Stephanie Donelson

Content marketing isn’t going anywhere.

We like content marketing. We crave content. We want things to read, watch, or listen to. Brands that say they don’t do content marketing are either just bad at it or don’t care about their prospects or customers.

But, like anything in business, content marketing needs to have goals. You can’t do it just to say you did it.

If you’re figuring out what kind of goals to set for your content marketing efforts, these four ideas can help get you started and figure out what marketing metrics to track to measure your success in achieving your goal.

4 content marketing goals to add to your strategy

Generate leads

Brand awareness and lead generation should be at the top of your list for you content marketing goals. Content marketing is typically treated as an inbound tactic and when people are searching for content just like yours, the goal should be to turn them into a lead with a gated piece of content or opportunity to learn more through email marketing.

How to track:

• Website conversions (contact sales, demo requests, etc.)
• New traffic to site
• Email subscribers
• MQL/MEL/SQLs or new names added to the marketable database
• Marketing pipeline

Improve the sales process

Whether you’re creating content to help shorten sales cycle, help sales reps overcome objections, or reduce lost deals – sales-related goals are very important to your business and your content marketing strategy. These goals are easy to track and measure but do require joint effort between marketing and sales to understand what moves the needle in improving performance.

How to track:

• MQLs to closed deals
• Marketing pipeline won
• Time on site
• Gated content downloads
• View time of product videos

Foster brand loyalty

Once you’ve closed the deal, it’s time to turn a customer into a brand advocate and increase customer lifetime value. It’s easier to keep a customer, and is more profitable, than always going after new customers. Brand loyalty content marketing goals focus on customer education and user-generated content that proves the value or benefits of your product or service.

How to track:

• Repeat purchases/customer LTV
• Returning visitors to site
• Backlinks
• Engagement (time on site, pages per session, bounce rate)
• Case studies/customer testimonials created
• Product reviews
• Social followers
• Number of user-generated content created

Become a thought leader

Like building brand loyalty and generating leads, it’s important for brands to be seen as thought leaders and driving change instead of just falling in line with it. People look to innovators in different spaces to take charge, have a strong opinion, and grow their brand. Consumers trust thought leaders and want to be a part of the community those leaders are in.

How to track:

• Backlinks/third-party referrals
• Social referrals
• Engagement
• Email subscribers
• Social followers

There’s no wrong way to set content marketing goals as long as you know what you’re trying to achieve. Chances are you’re already working toward some of these goals already and just need to formalize your strategy and goals to explain the value of content marketing to your wider organization.

What other types of content marketing goals do you set for your team or department? Tell me in the comments below!