Goals and Objectives

Purposeful content

Your content should aim to achieve two things: it should help your audience to complete a task, and also help your organisation to achieve a goal.

Content should always have a purpose.

When planning your content, it is a good idea to consider what the primary purpose is, which is likely to be one of the following:

• inspiring audiences about what we do and who we are
• providing audiences with information that they need
• supporting audiences to take an action, or get something done

However, it should also help the University to achieve a strategic goal, even if it is just part of a longer journey.

We can achieve this by establishing our goals and objectives, agreeing the best way to reach them, and designing our content to take our audiences on that path.

Establishing content goals

When planning your content, you should have a strong sense of the goals and objectives you want to achieve.

Goals are larger strategic aims that your organisation wants to achieve. These goals should be SMART, or Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

They should focus on impact, rather than quotas or outcomes.

For example, 'We want to increase the number of undergraduate student applications by 20% by 2030'

NOT

'We want to write 100 articles every month for the next year'.

Mapping out content objectives

Along the way, you should also map out objectives, which are smaller tasks that you need to tick off to help you get closer to your goal.

Your goals and objectives should align with the overarching goals of your organisation.

They should also help you prioritise content, based on whether it contributes to the goal or not.

Strong calls to action

A call to action is an invitation which encourages your audience to take the next step on their journey, aligned with your goals and objectives.

For example, 'enrol on this course' or 'book a visit'.

A compelling call to action motivates your audience to do something that helps them to achieve an aim or a task. It should also take them further on their journey with you.

Your audience should want to continue, and know why they’re doing it. Using 'click here' or 'next' as link text isn’t good enough.

Strong calls to action should:

• be enticing to the audience, and they should feel that taking that action benefits them
• match the energy and emotion the audience is currently feeling
• feel clear, dynamic, and give them a strong sense of what they’re doing next
• make your audience feel like they’re being taken on the next step of the journey
• appear in an appropriate medium or channel

Agreeing when your work is done

If you want your content to fulfil a need, you must establish a point where that need is met.

Establishing the success criteria for your content allows you to be clear about what you want it to achieve - and when you want it to stop.

For example, let’s say you are creating content for a prospective student. They want to learn more about the range and quality of our University accommodation.

• Is their task complete when they have read about the facilities and seen pictures and/or videos?
• Or is your work not done until you have encouraged them to reserve a specific room online?
• What if you want them to attend an open day to see them first-hand instead, or wait until they have been officially offered a place?

Before you start creating anything, you should clearly understand the scope of your content. You should know how far you want to take the audience, and where you want them to go next.

Reviewing your work

Measurement is a vital part of managing content. Once you publish your content, you need to return to it to make sure it is having the desired effect.

This is a key reason why we make our goals specific and measurable at the start. This way we know what we are measuring, and can get a sense of whether we are on track.

Read more in our section on Knowing if your content is working.