Content Marketing Strategies For Dummies
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After you’ve established your content marketing mission statement, you can focus on your company goals. Here is a brief look at how to formulate goals.

Uncovering your content marketing goals

When looking at formulating your own goals, it can be useful to see what other marketers set as their top goals for B2B content marketing. According to the “2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends — North America” report by the Content Marketing Institute/Marketing Profs, (see the following figure), the top organizational goals for B2B content marketing are the following:

  • Brand awareness: 84 percent

  • Lead generation: 83 percent

  • Engagement: 81 percent

  • Sales: 75 percent

  • Lead nurturing: 74 percent

  • Customer Retention/Loyalty: 69 percent

  • Customer Evangelism: 57 percent

  • Upsell/Cross-sell: 52 percent

    2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America Survey.

    2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America Survey.
The report indicates that 2015 was the fifth year that brand awareness came in at the top spot and that customer evangelism shows up on the list.

Picking KPIs

After you establish your goals, you need to develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are the measures you choose to help you determine whether you’re reaching your business goals. You need them to keep your strategy on track. If you don’t measure yourself against your business goals, you won’t know whether your content marketing strategy is working and supporting your larger business goals.

To help you think about how to craft your KPIs in relation to your marketing goals, check out the table. You can apply the table to your marketing plan as well. List your goals and then choose some metrics. Then refer back to this list when you check your progress.

Choosing KPIs
CMI/Marketing Profs B2B Top Goals Suggested Metrics
Increase brand awareness Social media shares, social media likes, email forwards, referral links
Lead generation Lead nurturing Blog signups, blog comments, conversion rate, form completions
Increase engagement Comments, page depth (how many pages consumed), downloads, page views, back links, time on site, click through rate
Grow sales revenue by X percent Revenue influenced by content (which content was consumed before sale), offline sales
Improve customer retention/loyalty Bounce rate, followers, retention rate
Encourage customer evangelism Social media shares, comments, follower count, word of mouth
Increase upsells/cross-sells Measure conversions in shopping cart and on landing pages, number of conversions

About This Article

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About the book authors:

Stephanie Diamond is a marketing professional with more than 20 years of experience building profits in over 75 different industries. A strategic thinker, she has worked with solopreneurs, small business owners, and multibillion-dollar corporations. Follow her blog at Contentmarketingtoolbox.com/blog.

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