While driving traffic to a website was the No. 1 goal in the early stages of online marketing, statistics show most content marketing leaders today are more focused on engagement and conversion.

According to a report by Skyward, 96 percent of visionaries and 88 percent of leaders want engagement and conversion over traffic.

Advertising statistics show that traffic is no longer the main goal for marketing leaders. Experts say this is because online traffic on its own is often too general and vague.

Marketers instead prefer to focus on specific content marketing metrics, including engagement and conversion, because many have found these aspects are more likely to lead to sales.

A focus on traffic alone often can lead to a mismatch between what the user actually was searching for and what a website was able to offer, experts say.

Once the user discovers the website doesn’t have what they are looking for, they will quickly exit the page.

The subsequent bounce rate metrics then may let Google’s algorithm know that a particular website is not the right fit for that search query.

Instead, experts say a focus on engaging, quality content and a strong SEO strategy will drive the right traffic to a website and lead to more conversions.

Digital marketing statistics show that leads from SEO have an average conversion rate of 14.6 percent.

And according to marketing trends, 79 percent of companies want to attract more quality leads through content marketing.

Quality content that will lead to conversions looks different for every business, experts say, but begins with determining the target audience and what solutions they can provide to this target.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 86 percent of marketers list brand awareness as a top B2B marketing goal, and successful marketers spend 39 percent of their budget on content marketing.

Experts say marketers who commit a solid chunk of their budget toward content marketing are the ones who get the best results.

However, experts say there are several small ways to get started, including building an email list, getting on social media, reviewing existing content, and trying out new types of content, such as blogs and videos.

Eventually, a company may choose to hire a professional to help implement the right strategy and dive into the data.Until then, experts suggest first establishing goals and digging into audience data to discover the right types of content and information to share.

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