A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is an important aspect of business for tracking marketing program health, and implementing KPIs in order to optimize your company’s content marketing performance is a vital strategy.
Enterprise companies usually have lots of metrics they are tracking. If you’re a midsize or smaller company you should take this page from their playbook. When it comes to content marketing, it can be a headache trying to pinpoint where the most critical improvements are needed. How can you determine if you have the right KPIs for measuring your content marketing goals’ effectiveness? I spoke with Erin Robbins O’Brien, COO of GinzaMetrics, to help guide us on the path to achieving organization goals.
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Inbound Marketing Metrics Though Closed Business
You need to be able to track the content all the way through the revenue. Ask yourself how your content is contributing to your bottom line. For most companies, the intended goal is to increase revenue. You have to analyze the marketing content and find out its direct correlation to achieving your goals.
Here’s another example: your primary objective is to drive traffic into your website. What activities would you want to improve? Well, you would want to implement the best practices in SEO and SEM. What keywords and search terms is your target demographic putting into Google? Is the content you’re publishing in your social media platforms relevant to your product or service?
See The Google Forrest From The SEO Trees
You have to view KPIs in two perspectives: macro and micro. You need to be able to group it together logically and understand how all of these pieces intermingle and relate to each other. And then individual pieces of content from an analytics’ and metric’s perspective need to be measured for a variety of reasons as well.
It’s also important to know what specifically about the content that’s effective. If you published an e-book and it did very well, you can’t just assume that you’ll replicate the same success the next time around by pushing 1 million more copies into the market. In this example, to find out if you have the right KPI for measuring your goals, ask yourself these questions:
- What is it about this ebook that captivates our target readers?
- Is the topic something that’s important to our potential customers?
- Is our distribution channel the best platform?
- Does our promotion metrics correlate with downloads and does that result in closed business?
- Did an endorsement by an influencer or other action outside our direct control increase the ebook’s visibility and downloads?
Choose KPIs That Allow You To Improve
“You can apply these types of inquiries to your firm’s objective. The important thing is to find the specific KPI that would allow you to make improvements. But what are the consequences to their brand and marketers for not having a goal and metric alignment? You miss out on creating better content that would work more effectively for your audience,” said Erin.
Think about it, you’re spending time and money to create valuable content, and yet it seems to be going nowhere. Naturally, this will leave anyone frustrated. This is where strategic planning becomes essential. Use metrics to make your efforts more impactful so you won’t miss out on higher conversion rates. You also have to remember that your competitors might be producing similar content that you are, and it’s important that you’re implementing the best strategies to gain an edge over them.
Track Metric Through The Digital Sales Pipeline
If there’s one thing to remember about using KPIs effectively, it’s this: think in terms of following a logical flow. For example, if you’re an e-commerce business and want to streamline a more user-friendly shopping experience, you will need the ability for your visitor to check-out easily available, e.g., shopping cart. What now? Well, you should find the next logical step in the progression, which is the checkout page. Is your current checkout page too cluttered with confusing information? If so, then cut as much useless information as you can. Better yet, A/B test your checkout pages.
If you are unsure your copy is hurting or helping with conversion, you should hire a copywriter to improve it. That’s what KPI measurements help you do; see the path to your goal as a timeline, and making sure the nodes on it propels you forward rather than acting as speed bumps.
This is from an interview I had with Erin Robbins O’Brien, COO of GinzaMetrics. You can watch the complete interview here
OR get the podcast for the Steveology interview with Erin Robbins O’Brien, COO of GinzaMetrics
About The Author
Steve Farnsworth is a Demand Generation Strategist for The @Steveology Group: A Content Marketing agency that drive sales and dominate markets for high tech B2B. You can contact Steve or connect with him on Twitter as @Steveology.
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Emenike Emmanuel
September 27, 2014
Nice post. Keep it up.