The phrase “content is king” has been a cliché across the digital content marketing world for many years. Unfortunately, digital marketers can’t just wave a magic wand and have their content bring in tons of customers after a first glance. Content is just that — content. It needs to be properly optimized for businesses to reach their digital marketing goals.
Creating, publishing and sharing content shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all. Instead, you need to take the time to develop a comprehensive content marketing strategy to ensure your content works for you and your customers.
What is a KPI in a Content Strategy?
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. KPIs are measurable goals that allow teams to determine the success of a particular initiative or program. In relation to content, these metrics often include brand awareness goals, engagement with customers or prospects, newsletter open rates or visits to a website. KPIs also make it easy to effectively measure content marketing efforts, so teams can further refine and adjust their approach.
What are Good Content Metrics for Tracking?
The right metrics to track will be dependent on the goals for a particular asset. For brand awareness goals, you may want to leverage brand awareness and recall surveys. For sales-related goals, you can track MQLs and SQLs. Each piece of content should be associated with an overarching business goal and a metric for tracking that success. Below is a list of metrics your team can consider:
- Brand recall
- Brand awareness
- Brand perception
- Brand retention
- Website views
- Newsletter CTRs
- Newsletter Open Rates
- Engagement Rates
- Feedback from Clients
- Impressions
- Lead Generation
To find out which of these metrics and KPIs to track, continue reading below.
Choosing the Right Content Marketing KPIs
Content marketing must be actionable, attainable and measurable. Pushing out content regularly is not enough. You need to have a content marketing strategy in place that dictates the type of content you’re producing and how you’re going to create it.
You can easily translate your content wants and needs into measurable goals and key performance indicators. These KPIs should be highly individualized to you and your company; they will depend on the size of your business, your resources and budget, and the outcomes of any prior marketing campaigns or tests.
It’s important to remember that what works for another business won’t necessarily work for you, and that your content approach may be drastically different from your competitor’s.
What Is the Purpose of Content Marketing?
Understanding the objective behind content is the core of any content marketing strategy, and informs the creation, distribution, and promotion of content. The primary goal of content is to engage and resonate with your target audience, answering questions they may have or educating them more about your product or offering. Great content will help you increase brand awareness, nurture customer relationships, generate new leads, and drive sales.
In a world that thrives on online information, creating digital content for your brand is a great way to attract, inform and generate new clients, while building loyal relationships with existing ones. At its core, content marketing provides value to your potential and existing consumers in the hopes that they either convert or remain loyal to your brand.
Content is the overarching term for any information that a business publishes about itself online. This can include social media posts, as well as email newsletters, blogs and podcasts.
We are lucky to live in a world that consumes content in so many different ways. Quality content marketing allows a brand to reach its customers efficiently with the format they consume the most. With the right approach, content marketing can grow your business and brand while fostering relationships with consumers.
The Role of Content Marketing in Business
Content marketing works for any brand, no matter its size or target audience. Business-to-business companies can especially benefit from content marketing, as such digital tactics can help these firms achieve their overall business goals.
Content marketing has a great track record with B2B companies. In the B2B Content Marketing 2020 study, content marketing has been shown to work when a business has a solid plan in place. For example, 75% of companies that have used a comprehensive content marketing strategy have managed to generate revenue from their efforts. Additionally, a full 84% have used content as a method of building loyalty and trust with their customer base.
Content marketing is also a great tool for measuring success. Your team can easily calculate the multiple wins and failures of your content, and use this information to inform your strategy moving forward.
Content marketing is a powerful asset that produces real results, which is why more and more businesses are jumping on the content marketing bandwagon. In a global survey of more than 1,500 marketers by the online data provider Semrush, 84% said that their company had a content marketing strategy in place in 2020. This is up from 77% in 2019.
How Do You Set Content Marketing Goals and Objectives?
According to content marketing best practices, it's important to establish clear KPIs. Goals related to content marketing should be actionable and measurable, while having a clear timeline. When setting these goals, it’s important to consider your company’s overall business goals and how marketing ties into those.
For example: If your company is looking to increase revenue, your marketing goals should focus on generating leads via your content marketing efforts. If another primary business goal relates to your current customers, your content marketing goals could focus on newsletter open rates or website engagement. These goals should include a clear time frame for evaluating success, with consideration for both year-over-year and month-over-month improvements.
Why It’s Important to Set Content Marketing Objectives
Defining clear content marketing objectives is a crucial step in the overall content strategy. Without established objectives, your content efforts may lack consistency, coherence, direction, and effectiveness. Setting objects for your content marketing will help you align content efforts with broader business goals, set a framework to measure the content success, and will also help foster accountability around teamwork collaboration. In setting content marketing objectives, it’s important to understand the key content metrics to measure.
How to Set Up Your Content Marketing Goals
It’s recommended to take a systematic approach to setting up goals of content marketing, so you can ensure that they are measurable, meaningful, and align with the broader business goals. Below are specific items to consider when considering which specific content marketing goals resonate most with your brand:
Understand Broader Business Goals:
As you begin to hone in on specific content marketing goals, it’s important to understand the overarching business goals. This way, you can be sure your content marketing goals and strategy support the greater business goals.
Define Specific Goals:
Decipher how content can help you achieve your greater business goals. For example, if the business goal is to generate more leads, then a corresponding content marketing goal could be to increase leads by a certain percentage by a specific timeframe. See more examples of specific goals in the numerical list below.
Make Goals Measurable:
For each item you identify as important for the content marketing strategy goals, determine corresponding KPI’s and means of measurement. Clearly define how you will measure and quantify progress toward each goal.
Set Timeframes:
Assign deadlines or time frames to your goals of content marketing. This will facilitate teamwide accountability and also help create a sense of urgency on projects.
Communicate Goals Across the Team:
Reaching your content marketing objectives may require involvement from interdepartmental team members. As you establish clear content marketing strategy goals, communicate this across your team to ensure everyone understands the objectives.
Now that you have a better idea of your content marketing objectives, you can now narrow in on specific content marketing goals to inform your strategy.
7 Content Marketing Goals & Metrics to Guide Your Strategy
While we can’t tell you exactly what your business needs, there are a few content marketing goals and KPIs that have consistently brought success to B2B marketers. Use these seven goals to guide your content marketing strategy so that you can get the most out of your marketing efforts.
1. Increase Brand Awareness
More than anything else, your content should be used to promote your brand. While it’s true that generic content can be useful to a consumer, the goal is for the reader to be so inspired by your content that they are moved to convert.
To increase brand awareness, you need to produce content that reflects your company’s mission and values and explains who you are. At the same time, the content should be noteworthy enough to catch the attention of people who weren’t previously aware of your brand.
It doesn’t matter what content format you use, as long as it’s informative and shareable. Whatever you decide to do — create a blog, update photos and videos on Instagram, or produce a podcast — you need to measure the effects of your efforts. You can do this by tracking the number of social shares your content receives, looking at your audience views compared to your competitors and sending out brand awareness surveys.
Metrics to Track Brand Awareness:
Tracking brand awareness can be a difficult endeavor. The most accurate way to track this metric is to conduct a brand awareness study. These should be conducted before and after a campaign for better insights into how campaigns performed. However, teams can also track website visits, newsletter sign ups, and social media engagement to determine if brand awareness is improving.
2. Improve Brand Perception
While brand awareness measures how many people are aware of your company, brand perception measures the associations your target audience has with your company. Brand perception looks at each interaction a potential customer may have with a brand, including customer service, advertisements, content, and onboarding. Improving brand perception should take data into account, including client surveys and industry reports.
Consistent content marketing initiatives via various channels can be a valuable tool to improve brand perception. In a recent webinar, AdvisorStream, a marketing platform for financial advisors stressed the importance of regular communications with clients. In fact, 17% of those surveyed by Salesforce left an advisor due to poor communication. This number was higher than those who left their advisor due to poor performance. However, first-party content shouldn’t be the only kind of content being promoted in these updates. Curating a mix of content can help brands build credibility with their target audience while improving brand perceptions.
Metrics to Track Brand Perception:
Brand perception can be measured via surveys and third-party data providers. Your team can also check review sites, depending on your industry, to see what clients are actively saying about your brand.
Client surveys can also give your company an idea of how customers perceive the brand. These can be measured over time to determine how the company is performing.
Additionally, content marketers can measure engagement on social media and review sites.
3. Drive More Traffic to Your Website or Blog
Driving traffic to your website is a top-of-the-marketing-funnel goal; potential customers arriving at your website or blog looking to learn more about your services can be easily targeted and induced to move further down the marketing funnel. To give these readers the information they’re looking for, you need to create content that informs them and introduces them to the value of your brand.
This content doesn’t have to be too specific about your product offerings. Instead, you can create content that piques their interest and motivates them to learn more about your brand. Doing so will lead readers down the rest of the marketing funnel and hopefully convince them to convert.
Metrics to Track Website Traffic:
Website visits are relatively easy to track. Content marketers can leverage an Analytics tool, such as Google Analytics to measure visits. A keyword tracking tool can also showcase which keywords are driving the most visibility.
When crafting your blog content strategy and goals, consider tracking the number of website or blog visits per month, the time each visitor spends on your site and the number of blogs that drive conversions to your brand.
4. Generate Sales Leads
It goes without saying that generating leads is one of the most important goals for your marketing strategy — ultimately, leads are what drive conversions, subscriptions and return on investment. To generate quality sales leads, you need content that is specific to your brand and its offerings.
Lead-generating content, such as e-books and white papers, are great options that can be easily produced using your brand’s success stories. Additionally, you can create a gated asset on your website that requires potential viewers to fill out a form before they can access it. Doing so will allow you to capture your visitors’ contact information, ensuring that they continue to move down the marketing funnel.
Metrics to Track Sales Leads:
To measure this goal, look at the number of leads generated from each piece of content, as well as the conversion rate for a specific page on your website, such as the landing page. These two metrics will tell you how well your content is resonating with consumers, and if it’s inspiring them to contact you.
5. Convert Leads Into Longtime Customers
Now that you’ve captured people’s attention and generated a few sales leads, it’s time to convert them into longtime, returning customers. The ultimate goal is to create a loyal consumer base, and you can easily do this by producing new content that informs your audience and teaches them something new. Those at the bottom of the marketing funnel are hoping to continue their education about your industry and are looking for fresh content. Ideas for such content include free or exclusive e-books for loyal customers, subscription-only infographics and videos, and special podcast content for those who spend a certain amount of money.
Metrics to Track Customer Retention Rates:
You can measure this goal by tracking the percentage of repeat customers, your retention rate and your revenue within a specific time frame.
6. Establish Your Brand as a Thought Leader
To stand out among your competitors, you need to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. You can do this by staying on top of industry trends and news, while providing content that is informative and educational for your target audience.
One way to stand out from the crowd is by leveraging licensed content or editorial content from renowned publications in your space. Doing so will provide a new perspective, while building credibility with your customers.
Metrics to Track Thought Leadership Goals:
How should you measure this goal? You can track the number of shares to the thought-leadership articles you provide, the number of visits to these articles and the feedback you get from trusted customers.
7. Improve Your Email Open Rates
Email is one of the best tools to communicate with prospects and customers. The people in your database have expressed enough interest in your brand to receive further communications from your company. It’s important to proactively create updates to share with your database that are useful and actionable. Consider curating newsletter and email content alongside your company’s updates for actionable insights.
Metrics to Measure Email Campaign Success:
Measuring the success of your email campaigns is relatively straightforward. Your team will want to gather the CTR and open rate data from past campaigns and compare these with industry averages. This data can then be used as a benchmark for you to improve upon.
Final Thoughts
While choosing the right content marketing goals and KPIs may seem overwhelming at first, doing so will set your brand up for long-term success. You need to ensure that your content works for your business and that it captures the right audience. Licensed content from NYTLicensing can help you make this happen.
Working with NYTLicensing, you can harness the power of the world-class journalism produced by The New York Times to appeal to your target audience.
Frequently Asked Questions About Content Marketing KPIs:
What are content metrics?
Content metrics are tools that allow teams to measure how particular assets are performing. By leveraging data, content marketers can easily adjust their strategy based on what’s working and what’s not.
How do you measure content strategy effectiveness?
There are several ways teams can measure the effectiveness of their content strategy. It’s first important to consider what success looks like for the business as a whole. If business goals are to increase customer retention, for example, it is important to select metrics that align with this objective. This includes brand affiliation goals, engagement rates, and newsletter open rates. For lead generation goals, this could include new contacts generated or website visits.
What are some KPIs for brand awareness?
KPIs for brand awareness include brand lift studies and brand awareness studies, which should be conducted before and after a campaign. Other metrics can include website visits and engagement on social platforms.
What is an example of a content marketing objective?
An example of a content marketing objective could be to increase website conversions by 20% within the next quarter. These goals should be measurable, attainable and time-bound.
What are the goals of content marketing?
The goals of content marketing typically include driving website traffic, establishing thought leadership, increasing brand awareness, generating leads, nurturing customer relationships, boosting engagement and social media presence, enhancing brand loyalty, and ultimately driving sales and revenue.
What are SMART marketing goals?
SMART is a marketing acronym that stands for settings goals that are: Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Time-bound
