You've done all the hard work of creating a website including researching your audience, implementing mobile-friendly features like responsive web design, and thoughtful navigation. Now you're ready to jump in and start filling up your blog.

To make the most of content marketing, business owners must do more than just push a lot of information out onto the web. Instead, each piece must be created and distributed with a specific goal in mind. Before you set goals for your content, it's helpful to understand the common goals that content can achieve.

1. Brand Awareness

Unless your brand is already a household name, building brand awareness is probably on your list of marketing goals. High-quality content such as blogs, videos, and graphics that speak to the needs of your customers will help people find out who you are while they are trying to solve their problems.

2. Brand Loyalty

Loyal customers are the highest achievement for most businesses. Content will help you get there by giving you a place to establish trust and build relationships outside of the sales process. By answering questions and being helpful, your customers will learn to turn to you for answers and your name will be top-of-mind when it's time to make a purchase.

3. Thought Leadership

Content provides you with an opportunity to showcase yourself as a leader in your industry. When people start to think of you as the go-to source for a topic, product, or service, you'll gain traction on the competition while collecting more customers for yourself.

4. Education

While your customer service team is surely happy to help your customers in every way, some people prefer to seek answers on their own. Your content can be a great source of educational material for current and potential customers. To build a list of topics, check in with your staff and find out which questions seem to come up the most, and then develop content around these issues.

5. Removing Roadblocks

Customers will run into roadblocks at various stages of the buying process that could prevent them from completing the sale. Content is the perfect vehicle for addressing these pain points to nudge the buyer along. Consider text and photo posts that offer how-to information, videos that show how others use products and services, infographics full of statistics, social proof to boost confidence, and customer reviews and testimonials.

Make Content Work for You

Whether you're hosting the content yourself on your blog, or you're posting content to your social media feeds or other web assets, you want your content to work for you. When your content is educational, entertaining, and helpful and written with your customers' needs in mind, you'll achieve the best results.