How to set content marketing goals (that actually make sense)
Published June 18, 2025
Whether you’ve worked in corporate before or you’ve always worked for yourself, we all know how important goals are. They give your business direction and ensure you’re producing meaningful work, not just busywork. But if you’re like me, setting content marketing goals isn’t exactly second nature.
Especially when I worked in corporate, I knew how to gather and look at analytics, but I didn’t always know how to turn that into a goal. Do I just add 15% to everything? What’s realistic?
Don’t worry–they’re common questions for a reason. Luckily, I’ve gotten to the point where I can break down goal-setting into a straightforward process. Here’s what I do:
Understand strategy vs. goals vs. tactics
Okay, first let’s get this terminology out of the way. These were hammered into me in school as a public relations major, and I still need a refresher every now and then, but understanding the different components is key to successful marketing.
Goals: What you want to achieve, or the big-picture view, and the KPIs that you want to hit.
Strategy: The plan to make it happen, or the overarching content marketing channels you’ll use.
Tactics: The specific actions you’ll take consistently to achieve your goal in a specific time frame, like posting two blog posts per month, etc.
To make it as simple as possible, I tend to keep in mind that goals can be as short as a sentence, while your content marketing strategy will include a little bit more information about what you need to do, and your tactics are basically a checklist.
Review your current analytics
To set any goals, you need a benchmark. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark. Unless you’re brand new to business or just started marketing yourself, you should have some numbers you can go by, like your average monthly impressions, leads, and sales.
If you don’t have any numbers of your own, you can look at your competitors or find industry benchmarks online. Just keep in mind that you’ll definitely need paid software to look at your competitor data, like Semrush, and industry data can be broader in general.
Consider your sales funnel
I like to either set a goal for each stage of my sales funnel or focus on one stage at a time. For example, I’m still trying to grow my visibility online right now, so my ultimate goal is tied to awareness, and I’m targeting a lot of vanity metrics through my marketing efforts. That means things like impressions, followers, reach, and engagement. I still look at other metrics, but I personally don’t have the time to put the same amount of effort toward each stage of my funnel.
If you do have the time and resources, you could set a goal for each stage of your funnel. That might look something like this:
Awareness: Growing website traffic by 15% to reach 1,000 monthly sessions by the end of Q2.
Consideration: Increasing leads by 10% to reach 30 new leads by the end of Q2.
Conversion: Increasing sales by 10% to reach 5 new bookings by the end of Q2.
You can also get even more granular to set a specific channel goal tied to each stage of your funnel–it all depends on what you want to focus on and track.
Breaking out your content marketing goals into a funnel helps you ensure that you’re reaching potential customers at the right time and filling out your pipeline to ensure that your content supports the ultimate goal: growing your business.
Follow the SMART framework
The goal examples I gave above all follow the same framework, which is called SMART. That stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based. This is a super-easy framework that makes it easier to document your goals and reach them.
Without this framework, I find that it’s easy to get a little too ambitious with my goals, or to call something a goal when it really isn’t. Like, just saying “I want to grow my leads this year,” isn’t really helpful when it comes to doing the work that will make that possible.
With SMART content marketing goals, you always have a north star that you can consider when you’re deciding what channels to focus on, what type of content to create, and what topics to create content about.
Examples of realistic content marketing goals
I don’t know about you, but I learn best by example, so I want to make sure I provide that here, too. Here’s what different types of content marketing goals can look like when you drill down from your sales funnel to different channels.
Awareness: Growing website traffic by 15% to reach 1,000 monthly sessions by the end of Q2.
Website impressions: Reaching 5,000 monthly impressions
Instagram followers: Gaining 200 new followers
Threads followers: Gaining 200 new followers
Pinterest clicks: Gaining 300 monthly outbound clicks
Consideration: Increasing leads by 10% to reach 30 new leads by the end of Q2.
Leads (from free tool): Gaining 15 new leads
Newsletter signups: Gaining 10 new newsletter signups
DMs: Gaining 5 new DMs
Conversion: Increasing sales by 10% to reach 5 new bookings by the end of Q2.
Sales calls: Setting up 15 sales calls
How to stay on top of your content marketing goals
Just setting your content marketing goals is one step, but creating the strategy and tactics around them is the next piece. After that, you still need to continually refer to your goals to see how your performance is doing.
I set quarterly goals, but I monitor my performance each month and track everything in a Clickup dashboard. Depending on your goals and strategy, you can use that information to tweak what you’re doing or make adjustments during your next planning cycle.
Manual monitoring works fine when you’re starting out small, but as you’re managing more and more, and you have a lot of business metrics to track, an automated dashboard is always crucial.
No matter where you are in your business, I’d love to help! I offer not only a full content marketing strategy package, but it also includes a 90-day content plan. I can also work on a monthly basis and build a custom monitoring dashboard to make it easier for you to stay on top of your content marketing goals, without any work on your end! Contact me to learn more.
