Achieve Your OKRs Faster with a Smart Content Strategy

If you write great content and no one reads it, does it actually exist? 

In terms of business success, not really. Even the best content matters little if you can’t align it with your business goals, or position it in the context of all the other content you’re planning, creating, and publishing. 

When great content aligns with business objectives and lives within a greater content marketing strategy framework, it can deliver incredible impact. But all three of those pillars (content, business objectives, and content strategy) need to align, especially if your business and marketing strategy live within an OKR framework.

If you’re unfamiliar with the acronym, OKR is short for Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting framework to make sure anything your business or team spends time on has a measurable impact on achieving its goals. It sets general objectives and then defines the exact metrics that show progress towards achieving them.

For example, your marketing team may set a goal of optimizing your website for organic search. Potential key results tied to the objective would be increasing the volume of ranked keywords by X%, increasing domain authority by X points, and increasing organic search traffic by 20% over the next six months.

When it comes to marketing, your content marketing strategy has an important role to play. Content marketing impacts almost every piece of your marketing efforts from SEO to increasing credibility, creating more leads, retaining more customers, and even engaging more employees. 

So, if you’re looking to achieve your OKRs, your content marketing strategy should be a central part of your efforts. Once you begin to rethink your content creation, you might be shocked by the results you get.

Why Content Strategy is Key to Achieving OKRs

Let’s start with the basics. Content is anyway you communicate with your customers. When we talk about “content strategy,” here’s how one expert defines it:

A content strategy is an organization-wide approach to content creation. It’s dictated by organizational goals, objectives, and resources. The right content for the wrong purpose won’t drive consistent results. Further, a strategy should incorporate a service level agreement (SLA) across departments. To succeed, you need to have ‌buy-in from different groups and subject matter experts across the organization.

At its best, a content marketing strategy solves multiple business needs through a systematic approach of auditing existing content, building a framework of new content that aligns with these objectives, actual content creation, and measuring the impact of that content to improve the strategy over time.

Content creation without the larger business in mind is not a strategy. Neither is a comprehensive framework that creates a web of content across channels, but without keeping larger business objectives in mind.

Another definition, this one coming from the Content Marketing Institute:

“At its core, your content marketing strategy is your “why.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. Organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and to achieve at least one of these profitable results: increased revenue, lower costs, or better customers.”

Separating Strategy and Tactics in Your Content Marketing

Anyone working in content marketing will be involved in the tactics of content creation at least on some level. But here’s one thing you cannot forget: every tactical effort within your content marketing has to live within an overarching strategy framework.

Think of this framework as the foundation of everything you work on. It defines not only the goals of your content marketing but also the audience you’re trying to reach. You might even want to include components like the tone and voice with which you’ll talk to those audiences. In other words, it’s the reference you use that all content you create layers up to.

The tactics of content marketing, on the other hand, represent the execution of that strategy. It’s the writing, designing, scheduling, and measuring of your efforts. 

How Content Strategy Can Tie Directly to Your OKRs

Together, your content marketing strategy and tactics can be the key to achieving your OKRs. For example:

• You can increase your brand awareness and visibility through SEO-optimized content that pops up prominently in search results.
• You can enhance your lead generation by making a strong case for gathering contact info, using gated content like whitepapers, guides, and webinars.
• You can improve your customer engagement by providing educational content that customers can use as a resource in their work and daily life.

Put differently: once you set OKRs, you can define a content strategy specifically to help you reach those objectives. And once you do, the benefits for your marketing efforts and overall business can be pretty immense.

The Benefit of Aligning Your Content Strategy with Your OKRs

You need a content strategy, and should have OKRs. The magic happens when you combine the two. In fact, the benefits of building a content marketing strategy that aligns directly with your OKRs range far and wide:

• You ensure clarity and focus by aligning all of your content efforts with strategic objectives. That means everything you do, from creating content to scheduling different content on different channels for different audience segments, is focused on what matters most to your marketing and business goals.
• You ensure accountability for all of your content efforts. When a piece doesn’t perform, or even when someone creates content consistently that doesn’t align with your business objectives, you’ll know about it. This accountability ultimately ensures that everyone rows in the same direction on the efforts to create content that helps your business.
• You ensure better team productivity. When content and marketing team members no longer have to worry about tasks that don’t have a tangible impact, they can focus their time where it matters most. As a result, they’re more productive, benefiting from a more streamlined and cohesive approach.
• You ensure a measurable impact of your content efforts. That means maximizing your ability to track improvements in areas like lead generation, customer conversions, and employee engagement that ultimately help your business grow and succeed.
• You ensure better collaboration within your content and marketing teams. If everyone knows what they’re working towards, they’ll be able to work together more easily—not just within marketing, but in all areas of the organization that your content may touch.
• You ensure better adaptability for potential market changes. Regular review and updates of your OKR can lead to direct enhancements and adjustments of your content marketing strategy. This increased agility can help you adapt more quickly to dynamic conditions, like changing audience preferences or new competitors crowding the market.

A great content strategy defines its relationship to your OKRs at every turn. Once it does, everyone in the business benefits. 

But that’s just theoretical. Let’s talk about how you can make sure that any attempt at strategic content creation plays a central role in achieving your OKRs.

6 Steps to Develop a Smart Content Strategy for OKRs

Time to get specific. Building an effective content marketing strategy takes work, especially if it needs to align with your OKRs for the best possible outcomes. Once you break that work into specific steps, it becomes a roadmap that every business can follow to success.

1. Define Clear Content Goals

Every strategy starts with goals, and a content marketing strategy is no different. The good news: if your marketing team follows the OKR framework, a lot of those general goals are already in place.

In that case, it’s just about the specific OKRs that your content strategy can help you achieve. For example, you may want to create content that increases your website traffic or decreases your churn rate. Or, you may want your strategy to play a significant role in generating more leads for your business.

Don’t have OKRs set up that you can relate to content? Look again—chances are you can make some connection. But you can also set up OKRs that create that closer alignment. This guide on setting up OKRs can help you get started. 

2. Understand Your Audience

With your goals in place, it’s time to define who you’re writing or creating content for. A clear definition of your audience can help every part of executing your content strategy, from knowing what channels you want to target to your writing style and measuring success.

Most importantly, it also helps you focus your content on solving the needs of your audience. Through persona research, you can create profiles of your target audience that go beyond demographics. The result: a better idea of what their needs are, along with the different ways in which your content can address them. 

3. Run a Content Audit

Chances are you’re not starting from scratch. You’ll have troves of existing content already in place, from social media to blog posts, landing pages, and beyond. That content isn’t automatically bad; through a content audit, you can understand what you have already and what to do with it, noting:

• Low-hanging fruit of existing content that’s close to helping you achieve your goals, requiring just a few tweaks in keywords or a slight content refresh.
• Potential gaps in your content marketing, like audience needs that remain unsolved and that new content may be able to fill.
• A strong idea of what’s working and what’s not working for your audience, leading to insights that you can use when you create content in the future.

Running a content audit takes time, but it’s worth your efforts. The insights you get can inform every step of your content strategy going forward.

4. Map Your Content to OKRs

With a clear understanding of your existing content, start building a roadmap for new content you might want to create. These are the blog posts, sales enablement resources, conversion-driven landing pages, social media content, and any other item that can help you achieve marketing and business success.

That last part is key. For each new piece of content you brainstorm and create, make sure that it ties directly to at least one of your OKRs. That way, as you move from content creation toward measurement, you always know what you’re tracking against and how you can reliably define success.

5. Optimize Your Content for Searchability

No matter how you slice it, search engine optimization will always be a core part of successful content marketing. Especially when you optimize your content for brand awareness or visibility, you need to make sure your audience can easily find it online—or come across it when they search for answers about the general topic.

That means strategically inserting keywords and phrases your audience will use on Google throughout your content. It also means ensuring that your metadata, like your meta description and ALT text, is up to snuff in terms of both keywords and accuracy. And, because search engines are pickier these days, your content needs to be easy to read and skim for both their crawler programs and your human audience.

Full search content optimization is too complex of a topic to cover here. This SEO guide by the experts at ahrefs offers a great deep dive for any content creator with 20 minutes to spend.

6. Track Your OKR Progress With Relevant Metrics

Finally, even the most well-intended effort to create content only matters if you can tie your content marketing back to your OKRs when it’s all said and done. Start with identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow you to track how your efforts are working. Common KPIs in content marketing strategy include (but are not limited to):

• Total content views
• Social shares
• Lead conversions directly from the content
• Inbound links
• Ranked keywords
• Average time on page
• Bounce rate

Say it with us: the key to finding the right KPIs is their alignment with your OKRs. Spelled out: the key to finding the right Key Performance Indicators is their alignment with your Objectives and Key Results. Track the metrics most able to help you show progress toward the objectives you’ve defined. If your content management system cannot track these metrics internally, external software like Google Analytics can help.

Smart Applications of Content Strategy Across Business Functions

Get your content strategy right, and it becomes more than just a marketing function. Instead, it begins to apply across your entire business, creating a true full-funnel opportunity to effectively reach and convince audiences.

Content Strategy in Marketing

Most of what we’ve discussed in this guide is directly connected to your marketing success. You can use content to create more optimized campaigns, driving engagement while contributing to goals central to your marketing and sales goals. Pull it all together under a consistent strategy, and your entire sales funnel benefits. 

For example, a webinar on a topic related to your industry and target audience can become a centerpiece of your content marketing strategy. You can use nuggets from it for top-of-funnel efforts on social media. Longer excerpts can form the basis of an SEO-optimized blog post, while the webinar itself (gated behind a sign-up form) drives new leads. For existing leads, the webinar may be a way to stay engaged while they make a buying decision.

Content Strategy in Sales Enablement

As your audience gets closer to the sale, content can continue to play a central role in closing the deal. Case studies offer social proof, a heuristic (or shortcut) humans use when making decisions. Explainer videos can help sales teams illustrate a solution that’s difficult to explain in words.

For this last part of the funnel, content can become a powerful aid for any sales team. Especially if long-form, well-developed resources become an extension and part of your final pitch, ensuring that potential customers have all the information they need to pull the trigger on the purchase.

Content Strategy in Customer Service

Don’t limit your imagination to lead and sales enablement, though. Once prospects become customers, they can still benefit from content that helps them use your product and build trust with your brand.

The key at this stage is improving customer experience. For example, self-service resources like a knowledgebase not only reduce the burden for your customer service team but also put useful information at your customers’ fingertips. Other content, like an industry newsletter, continues building your brand as a credible resource that offers value-added services beyond your core value proposition.

Content Strategy in Employee Engagement Efforts

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of content marketing in engaging your own employees. Through consistent internal communication, you can drive clarity about your organization and collaboration across your teams. Aligned with your OKRs, engagement-driven employee content marketing can include company news, training materials, employee success stories, messages from leadership, and more.

3 Examples of Successful Content Strategies

Finding examples of great content strategies is difficult, for perhaps obvious reasons: it’s what happens in the background. Good design is invisible, as the saying goes, and most brands won’t share their secret sauce to consistently great, goal-driven content. To find those examples, you have to judge the tactics and see the connections. But once you do, one thing becomes clear: some of the biggest brands in the world have made massive inroads in this arena.

• LEGO’s content marketing strategy revolves around both storytelling and user-generated content. The goal: showcasing and fostering the creativity that building with the world-famous bricks can instill. Videos, tutorials for existing customers, and contests designed to find new LEGO sets all play a role in generating excitement, increasing sales, and deepening loyalty.
• Beauty retailer Sephora focuses its strategy around educational content. A large focus on social media makes it easy for future customers to discover the brand, makes sense for a visual medium like makeup, and makes the most of its products once a customer decides to purchase.
• Apple might be most famous for its iconic commercials, but its content marketing efforts are just as significant. Once again, user-generated content takes center stage as the brand looks to leverage its strong brand loyalty. But it’s also made a habit of using its online newsroom for more than media outlets, creating excitement through new releases or new ways to use existing features.

In every industry, brands at the top of the food chain are using content strategies to get ahead. It’s just about finding a strategy that works for your business (and your OKRs) to see similar benefits.

5 Practical Tips to Refine Your Content Strategy Efforts

Even as you execute a strategy that you know aligns with your OKRs, following the examples of some of the best in the business, you can continue to improve. These tips will help you go from good to great as you look to refine and maximize the return on your content investment:

• Mix timely and evergreen content. Only focusing on new trends and developments that become outdated is not sustainable long-term. Consider mixing in content that will be just as relevant a year or two down the road, forming the backbone of your content plan with more of-the-moment content filling in the gaps.
• Keep your content adaptable. Once you publish your content, your job is not done. Initial metrics may show that your audience is not engaging with it, or looking for slightly different keywords. Adaptable content helps you adjust and based on the data.
• Test different formats and channels. Don’t guess whether your audience prefers specific social media channels or video over static images. Instead, let data drive your decision-making by testing different approaches seeing which of them perform best against your content KPIs.
• Take full advantage of emotional pull. There’s a reason humans are drawn to storytelling. Even in business-to-business environments, emotion can sell. So while statistics and objective research are important, making an emotional connection to your audience through stories, testimonials, and your company’s personal history is important too.
• Balance creativity with science. Any marketing effort can only be great with a healthy mix of creativity and data-driven content creation. Use your performance analytics to inform that creation, but don’t be afraid to think outside the box as you look to engage your audience. (We recommend the book Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by podcast guest Rory Sutherland for more on this.)

Above all, keep a continuous improvement mindset. There will always be something to tweak, improve, and adjust to make sure you’re reaching, engaging, and converting your audience as effectively as possible.

Create an OKR-Aligned Content Strategy With Verblio Plus

If a 3,000-word guide hasn’t made it obvious, creating a successful content strategy is a lot of work. Many businesses decide that juggling SEO and content isn’t worth the hassle, and simply do nothing. That’s a missed opportunity for growth. 

Get it right, and content can play a massive role in helping you achieve your OKRs in marketing, sales, customer service, and even employee engagement. Get it wrong, and you’ll have spent significant time and resources with little to nothing to show for it. Do nothing, and your competitors will step in and grab your audience.

We created Verblio Plus for businesses of all sizes and maturity who want an end-to-end partner for SEO and content. We’ll help you take a strategic approach to content marketing through a site audit, competitive analysis, and comprehensive SEO plan that we then execute and optimize over time to drive measurable results for your business. No matter where your marketing is now, we can seamlessly integrate into your process and drive results that help you grow. Book a call today to learn more.