How to Set Realistic Content Marketing Goals

Your content marketing strategy is all about setting yourself goals.

And each of those goals should lead to the same objective – to make your business stand out, create brand awareness, brand loyalty, engagement, education, and, eventually, leads and sales. 

Not exactly a short order, is it?

But before you start feeling overwhelmed by it all, just take a breath. In this article, we’ll show you how to set realistic, achievable content marketing goals, and how content writing and other content marketing strategies can help you get there – so you can leave that pesky overwhelm at the door.

What are some common content marketing goals?

First, a little question for you. Do you set content marketing goals for yourself and your business? And if so, what do those goals look like?

As with any part of your business, having a strategy for your content marketing is crucial for creating the bigger picture. And your strategy should lead to the goals you want to attain. But before trying to come up with a bunch of amazing content marketing ideas, you need to define your goals so you know why you’re creating content in the first place.

Some common content marketing goals are to generate:

1. Brand awareness
2. Brand loyalty
3. Education for ideal clients
4. Engagement with ideal clients
5. Leads
6. Conversions and sales
7. Repeat sales

These goals can all be achieved by having a solid content marketing strategy in place. Before you create that strategy, you need to establish and set up your goals so you can ensure your objectives are achievable, measurable, and met.

This is where it pays to be SMART. 

How to set up SMART goals

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based goals. These are the goals that are established to ensure your objectives are attainable within a specific timeframe. 

When it comes to content marketing, this can include everything from your blog plan, social media plan, videos, webinars, social media lives, lead magnets, tripwires, and anything else that helps to ultimately achieve your overall goal. 

By setting up SMART goals, you’ll have a clear timeline and be able to track progress as well as spot when a milestone has been missed. Once this is in motion, it takes the overwhelm away, allowing you to breathe easy. 

Let’s look at each component of this nifty acronym, and how you can use it to achieve your content marketing goals.

S – Specific

Time to get to the nitty-gritty stuff. If you want your goal to be effective, you need to forget generalities and be as specific as possible.

Let’s say you’re planning your blog content. Some examples of specific goals would be:

• Who is responsible for writing the blog content?
• Who is responsible for researching the content?
• What steps do we need to take to create a content writing plan?
• What is the overall objective of the blog?

Think how much simpler your blog planning and writing will be once these prompts are nailed down. Your overall specific goal could look like this:

The goal of the blog is to drive traffic to the website and generate brand awareness and loyalty. We first need to research the best content ideas by using customer avatars and competition. The blog content will be researched by John and written by Meg.

M – Measurable

Okay, so you made a great start by getting specific about your content marketing goals. The next SMART goal to focus on is measurable. And this means measuring your goals, normally using numbers and analytics and other techy stuff. 

If you want your blog to attract more traffic to your website, then that’s great. That’s a sound goal. But how much traffic? This is where you need to incorporate measurable benchmarks. Progress needs to be achievable and something that you can track, while also including how you will track it and what you will use to push that traffic.

We want to increase traffic to the website through the blog post by having at least 100 new readers per month. We will accomplish this by promoting blog posts through social media and newsletters as well as using on-page SEO.

Measuring your goals makes it so much easier (and less overwhelming) to track your progress. 

A – Achievable

This is where the overwhelm can start to set in. You have to make sure that your goals are realistic and achievable. Even if you have huge dreams, you have to walk before you can run. 

If you set your goals too high to begin with, there’s a chance they could come tumbling down, causing you stress and upset. So, make sure the goals you set yourself are attainable. Consider the size and experience of your team, current workload, and the hours you need to put in and the cost involved. You might want to go all out (as in your measurable goal above) and work on promoting your blogs on social media, SEO, and newsletters… but if you have a small team that is already pushed to their limits researching and writing your blogs, is it really attainable to get them to do all that promoting as well?

If so, then scale it back a bit, and maybe just focus on one channel to begin with. 

R- Relevant

Keeping things relevant is a great way of achieving realistic results and avoiding overwhelm. 

Don’t set your goals for giggles. For every goal you want to hit, you must make sure there is an important benefit to hit that overall objective. Think about what the goal really means, and what a difference it might make to your business. This will help you build a bigger picture and allow you to reconsider any goals that might not be that relevant (or important) after all. 

Always consider your business’s long-term goals. 

T- Time-based

Finally, we reach time-based. 

Incorporating dates or deadlines into your goals is vital for success. You don’t want a project lingering on forever and getting stale as everyone grows tired of it. 

Your objectives need to be time-based. And you and your team need to be on the same page and agree on when the objective has been reached. In the original example, we saw the main goal being a brilliant blog that would provide education, engagement, and brand awareness for readers, with the goal to drive at least 100 new readers a week from the blog to the website.

What it didn’t say was over how long. The next month? Six months? A year? Decade? 

Make sure your SMART goals have parameters and a time frame. Once you have those dates, and everyone is aware of them, you will have completed your SMART goal.

Congratulations!

Set content marketing goals you can actually achieve

The old saying “content is king” is true. But the king is nothing without the queen – and that queen is a solid content marketing strategy that supports your business’s overall goals. 

Now you know how to set realistic content marketing goals, you have everything you need to create a winning plan to accelerate your business to the next level.

And if you need a little (or a lot of) help with your content, then have a look at our selection of bespoke content packages and let us do the hard work for you.