Content Marketing Goals & KPIs you Should Track

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The importance of Content Marketing Goals and KPIs

If you’re a blogger, a professional content marketer at a B2B or B2C firm and want to boost your Inbound Marketing Strategy, you need Content Marketing Goals and KPIs to know if your time and resources are well spent. 

What you write down, is where your attention flows.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you start writing down your goals, you think about them more often and you do slightly more your best to achieve those goals?

Next to keeping track of your time and resources are well spent, it’s also a great tool to motivate you to reach your goals for next the month(s).

In this post, we’ll be going over a couple of Content Marketing Goals and KPIs you should be tracking, how to set it up and we’ll provide you a Google Sheet Template so you can get started right away.

Our Content Marketing Goals Template lives within our Growth Storytelling Framework which helps you reach your goals faster.

This framework also includes your Strategy, Keyword research, On-Page SEO checklist, Storytelling framework, and more.

You can access it here for free.

No email signup is needed.

Content Marketing Goals and KPIs you should track

Your business is unique.

I get that.

That means that your goals and KPIs are also unique.

This guide and framework are to inspire you. It’s up to you to make it your own over time. It’s ok to start with just a couple of goals and KPIs if you’ve never done this before. It’s also ok to vastly expand upon what we provide you. You are in control.

Check out Challenges, Goals and Statistics from researches

To help you out, we’ve done our research to find out per discipline what other marketers are struggling with, with goals they set and tried to find statistics so you can benchmark performances. Check them out below:

• Digital Marketing challenges, goals and statistics;
• Content Creation challenges, goals and statistics;
• Social Media Marketing challenges, goals and statistics;
• YouTube Shorts Statistics.

Set up Content Marketing Goals that motivate you and feed the bottom line

You should start with the end when setting up your goals and KPIs.

What is it that you need to achieve?

If you’re ambitious, add 10% or 20% on top of that.

Then, think about how you can achieve that. Do you have previous data that can help you with your estimations? Do you know which channels have been successful?

Here’s an example of how you can set it up:

• I need $24,000 turnover by the end of the year;
• That means that I need to make $2,000 a month;
• I know that my email list has been our most successful channel;
• I need at least 24.000 email subscribers by the end of the year;
• That’s also 2.000 new subscribers a month;
• I know that SEO and Social Media Marketing have been the main drivers for new subscribers;
• I also know that Twitter and Instagram has been our most successful Social Media Channels;
• Every 10th visitor becomes an email subscriber;
• So I need about 240,000 visitors by the end of the year;
• That’s about 20,000 visitors a month;
• SEO brings in about 10,000 visitors a month;
• Social Media Marketing brings in about 1,000 visitors a month;
• So I need to grow at least 9,000 visitors this year and SEO and Social Media is going to be my main driver.

During this thought journey, there are multiple routes you could have taken.

The most important thing is to understand:

• Where do you need to be?
• What has been successful?
• What can you scale?
• Where do you need to invest time and resources?

Setting up your Content Marketing Goals and KPIs in our sheet

As you can see in the image above, we’ve already filled in a couple of possible goals and KPIs.

It’s up to you which ones you delete / add.

What you can also see is that we separated them in a couple of buckets:

• SEO
• Social Media
• E-mail marketing
• Revenue

This is also something you can expand. Maybe you’re big on Video Marketing. Maybe you’re getting a lot of traffic from Medium and Quora and what you prioritize and keep track of that. You name it.

You see that January and February are fully filled in with fictional numbers and that March only contains a couple of numbers.

The numbers of March the goals.

You can select which ones you want to pre-fill in and hope to nail and for how many months.

One month ahead or one quarter or the entire year?

On the right, you see two yellow columns.

One is for the actual numbers you’ve hit so far and the second is the goals.

You can also play around with the end goals of the year. See what works best for you.

Access the template here for free.

FAQ

What are common goals for content marketing?
Common goals include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, building customer loyalty, driving sales, improving customer engagement, and establishing thought leadership.

How does content marketing contribute to brand awareness?
Content marketing increases brand awareness by consistently providing valuable content to the audience, increasing visibility and recognition over time.

Can content marketing effectively generate leads?
Yes, content marketing can generate leads by offering valuable content that encourages users to provide their contact information, such as through gated content or sign-up forms.

What role does content marketing play in customer engagement?
Content marketing engages customers by providing relevant and interesting content, encouraging interaction, and fostering a connection with the brand.

How can content marketing drive sales?
Content marketing can drive sales by nurturing leads with informative and persuasive content, guiding them through the buyer’s journey toward making a purchase.

What is the significance of SEO in achieving content marketing goals?
SEO helps achieve content marketing goals by ensuring that content is discoverable in search engines, attracting organic traffic, and targeting the right audience.

Can content marketing be used to establish thought leadership?
Yes, by providing insightful, authoritative content, a brand can establish itself as a thought leader in its industry, building trust and credibility.

How do content marketing goals align with overall business objectives?
Content marketing goals should be aligned with business objectives by focusing on content that supports broader company goals like market expansion, customer retention, or revenue growth.

What metrics are used to measure content marketing success?
Key metrics include website traffic, engagement rates (like shares and comments), lead generation numbers, conversion rates, and ROI.

How important is consistency in achieving content marketing goals?
Consistency in the quality and frequency of content is crucial for maintaining audience interest, building brand presence, and steadily working towards long-term marketing goals.

Related articles

• Ultimate Guide to Content Creation
• Content Distribution Strategy
• How to come up with effective Content Ideas
• How to find the best Hashtags

Author bio:

Raul Tiru: Raul loves to build companies and help startups and scale-ups grow. Raul started his first website when he was 17 years old, has held several growth marketing positions in fast-growing companies, and has helped companies via his Freelance Marketing services. You can find Raul on his community GlobalOwls where he helps Nonprofits and Startups to do better marketing.