Once you have a strategy that’s clicking and you’re rolling out high-quality, meaningful content, you should be paying attention to how that content performs so that you can continually improve and provide better information to your customers.
When defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) for content marketing efforts, it’s different from answering the question of ROI. KPIs focus on the operational side of content marketing. The most important aspect of KPIs is your “why.” Why do you do what you do? That’s what people buy – not what you do.
Some KPIs to consider include:
• Measuring how a content marketing campaign impacts your sales team’s productivity: Does your sales team understand the objectives of the campaign and why it would deliver leads to them? If you have a disconnect here, leads won’t blossom into conversions.
• Understanding the percentage of customers that were marketing-generated: Knowing what new business was won from content marketing shows its influence.
• Time to revenue: How long does a campaign need to generate interest? If the time seems long, you need context (i.e., is your solution’s buying cycle long, have you inserted urgency into your campaign?).
• Customer acquisition costs (CAC): Calculating the CAC for each campaign provides key insights on how to streamline operations to reduce it.
KPI’s To Measure Your Performance
After defining KPIs, you should put your attention on these key metrics:
Traffic
Look at users, page views, and unique pageviews in Google Analytics.
Learn where your traffic is coming from and make changes based on this. For example, if referral traffic is coming from your Pinterest page, you should consider developing more content for the site.
Conversions
Is your content driving conversions? It’s a simple question, but not a linear answer. You can see from traffic that your content is getting more eyes, but what do they do next? Determine how you can link conversions, however you define them, to content to understand its sphere of influence.
Engagement
Traffic is great; engagement is better. Engagement happens when people spend more time on your site and how many pages they view in a visit. Those are all metrics you can find on Google Analytics.
Another element of engagement is what you’re doing on social media. Is your content being reacted to, shared, and commented on? The more this happens, the more it’s likely to drive more credible traffic.
SEO
Organic search rankings are vital to a healthy content marketing strategy. Keywords matter because that’s how your audience looks for answers. You should consistently monitor your keyword performance, including your current position for each keyword you’ve targeted.
Check this at least every 30 days. See where you’re rising and falling and find out why. It’s also imperative to optimize every piece of content, including having correct meta data, as well as a good ratio of keyword to content (how many times you use the keyword in your word count – 3 percent is ideal).
Authority
Authority isn’t easy to measure, compared to the other metrics described. The objective is for your website to have a strong domain authority (DA), which is a number between 1 and 100. The higher the score, the greater the authority.
Building authority improves SEO and conversions and is measured by Google. Google looks at things like backlinks from sites with good DA, as well as how much the content is shared, which Google would consider an illustration of the content’s quality.