The only content marketing resolution you need to make this year

“If your aim is foggy, your content marketing efforts will stumble.”

First, a confession. I don’t like New Year’s resolutions. I don’t find them helpful, and I don’t think they work. If something needs to change in your life, then don’t wait until January 1st to do it, and don’t set yourself up for failure by going about it the wrong way. 

I admit it, if there’s a Scrooge equivalent for all the New Year hoohah, it’s me. It’s dispiriting enough in an ordinary year to feel like you’ve messed up by January 15th, just because you’ve made yourself some unrealistic and unhelpful new rules to live by. No one needs that right now.

But I am a big fan of making powerful and sustainable changes in your life and your business, whatever the date on the calendar. So if you do want to make 2021 the year that your business writing really takes off, here’s the only resolution you need to make.

Get clear on your goal

If your aim is foggy, your content marketing efforts will stumble. It’s easy to get caught up in tactics - I’ll write a six blogs a month, I’ll make the newsletter weekly not monthly, I’ll start a podcast - rather than being really specific about the goal you want to reach. 

What do you want your writing to achieve for you? Four new clients by April? A sold out event in September? Three big projects to carry you through the year? To increase the life time value of existing clients? To recruit fantastic new staff? To be able to ditch a client you don’t like working with and replace them with someone new and better? 

There are an infinite number of reasons why you might want to refocus your marketing, but knowing yours inside out is the key to putting together an effective content marketing strategy that you’ll be happy to implement. 

Once you’ve outlined your goal, drill down even deeper. Say your goal is ‘four new clients by April.’  Why do you want them? If it’s to hit financial targets, how will you feel when you reach them? Relieved? Proud? Relaxed? What will you be able to do differently? How will you reward yourself? 

Spending some time thinking about why these targets matter, and how they will change your life for the better is useful. It will help you keep to the work entailed in hitting them, in just the same way that focusing on the amazing feeling you’d have finishing your first 10k event is a better motivator than ‘exercise more’ if you want to build running into your life. You’re more likely to pull on your trainers on a dark damp mid January morning if you’re really focused on why you’re doing it, than if your goal is ambiguous. And you’ll be more motivated to make time to write that blog or record that webinar or get the newsletter out on time if the results you seek feel tangible and they really matter to you. 

Get clarity on your target

So you’re clear on exactly what you want to achieve, and why you want to achieve it. You’ve made it feel real by imagining the results, and you’re emotionally invested in making it happen. What now?

Now switch your attention to the target. So you want four new clients by April, or ten new clients by the end of the year, or fifty clients to sign up for your new programme. What kind of people and what do you want them to buy from you? Where are they? Do they know about you already or do you need to make them aware of you for the first time? What’s going on in their world that makes them interested in what you’re offering? What challenges are they wrestling with that you can help with? The more specific you can be, the better. 

For example, it might be that a couple of your new ideal clients are already on your radar, maybe you’ve worked with before, or you know them through networking. They don’t need ‘awareness raising’ marketing, so you might decide to create an individual plan for them. Or you might decide to ring them up, or meet for a virtual coffee. 

Having clarity on who your ideal clients are, and what they’re struggling with will help you create a strategy to attract and engage them. For example, a series of free webinars could be a good way to attract people to your new online programme, but it might not be the best way of engaging new clients to your branding design agency. 

Knowing exactly who you want to attract will help you plan and create the content you need. There is no all purpose content strategy that fits every scenario.

A target of five new high paying retained clients by June may well call for some really high quality creative content that showcases your expertise and your unconventional approach. Something that LinkedIn will love, and the right people will share. Or an exclusive event where your ideal clients will learn something fantastically useful and get to know you and your business better.

But a different target, say a steady stream of clients for your family law firm, might warrant an investment in video to help people get over that ‘getting to know you hurdle’, or a series of accessible guides which are easy to share and super helpful for referrals.

Keep on keeping on

Whatever your strategy, and whatever tactics you’ve chosen to help you achieve it, there will come a time when you just have to do the work. Life will get busy, client work will encroach, there will always be other demands on your time. That’s where making the goal setting as vivid as possible really helps. Keep working towards the change you want to see. Put one word in front of another and keep going!

If you’d like my help with your content marketing strategy, check out my Strategic Marketing Reboot.