Develop Content Marketing KPIs to Gain a Better View

Companies invest significant time, funds, and resources into developing content for their brand. According to the Content Marketing Institute, on average marketers spend 25% of their budget on content marketing.

But why?

A smart business understands that content can serve a number of purposes:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The more content and pages you add to your website regularly, the better it will perform in search rankings. The main idea behind this is that the more content you have and the effort you put into growing that body of content, the more relevant you become.
Thought Leadership: When it comes to creating new content for your website, the ultimate end goal isn’t to just churn out a set number of words and tack on an image in the hopes that someone may read it. You want people to see you as a leader and an expert in whatever service or product you provide. Your content keeps you at the top of the mind of current or prospective customers so that when it comes time to make a purchase, they’ll remember you.
Sales: If you have a website, you are selling something. So while it’s important to put that call-to-action in wherever you can on the site (or offsite if you’re using sponsored posts and remarketing), it’s even more important to create content that supports your product or service, directly and indirectly. Your site needs to be as effective as any salesperson you have in the field.

It’s important to have a well-defined content marketing strategy with specific goals in mind. After you have a clear understanding of why you are creating content, you can set specific goals.

Defining Objectives

In order to be successful, businesses need to have a system of goals and metrics to measure their marketing success. It is important to begin with general goals and then move on to more specific goals.

The business goal is the overarching company agenda that defines all other team and individual goals in the company.
The business objectives are the company-wide achievements that help businesses obtain the main goal.
The key performance indicators (or KPIs) are the parameters you use to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts in achieving those goals.
The targets are the specific quantity or percentage numbers that determine whether you have failed or met your KPIs and, consequently, goals.

The most important metric to content marketing is the KPI. This metric can help you understand how well your content is doing, who your audience is, and what their potential reaction to your content might be.

KPIs help you measure progress toward your objectives. Your KPIs shouldn’t be confused with your business objectives. They exist to help you track progress toward those objectives. The stats are specific and help measure how successful your content is. Your marketing efforts should be based on your business objectives in order to achieve desired conversions.

The KPI

Once you have determined your business objectives, you can set KPIs to measure your progress. The selection of these should not be taken lightly. There are many options to choose from and it can be easy to get overwhelmed or sidetracked by ones that would be beneficial, but don’t give an accurate portrayal of your needs.

When it comes to marketing content, you want to follow the data points that show where you’re gaining customers, not just where you’re gaining passive views.

As for the selection of your KPIs, there are different types to consider.

Consumption: These are the most basic of the KPIs and they’re the ones with which you’re probably the most familiar. In general, these enumerate how many people are “consuming” (or viewing and possibly reading) your content. It’s a good place to start, especially if you want to make sure you’re getting the right amount of traffic to your content.
Engagement: The next level of interaction with your content is engagement. This could be in the form of sharing, liking, or responding to your content. Again, this type of metric is great to use when you want to make sure people are paying attention to your content. However, it’s important to remember that a passive like or share does not necessarily end in a sale, so these numbers should be used in conjunction with other information to interpret the bigger picture.
Conversion: While you may be tempted to put all your KPI tracking into the conversion bag, remember that it’s still important to get a good baseline for all your activity. That being said, conversion metrics are the most important ones to keep on your radar, as they’ll inform you about the action taken on your content—filling in the form below it, signing up for more information, or perhaps even making a purchase.

Remember that selecting KPIs should be based on your marketing goals. The business’s goal is to make a profit by delivering a product to the consumer. Marketing’s goal is to find potential customers, create content that will appeal to them, and then convince them to buy the product.

Metrics need to show how successful businesses are in finding and converting new business.

Content marketing KPIs to track for better results

Now that you’ve hired a content manager (you did that, right?), let’s look at the six metrics the most successful content managers track—which your content manager should be tracking as well.

1. Number of content marketing pieces published per week

One of the most important things to track, especially when you are just starting out, is to publish at least three pieces of high-quality content each week.

The goal of search engines is to find the best answer to the searcher’s question and help them meet their goals. When you publish valuable and transparent content on a regular basis, search engines will recognize that your website provides lots of useful information. This will cause your website to rank higher and faster in SERPs.

This means that if you want your website to rank well for multiple terms and be seen as an authority on your subject matter, you need to publish new content on a regular basis.

The data indicates that when companies produce a large volume of high-quality content on a regular basis over an extended period of time, they experience a significant increase in traffic and leads.

Some companies publish more frequently in order to see larger results more quickly. generally, you need three high-quality pieces of content to get search engines to recognize your website so that your information will come up in search results.

2. Organic website traffic

Is organic traffic an important metric to track? Some sources might disagree. An increase in traffic to your website is a good indicator of how well your company is doing in terms of educating people. Additionally, it is often an indicator that there will be more sales and inquiries. The greater the number of people who visit your website, the more chances you have of converting them into leads.

Now, is all website traffic great? Of course not. Your website will only be successful if you are attracting the right type of traffic. There is a guaranteed way to get people who are interested in your products and services to visit your website.

When Marcus Sheridan owned his pool business, River Pools and Spas, he and his company almost lost everything to the 2008 recession. He was able to save his business by publishing content on his website that answered the questions his customers were asking. But in an honest way and with complete transparency.

After he made these changes, his website’s traffic and sales increased dramatically, saving the company, which is still doing well today.

After analyzing the patterns of success, Marcus saw that content was driving the best results. He discovered five topics that were the most popular among potential buyers, which led to more sales opportunities.

After teaching his methods to hundreds of companies and helping them get the same results, it’s clear that most businesses aren’t doing this at all, or at least not well. The reason for this is typically because most businesses are afraid to tackle these topics head-on. Marcus found that these strategies can be effective in any business, whether it is B2B or B2C.

3. Session-to-contact rate

It’s great to see your hard work paying off in the form of increased traffic, but it’s important to make sure that this traffic is high quality and not just quantity.

The contact conversion rate is a way of measuring how successful you are in turning contacts into clients.

Your contact conversion rate is the number of new contacts divided by the number of total website sessions. If your contact conversion rate is high, it means that people who visit your website are clicking on your calls-to-action and filling out forms. They are exchanging their personal information for content that they find valuable. (A tool like HubSpot will manage this for you.)

Some of the high-performing content we see our clients use that drives the most conversions include:

Buyer guides
Ebooks
Webinars
Self-service or self-assessment tools

Conversions going up means that your content is so good that people are willing to share their personal information to get it. This includes things like their name, email, and company name. It can be difficult to share personal information because we all want to protect it.

4. Sales opportunities generated from inbound (SQLs)

The key performance indicator that companies pay the most attention to when investing in a content marketing program is arguably organic traffic. This is because content that is successful in driving organic traffic is more likely to lead to sales opportunities.

These potential customers will have problems that your company will be able to help them with. This allows your sales team to have more opportunities, and better opportunities.

This means that by the time your prospects contact you, they will already have information about your products and services. You’re creating great content that helps people answer their questions and solve their problems, which is why you’re seeing great results.

Having a well-made website will help boost your company sales.

5. Ranking for important keywords

Your website will start to rank for the top keywords in your industry when you have provided a lot of valuable content and are known as the No. 1 teacher in your space. Your content manager is ensuring that you are publishing high-quality content on a regular basis, and your prospects are finally finding you. Search engines are noticing, too.

If your content ranks well on search engines, your overall success with SEO improves, making it more likely that people will see your content on the search engine results pages. This, in turn, increases the speed at which your content produces results.

6. New sales attributed to content marketing

If your sales are increasing because of the content you’re making, it’s not surprising that this is a sign of success in content marketing. Content-tracking tools can tell you where a prospect entered your site and how many pieces of content they interacted with before making a purchase.

You can use this information to connect your content marketing program to a specific dollar amount or ROI. You can also tell how many new sales are coming in because of your content marketing program.

This means that you can be confident that the time and energy you are putting into your content marketing initiative are worth it, because you will have the numbers to back you up!

Conclusion

The average content conversion rate is above 2%. To improve your chances of success, it is helpful to monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs). What you should take away from this is that the numbers represent the behavior of your potential consumers. You need to find a way to translate the numbers from your research into your future content creation process.