In today’s high-tech age, you have access to the information needed to make important decisions about your business. It’s called big data and you are able to measure the big data for everything from social media use to real-time website traffic. All of this data is great and it enables you to set goals with key performance indicators or KPIs for your brand. Learn how to find KPIs for content marketing strategy that you can put into action now.
KPIs According to the CMI
If you want to get a good grasp of the whole key performance indicators for content marketers, start with the right focus. Look at the meta picture of your business to see what areas you can measure.
The Content Marketing Institute reports there are so many areas for KPIs along with specific KPIs to consider as a content marketing pro. To be clear, the specific KPIs you select at any given time for your content marketing strategy will vary. To help you generate ideas of KPIs that could benefit your business, take a look at these five areas of content marketing strategy.
Each category includes some specific and applicable KPIs that you can either apply to your strategy or edit as you see fit:
- Brand your business and measure according to social views and shares by the applicable audience
- Drive funnel-able traffic to your website to increase engaged time, total # of visits, percentage of repeat readers, and converted CTAs
- Increase the number of sales leads through “lead gen content”
- Convert leads and record the rate of lead-to-customer-conversion
- Increase customer retention and measure according to the percentage of repeat customers you have
Where do you get the information for measuring these percentages and conversion rates? In so many places. To start with, when you are measuring KPIs, you are actively engaged with leads and sales data. This includes info like the number of site visitors and web traffic geography deets found behind the scenes of your website design space or platform, such as WordPress or Squarespace.
You can also check out the social statistics from your social profiles on Facebook Pages, YouTube, Instagram, and other such sites. See how well your brand is growing according to how many visitors you gain and maintain, and how many of these are within your area of engagement, i.e., how many are clearly there to support your company. Your social media ROI is an important aspect of your overall content strategy since you depend on social traffic to help expand your brand.
Types of Content KPIs
The KPIs you choose for your business will also depend on the type of content marketing you are doing. Let’s say you are a business-to-customer or B2C company. Your main goal is to sell products to your customers, so you can directly look at sales related to social conversions and purchases generated from social media, according to Search Engine Journal.
For a B2B company, you will measure things like leads generated from social media, media mentions, and cost per acquisition of leads. The SEJ highlights an even more extensive list of all of the possible KPIs that B2Cs, B2Bs, publishers, and marketing agencies might have including:
- Mobile rankings, which are increasingly important since mobile has surpassed desktop in web use
- Page speed
- Dwell time
- Time on page
- Audience demographics
- Organic clicks
- ROAS or return on ad spend
- Profile views
- Optimal days and times for engagement
- Abandonment rate
- Brand sentiment
Of course you can’t keep track of all of the KPIs all of the time. The goal is in figuring out those KPIs that are directly associated with a the optimization of your content investment.
Creating Goals for KPIs
Content marketing strategy focuses on goals that help grow your brand. These include creating a stronger rapport with your audience in order to establish brand loyalty and build up your brand even more. Another goal would be to drive new and potential clients or customers to your website in order to funnel their activity through your marketing tactics to generate a sale and return customer.
More Kickstarting Your Content Strategy
Want more advice on how to get your content strategy into gear for your business? Check out How to Build a Small Business Content Strategy: Where to Start Your Journey.
