Setting content marketing goals are crucial to tracking your content's performance and identifying the areas you’re doing well. Or can improve.
Just like with everything else, establishing measurable objectives that you want to accomplish with your content can help you achieve them.
What you will learn
- What a content marketing goal is and why they're crucial to your content's success
- The most important content marketing goals and why
- How to achieve your content marketing objectives
- The most relevant metrics to measure for each content marketing objective
What is a content marketing goal?
A content marketing goal is a specific objective that a business wants to achieve with its content marketing efforts, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving website traffic. The purpose of setting a goal for your content is to help track your progress and make sure your content strategy works.
The key to setting an effective content marketing goal is to ensure that it aligns with the overall objectives of your business.
Often you will find that a single goal doesn’t quite cover your needs. And you will likely want to set multiple objectives that cover different outcomes you want to see from your content efforts.
For example, if the goal of your content marketing strategy is to increase organic traffic to your website, you may set a goal to achieve a 10% increase in website visitors over the course of 3 months.
Most probably, you will also want to increase content ROI and the actions they take on your website.
Why are content marketing goals important?
Content marketing goals are important because they help you measure the success of your content marketing with clearly defined objectives. Measuring the results of your content marketing can help tell you which content types and channels to double down on, as well as areas you should cut your losses in.
Having clear goals help you track and report how well your content is working, enabling you to improve and tweak your content marketing strategy over time. Content marketing goals can also help you align with the following:
Align with business goals
By setting specific content marketing goals, you can make sure that the content you create and share fits with the company's overall marketing goals. This helps to ensure that your content marketing efforts are not in silos, but instead working towards larger business goals.
Create accountability
Establishing content marketing goals creates accountability for content marketers and other stakeholders involved in the process. When goals are set and tracked, it becomes easier to hold team members responsible for their actions and ensure that everyone is working towards a shared content marketing objective.
Set priorities
Content marketing goals can help your business prioritize content marketing campaigns that deliver results. This can help you avoid wasting money on content strategies that don't fit with the business's goals.
Bring clarity
Having a goal for your content can also help everyone involved in the content creation process, from the people making the content to the people in charge, see where they are going. Having clarity on what everyone is working towards can improve content management and collaboration.
8 content marketing goals to track
In a study by SEMrush, 70% of those who saw success with content marketing measured their content marketing ROI.
Knowing your content performance matters more so, if you have limited resources and a small team.
Devote a good chunk of your time to setting content objectives just like you do to creating high quality content for your audience. Here are the eight most important content marketing goals to track for your business.
Increase sales
The main goal of content marketing is to get people to buy your products and services.
While you shouldn't be pitching a sale in your content, the end goal of your content is to build enough credibility and trust with audiences, so they choose you when they're ready to become paying consumers.
Increasing revenue is critical to achieving growth, scaling operations, and achieving your financial objectives. But you’re already aware of that.
Content can help improve both, your sales pipeline and your bottomline.
While your product has to be the right fit for your users, content marketing can help convey its benefits to a wider audience. Poor sales can stem from low product demand, ineffective strategies, or a lack of brand awareness.
Along with building your sales funnel, creating content like comparisons and case studies that can help solution and product aware buyers make purchasing decisions is a crucial step in your content strategy.
Take Podia, for example, who has a comparison blog post for every alternative.
Promotions, such as discounts, bundle deals and loyalty programs can incentivize potential customers who need more convincing.
Apart from tracking your revenue, monitoring customer lifetime values, return on investment and conversion rates can also help understand how your content marketing efforts affect your sales and revenue.
Drive website traffic
If people aren't going to your website, it could be because they don't know about your brand or because your website isn't doing a good job of showing what you have to offer.
More website traffic will mean more opportunities to generate leads, make sales, and build brand awareness.
46 percent of content marketers mention driving website traffic as a key content marketing goal.
Without a steady flow of website visitors from organic search, your business will rely on paid acquisition methods to find new customers.
Website traffic can also be important as a search engine indicator to improve your search rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find your website when they are searching for products or services related to your business.
Using search engine optimization to make content hubs and establish topical authority can help you show up higher in search results and get more people to visit your website.
Viral Loops, for example, a referral marketing tool used keyword clusters to rank for over a thousand keywords in their niche.
You can attract and keep website visitors' attention by making useful content that answers their questions and solves the problems of your target audience.
Besides creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content for search engines, you can also attract visitors by promoting your content on social media, or partnering with influencers who have a strong online presence.
As a content goal, the most important metrics to track website traffic are the number of unique visitors, the number of pages viewed, and the average length of a session.
Increase brand awareness
One of the primary goals of content marketing is to increase brand awareness among your target audience.
If users aren't aware of your products and services on organic channels, you'll have a much harder time convincing them to be buyers.
When a consumer is deciding what to buy, brand awareness is one of the most important factors. Most people want to stick with brands they've heard of and are familiar with. Blogging can be an effective way to achieve brand awareness, by publishing articles that educate, inform, or entertain your audience through the customer journey.
So can video marketing, or social media content.
Businesses can get more people to know about their brands by putting out useful and informative content on channels that their target audience uses often. As people engage with your content, you'll gain their trust and credibility.
To measure brand awareness metrics, businesses should track monthly increases in new website visitors, social media reach and impressions, and email list growth.
Build thought leadership
Thought leadership can be a game changer for your brand.
Think about it; you’re more likely to trust and like the places you get your information from.
Those could be traditional industry and media websites, or Youtube. Perhaps even Tik Tok or Twitter depending on your industry.
And attention span, perhaps?
Seeking to become a thought leader can help you build credibility and authority in your field. This can help you attract and keep customers, set your brand apart from competitors, and grow your business.
Thought leadership can also help to create a positive reputation for your brand, making it more appealing to potential customers and driving profitable customer action.
Without thought leadership in your industry, your brand may struggle to stand out from the competition and gain credibility with potential customers.
Customers might not see your brand as an expert in its field, which could make them hesitant to buy from you and hurt your sales and growth.
By creating high-quality, informative content based on research into industry trends and customer pain points, content marketing can help you establish yourself as an industry expert for a clearly defined audience.
Publishing such content on your website, social media and multiple channels can help your brand's recognition as a reliable source of information and foster customer loyalty. Speaking at industry events or webinars can help position your brand as an authority in your industry as well.
For example, NFX, a venture firm for early stage startups, uses highly tactical blog posts and speaking events rich with actionable information, and data to share its expertise on building two-sided marketplaces.
There are several metrics that can be used to track thought leadership, including backlinks to your website, brand mentions in the digital world, and social media shares, and comments.
Improve search rankings
Poor search engine rankings can make it difficult for potential customers to find your website and can result in missed opportunities for your business.
What’s the point if your content can’t help interested folks find you?
Without visibility on search engine results pages, your brand may struggle to attract your target audience, and lag behind competitors in your industry.
Search engine rankings are important because they make your brand more visible and help people looking for relevant keywords find your website. The higher your website ranks on search engines like Google, the more likely it is that people will visit it.
SEO can be an effective way to achieve this goal by creating content that is optimized for relevant keywords. Using keyword research to uncover opportunities for keyword clusters can help you demonstrate topical authority for a niche.
UAV Coach, an online drone training company, used SEO strategies to rank an ultimate guide that brought in more than 21% of their total traffic by ranking first for "how to fly a quadcopter" and related queries.
By making your search engine rankings better, you can get more visitors and get your content in front of the people you want to see it.
The most important metrics to track search engine rankings are keyword and page rankings, and your click-through rate (CTR) in the SERPs.
Generate leads
Lead generation is essential for any business because it provides a steady stream of potential customers. By getting more leads into your content marketing funnel, you can build your sales pipeline, keep in touch with possible customers, and eventually make more sales.
Without a steady flow of leads, your sales pipeline may suffer, and your business may stagnate.
Organic channels, such as social media, blogs, and email marketing, are excellent ways to improve lead generation. You can attract potential customers and encourage them to take action by creating valuable content that engages your target audience.
This could be signing up for your newsletter, downloading a white paper, or requesting a demo.
Publishing e-books, white papers, webinars, and blog posts that provide solutions to your target audience's challenges and position your brand as a thought leader can be effective ways to achieve success with lead nurturing.
Free trials or consultations can be used as lead magnets to get people to give you their contact information and enter your lead pipeline.
For instance, Salesforce sends out an invitation to a trial to someone who is reading a technical article and is likely a target user.
Improving your lead generation can help increase your sales pipeline and overcome stagnating business growth. Your sales team will be thankful for the added support.
To measure lead generation goals, you should track the number of downloads, form submissions, and email opt-ins, as well as conversion and click-through rates for lead magnets.
Talking to your sales team to assess the quality of leads generated through your content marketing efforts can help you ensure that they are qualified for your business.
Build brand affinity
How much do your users like you? Do they like you at all?
With content marketing, you can build brand loyalty by making content that fits with the values and interests of your target audience.
When customers connect with your brand on an emotional level, they're more likely to stay loyal and become repeat customers.
To build a strong brand, it's important to improve brand loyalty and advocacy on organic channels.
Sharing your unique brand voice in blog posts, how-to guides, and case studies that are directly related to your target audience and reflect the values and personality of your brand can help you build a stronger connection with them.
Engaging with your followers through social media, comments and email marketing can help them see your brand's personality.
Webflow, for example, isn't shy to show some personality.
Brand loyalty can be increased by getting customers to share their experiences through user-generated content like social media posts and reviews.
Also, when customers become brand advocates, they will let others know, leading to increased brand awareness and sales.
Your net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction, customer retention rates, social media shares, and referral rates are all important ways to measure brand affinity.
Customer lifetime value can help you figure out how loyal and long-term your current customers are, and brand sentiment can show you how your audience sees your brand and where you can make improvements.
Increase conversion rates
The problem with poor conversion rates is that even if you have a lot of traffic on your website, if your visitors are not converting into customers, your efforts will not translate into revenue.
Conversion rates have a direct impact on your bottom line. A higher conversion rate means more customers and more revenue for your business.
The first step to improving your conversion rates is to make sure that your content is relevant to the needs, interests, and pain points of your audience.
Use calls-to-action (CTAs) in your content to get people to do things like sign up for a free trial, download a white paper, or make an appointment for a consultation.
Take Zapier's blogs for example. They often included direct calls to action within the body of the post itself, besides the invite to try Zapier in the sidebar.
By increasing your conversion rates, you can get more value out of your existing traffic and marketing efforts, and convert more qualified leads into paying customers.
The most important metrics to track for conversion rates are the number of visitors who took the desired action, pages per session, click-through rates, and of course, the conversion rate at each step itself.
These can help you identify areas for improvement in your content and refine your content strategy to achieve higher conversion rates.
Key takeaways
- You don't have to have a single content marketing goal. Most companies have multiple goals for their content marketing campaigns.
- Tracking content marketing goals is essential to determining if your content is performing well for current and potential customers, and to uncovering areas for improvement.
- During the buyer's journey, you should try to build credibility and trust while getting to know your readers better.
- The end goal of your content marketing is to turn your audience into customers who buy from you.
- Tracking relevant metrics associated with your content goals will help you understand if you're on track to achieving them, or where you need to improve.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a powerful strategy that can help businesses achieve their marketing objectives. However, in order to measure the success of your content marketing efforts, you must set specific content marketing goals and track relevant metrics.
Have you considered what your most important content marketing goal is or are?
