Content marketing goals and metrics to watch

Aligning your content marketing with metrics and strategy helps with patient and customer retention and builds brand awareness.

An illustration of people sitting in front of a big chart reviewing data.

View all blog posts Blog

Key takeaways:

Nearly half of content marketers say their content marketing lacks clear goals.
Setting up SMART goals for health content marketing helps ensure your results are measurable.
When deciding on your content marketing metrics to track, make sure they support your key marketing goals and that you can act on those metrics.

Author: Nikki Breen
Last updated: 02/05/24

Content marketing isn’t just a trend — it’s an effective tool that can drive your healthcare system forward. Measuring your content marketing efforts is not just about numbers. Instead, it helps demonstrate progress toward meeting your business goals.

Yet nearly half of content marketers say their content marketing lacks clear goals. How can you determine what goals make sense for your healthcare organization? Here’s a guide to setting effective content marketing goals and knowing what to track to make sure your efforts pay off.

How do you determine content marketing goals?

You’ve likely heard of SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound). They’re about more than gaining patients. SMART goals can measure key milestones in patient acquisition and steps in their health journey with your hospital system over a defined period of time.

Your content marketing planning should consider your:

Staffing and budget resources
Customers’ or patients’ pain points
Stages in the audiences’ healthcare journey

Using SMART goals for your health content marketing provides a clear roadmap and makes sure your efforts are focused, attainable and measurable.

Content marketing considerations for healthcare

Your healthcare content marketing plan may focus on a number of audiences, including patients, caregivers, donors, B2B customers and referring providers. Tailor your content to meet your audience and build a personal connection with the user that shows you understand their pain points and can meet their needs.

Content marketing considerations for healthcare include:

HIPAA: Patient stories can add an emotional tug to your content marketing efforts, but patient consent for HIPAA and other privacy concerns is crucial for maintaining patient trust and compliance. Also, make sure you’re following HIPPA data collection guidelines to inform future marketing efforts.
Sensitivity: Sensitive topics such as hospice care or cancer require understanding your audience and using sensitive language to help you avoid alienating, frightening or otherwise upsetting them. This approach can also encourage them to seek the screenings or healthcare they need.
Medical accuracy: Fact-check your content with a health provider to ensure consent follows medical best practices. Search engines are leaning more heavily on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in ranking online content in search (E-E-A-T).
Accessibility: Inclusive language, following WCAG recommendations for people with disabilities, and investing in plain language best practices can help make your health content marketing more understandable for your audiences. When health content is riddled with medical and insurance jargon, it can be hard for the average patient to read.

Which content marketing goals should you consider?

Understanding the effectiveness of your hospital’s content marketing program is crucial. It can reassure you of your progress, instill confidence in your marketing efforts and help you retain or even gain resources for future marketing initiatives.

Depending on where your content is in the marketing funnel, your content marketing goals may focus on:

Brand awareness
Engagement
Lead generation or patient acquisition
Cross-selling
Education

Once you know your content marketing goals, you can decide on your tactics to achieve them. Those tactics will dictate what KPIs you track.

Get more healthcare marketing tips and best practices: Subscribe to the WG Content newsletter!

Top content marketing metrics to track

There’s no value in having data just to have data. When deciding on the content marketing metrics to track, make sure they support your key marketing goals and that you can act on those metrics.

Some examples:

Goal	Content Marketing Metrics
Brand awareness	Video views Organic traffic Impressions Subscriber growth Increase in search engine ranking Media coverage
Engagement	Likes Shares Comments Downloads of white papers
Lead generation	Form completions Appointment completions Email subscriptions Conversion rates
Cross-selling	Email subscriber to event signup New service inquiry for existing consumers
Education	Email open rates to an educational blog Views of educational videos Reduced readmissions in targeted populations

Understanding how your content marketing efforts are performing before you make changes to them is key. Your content audit may show that you have a strong keyword ranking on one topic and less so for another service. Or you may learn your content isn’t following SEO best practices or isn’t ranking for viable keywords that may convert readers to patients.

See how content marketing investments helped Atlantic Health System achieve big gains.

A content marketing example

Let’s see these concepts in action. Here’s an example of tactics used to increase event registrations for a community heart health event. You’d track:

Tactic	Content Marketing Metrics
Email marketing	Open rate Click-through rate Registration from emails
Social media advertising	Click-through rate Shares Comments Registration from social media
Postcard mailing	QR code clicks Registration from QR code

Aligning your content with strategies — such as key performance indicators (KPIs) and marketing campaigns — can help retain patients and customers and build brand awareness for your hospital. Goals provide focus and direction for your team and your organization’s future, thereby helping you lay a path to the end game. Just make sure you measure it to know the final score.