Pie In The Sky Goals

Hey Contentlandian,

I was trying to plot a course for our next journey when I realized that the destination didn’t make sense. It was wayyyy up in the sky. It also smelled thickly of pie.

Sure, it’s fun in the clouds, but we really don’t have the means to get there. Our unicorns don’t fly and Pegasus was lost to this world a long time ago.

Okay, I’ll stop playing around with the metaphors because I want to be really clear here:

If you’re going to set goals for your content, you need to make sure that you can actually reach them.

(Gasp) Shocker, right?

It seems like the most obvious statement, but I come across this all the time — companies setting unattainable marketing goals that don’t correlate to their capacity, budget, and resources.

But is this really something we can fix when those goals sometimes come from the lords above rather than the marketing team itself? A perilous quandary for sure… Let’s explore.

The recipe for disastrous pie-in-the-sky

Imagine yourself in the same situation as this client whose goals were as follows:

• Balance inbound and outbound leads to be 50/50% (they had 100% outbound leads at the time)

• 5x inbound traffic

And their resources were:

• Just one in-house marketer who was new to the position and did not have the time/ capacity to review a bunch of fresh content, let alone do all the work behind the scenes to publish it on their CMS.

Their budget:

• 15K per quarter

The only reasonable strategy involved fixing the back end of their website first, updating all of their old content, and repurposing existing resources. The plan was to only create one new resource for the quarter.

That’s really the only way to meet such a lofty goal without producing a ton of fresh content on a consistent basis.

The problem with this:

They didn’t consider their resources, capacity, and budget before they set the goals. It meant setting unattainable goals (in relation to the content they wanted to produce).

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Plotting the course to attainable pie

(P.S… I know a lot of you are in companies with CEOs and boards of directors that like to be more involved with the direction of marketing than in other companies, and will often set the goals and initiatives for you. I’m sorry to say that this exercise may not be for you, unless you can yank the steering wheel back)

There isn’t one set way of developing your goals:

1. You could start with the strategy first and then determine your goals.

2. Or determine your goals and then build the strategy.

Paving the road before deciding on a destination

This method makes the most sense if:

• You have specific initiatives you want to tackle in the next quarter/ year

• You have already worked out your capacity and capabilities, so that’s determining most of your strategy.

Say, for instance, that you know next year you want to kick off a newsletter and a podcast. You’re also going to continue blogging at your regular cadence of 4 articles per month, and you’ll continue to do 5 LinkedIn posts per week.

You already know that you can’t take on more than that. You’re a small, potentially even solo marketing team and your capacity for more creation is rather low. Your budget is also the same as it’s always been, so you can’t hire any freelancers or in-house employees.

But you know you can take on this new content because you’re reshaping your content production engine to get more alignment and reduce the pressure to create something new for all of those channels.

Your strategy will look a little something like this:

Podcast> Newsletter>2-4 articles>10-20 social posts

AKA you use your podcast as a pillar and break it down into 2-4 weeks of content for other channels (repurposing… as they say).

In that case, you can be a little looser with our content goals.

They can be as simple as:

• Increase brand awareness

• Increase engagement

• Increase conversions

Or more targeted:

• Grow LinkedIn following by 10% each month

• Increase conversions from the blog by 50%

• Increase demo signups by 20%

and so on…

Deciding on a destination before the journey

This method makes the most sense when:

• You’re still trying to figure out what channels and avenues of marketing you’re going to pursue

• You have a larger budget

• You have the ability to hire an agency or freelancers to fill in some gaps

• You have more control over your initiatives

At the start of this episode, I shared a client’s goals, resources, and budget, and then the resulting content strategy.

In that case, they’d decided on the goals and had an idea of the type of content they wanted our team to create (their focus was largely on direct response email sequences and one larger piece of content per quarter.

However, they hadn’t considered how attainable those goals were.

They figured that, because they were outsourcing the content production, that their in-house capacity wouldn’t have an impact on output.

That their budget was enough to reach such goals.

Not to say that the budget wasn’t enough or that their goals were impossible to reach because we were able to create a strategy to fit the goals.

As mentioned, the strategy looked a lot like this:

Fix the website’s SEO > update the 100 existing blog pages > massive interlinking campaign > repurposing existing content > one new asset per quarter > heavy distribution

AKA you use what you have instead of coming up with a bunch of new stuff, make smart SEO moves, and play on distribution.

In that specific case, we remember that their goals are:

• 5x organic traffic to the site

• Get an even split of 50/50% between inbound and outbound leads

But you don't necessarily see the parallels just looking at those goals and the outcome. How do we get there, right?

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Considering road conditions and the snacks you might need to bring

If you were about to take a road trip to the most epic pie bakery in the country, and you know it’s a long journey through several states in the middle of winter… aren’t you going to consider:

• Road conditions

• How long the journey is/ how many stops you’ll need to take

• How much gas you’ll need

And on and on…

Even if you didn’t know where you were going, you’d want to make sure you’d have everything in your truck for every road condition, weather, length… and you’d make sure you have a good amount of cash on hand too.

In other words, whether you choose your goals before or after you set your strategy, you need to consider all the conditions:

• Budget

• Amount of existing content

• Your site’s SEO/ usability health

• Your content partners (do you work with other companies to create content?)

• Availability of writers (do you work with someone in-house? A freelancer? An agency?)

• Your time capacity to review and post any content you create

• Any initiatives/ experiments you want to try or are being asked to perform in the new year or quarter

• Customer insights

• Product updates and releases

• Attribution data for any past and ongoing marketing initiatives

Before you can even set your goals.

If you don’t consider the above, you might have to search for Pegasus before you can reach that pie.

The Pie Stash

🦄 Want to get a content strategy that matches your goals? Get a 1:1 with me.
🦄 Get those audience insights before you set your goals and strategy
🦄 The tool I use to write this newsletter

Should I write more about insights? Or would you rather hear about how to apply them? Right now, we’re on the path to turning insights into a real, fire-breathing content strategy.

See you on the next leg of this journey!

Your Contentlandia Mayor and tour guide,

Sarah (Colley) Taslik

(p.s… I only recently changed my name, in case you’re wondering why there’s flip-flopping. I’m still getting used to it).