Content is King. Or so they say. The truth is content on it’s own is just a wandering prince. It’s when you give that prince direction, a purpose and a clear route that content in fact becomes a king.

There’s no secret recipe or trick to writing goal oriented content. Writing is a process that you get better at over time. The more you put your writing out there the more you will learn.

Having said that, everyone loves a shortcut. We’re here to give it to you.

What is Goal Oriented Content?

Goal oriented content is content which has a clear and concise purpose. Just like any other venture whether it be product development or engineering or medical research, content development needs a goal. It needs a purpose to make it worth your while.

Let’s take this blog for example. 

This blog is being written with the clear purpose of explaining what goal oriented content is and how to implement it into your daily content work. You won’t find this blog diverging into points which don’t add value to the main purpose. If this blog wasn’t giving you a clear explanations of goal oriented content and how to implement it, you probably wouldn’t be reading it.

Now of course you don’t want to write a boring monotonous blog which puts the reader to sleep before they hit the 200 word mark. The trick is to stay focused on the goal while keeping an approachable tone. 

How to Write Goal Oriented Content

In order to keep your content focused on it’s goal, there are several simple steps you can follow.

Step 1: Determine the northstar metric for your client.

The northstar metric is simply the metric which focuses on what actually grows your company/project. It can be leads generated, sales, customers signed up, people reached or a plethora of other things.

To determine this you need to have thorough discussions with the client. You can perhaps have a questionnaire on hand which guides the discussion and captures the information you need to determine the northstar metric and the direction the client wants to take. As you work with clients you will find out what works best for you and your particular industry.

Some points to consider when trying to determine the northstar metric for a client.

• Find out how the client’s product delivers value to the customer
• Look for a metric which brings in revenue, reflects the value given to the customer and can be easily measured for progress
• Remember that the northstar metric is a long term tool during which time you will have smaller metrics that come and go
• The northstar metric generally won’t change for a very long period of time and thus must be a core value point for the customer in exchange for their money

Step 2: Create a plan/outline to give direction to your content.

Once you determine the northstar metric you want to plan out how the content you write will help achieve this northstar metric. This depends on the type of content you’re writing (website content, blogs, social media, SEO, articles etc.). This is the content strategizing step.

Here at ContentGuyz we like to create outlines for each type of content. These mini outlines keep our writing within borders and prevent us from going into content which doesn’t achieve that northstar metric. Your outline can contain anything you find relevant to creating that particular type of content. It can be topics, audience, metadata, content points or any number of aspects which are relevant to the content. 

Two things to consider before writing the content:

• Write up a plan beforehand which contains the  information mentioned above. Use this plan to keep your content in check and as an editing tool.
• Write the content first then draw up the plan and rewrite/edit your content to fit the plan. This allows for room to write creatively without those constraints holding you back.

You could of course go about writing the content without any planning involved but then your content would be that lonely, wandering prince we talked about earlier. 

Step 3: Measure for success.

This may be the scariest part and the most important part at the same time. 

It’s scary because nobody wants to write a bunch of content only to see that it fails. It’s important because, well, how else would you know how effective your content is?

There isn’t a set way to measure success. This depends on the type of content and what the northstar metric is. One of the most common ways to measure success for online businesses is the use of analytics tools like Google Analytics. However, you can also simply keep track of the number your north star metric focuses on. 

For example, if you were to write content for a website which hopes to have 100 people sign up for a new sporting event coming up, then your success could be determined by how many people actually sign up through this website. You would have to of course consider other factors that could have influenced these people.

This example is a short term project so it’s easy to track the northstar metric. For longer projects or companies looking to expand, analytics tools are practically a must as they can save large amounts of time and increase productivity drastically.

Improving over time

You won’t hit the nail on the head the first time. Probably not even the second or third time.

Finding out the northstar metric, drawing up a plan and measuring the success of your content is a process which you will develop over time. As you develop content, take note of what works and what doesn’t and implement it into your process.

There is no one size fits all solution but if you start implementing these practices into your writing, you will notice a difference in your very thought process while writing.

Contact us to find out how we can help your company grow rapidly through content.