Online marketing has evolved quite a bit since Google released its landmark Zero Moment of Truth study in 2011, proving and defining the discovery and awareness stage of the customer journey.
As marketers flocked to chase sales back then, they soon found it wasn’t enough to simply create content. They needed to create relevant content, targeted to the right audience, deployed at an optimum frequency. And in order to know if your content is accomplishing its objectives, you need to track how your target audience is responding and engaging with it.
With so much information available today, content marketers can find themselves buried under an avalanche of metrics. Instead of improving productivity, trying to process everything can feel a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose.
A much better strategy is to concentrate on the relevant, actionable, and easy-to-measure stats that matter most to your business. Let’s take a look at how to do that.
Before you begin any strategy, first define your objectives and be sure everyone on your team — including your stakeholders — agrees on the end result. It’s fine if team members introduce additional goals, but everyone should agree on the order of priority for all objectives before crafting your strategy.
Valid objectives include increasing website traffic, growing your email list, converting visitors to leads, or leads to customers. Newer companies may need to focus on growing brand awareness and building authority. More seasoned businesses may want to focus on customer retention or increasing conversions.
Whatever your objectives are, it’s a good idea to make sure your goals are SMART, which stand for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
If you make your goals too general, whether you have accomplished them is open to interpretation. A vague goal, such as “increase website traffic,” is hard to quantify. A specific goal, such as “increase blog page views 25% by September 31,” is objective and easy to agree on.
Setting clear goals also helps you determine what kind of content to produce and how frequently you should post it. It also allows you to use key performance indicators for content marketing to determine whether your current strategy is on track to achieve your goals or if you will need to make changes.
There are three general areas content marketing metrics touch on:
Although conversion is an important end-goal for all businesses, you need to have a sense of the big picture if you want to maximize your content marketing ROI. Knowing your industry benchmarks can also give you a good idea of what’s realistic for your company.
79% of top-performing marketers
consider knowing their audience to be the biggest factor for successful campaigns. And the best way to get to know your audience is by studying their actions.
This includes:
Is improving SEO your goal? One of the best ways to do that is establish your business as an industry leader. Two content marketing metrics that can show how well that’s working are Domain Authority and Page Authority. Page authority is a prediction of how well your website page will perform in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), while Domain Authority reflects the overall authority of the entire website. Page Authority can benefit from tweaking, but Domain Authority is an aggregate score that reflects changes over a longer term.
The wonderful thing about content marketing is creating posts and pages that perform well with your target audience will both increase organic traffic and build your company’s reputation as an industry leader.
At the end of the day, all strategies’ eventual goal is to increase sales. But success in your sales goals can be measures in different ways, including:
Click-through-rateExecutives who use an effective Content Management Dashboard help create a rewarding work environment that gives their teams more room for creativity and experimentation and improves their chance of marketing success, according to Hubspot.
There are a variety of dashboards to choose from — and they can be customized to give you the right metrics at a glance. Having key content marketing metrics together in one place simplifies your team’s efforts and allows everyone to stay on the same page as you adjust your strategy.
Ideal dashboards contain only five to nine KPIs, so your team can focus on the areas that mean the most to your company and help make your content marketing metrics more accessible.
Content marketing is some of the most affordable and cost-effective marketing available. But it takes more than just creating content and putting it out into the void. Marketers need to clearly define their goals, create a plan, and carefully monitor the results of their work. Thankfully, there area wide variety of metrics to choose from that can help you reach your marketing goals.
Content marketing can seem abstract, and having concrete, real-world examples can help you better understand the kind of results you can get from a solid campaign. Take a look at some of our case studies to see what happens when a marketing agency applies 25+ years of marketing experience to help clients achieve their goals.
