes “Do our ideal prospects even listen to podcasts? If so, what formats do they find most interesting?”

Remember, there are no inherently right or wrong answers.

Only good or bad uses of your team’s time and energy.