How To Create Content Marketing KPIs

Businesses spend a lot of energy, money and time generating high-quality content for their brand. In fact, WebFX indicates that marketers designate an average of 25-30% of their budgets on content marketing strategies. Smart businesses realize that SEO, thought leadership and sales serve many purposes.

To get the most out of these content marketing strategies, it is crucial to establish your goals and KPI approaches. And of course, it’s important to find the right KPIs. Not sure where to focus your energy when creating these goals? We can help you get started.

What Are Content Marketing KPIs?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important for every aspect of business, especially for the marketing team. When defining KPIs in marketing, it’s basically having measurable values that promote sales and establish your brand.

Content marketing campaign KPIs are a little more specific. They measure how your sales and branding are increased through the content you produce on your website and social media marketing. Because content marketing is a big investment but can pay out well, you need strong KPIs that help you determine success.

What Makes An Effective Content Marketing KPI?

The key to an effective KPI is specificity. What is good for one business may not be the best for your own business, and that’s something you’ll have to determine. With that being said, it is important to formulate content marketing KPIs that match the goals and needs of your business.

Don’t forget that Key Performance Indicators are not just goals, but they also help your team communicate and should be an active part of your content marketing plan. You should constantly be analyzing, comparing and updating your KPIs.

So how do you get something specific and effective? We’ve got a few ideas.

How To Create Specific Content Marketing KPIs

Thriving businesses understand that establishing goals and determining metrics are necessary to measure their marketing success. Although you are aiming to get customized goals for business, the key is starting with the very broad and work down to more specific goals.

The most important metric to content marketing is the KPI. It can guide you in determining how well your content is performing, identify your audience and predict how they will respond to your content.

Begin by following these four steps:

1. Set your business goals.
2. Define marketing objectives.
3. Choose key performance indicators.
4. Identify targets.

As you follow these steps, you can get the most out of your Key Performance Indicators. Here are a few more details about each step.

1. Set Your Business Goals

If you want to save time and a lot of wasted effort, you need to begin with a strategy. It’s really easy to become overwhelmed by the hundreds of content marketing KPIs you could have. It’s much easier (and wiser) to start on a vague-yet-more-accurate path than a specific-yet-incredibly-random trail that will only lead you down to a spiral of confusion and unmet needs.

So how do you start with a strategy that keeps you on track? Think about general business goals that your business has and keep it simple. A great way to find these goals is to figure out which questions need answering, such as where is your revenue coming from and how do you normally increase sales?

Understanding your business goals requires you to look at the company’s needs as a whole and not just from the marketing perspective. Start from the top of the funnel and move down.

2. Define Marketing Objectives

Your marketing objectives are more specific versions of your business goals. They are the specific steps to seeing a change or improvement to the business. Marketers have the tricky task of promoting, improving and selling the products or services you offer. Content marketers do a lot of this through the content they produce and promote online.

Consider what tools you have to market, and which tools you hope to gain as you go forward. Perhaps this year, you want to focus on writing and publishing more content consistently. This is a great marketing objective that can help focus your team and prepare you for the next step: creating specific Key Performance Indicators that can keep you right on track.

3. Choose Content Marketing Key Performance Indicators

After you clearly define your goals, choosing the right KPIs for your business is next. When it comes to marketing content and assessing its effectiveness for your business objectives, make sure to follow the data points that show where you’re gaining customers, not just where you’re obtaining passive views.

As a content marketer, you have specific indicators that can help you achieve what you are hoping for. Here are a few examples of strategies for developing high-quality content marketing KPIs:

Drive Additional Traffic to Your Blog or Site

For this objective, you want to focus on creating engaging content that drives readers to your site. This is a great goal that not only increases readership but leads to higher online credibility and a potential increase in sales. Content marketing strategy KPI examples for this goal are the total number of website views monthly, conversion rates for call-to-action content and the percentage of returning readers.

Expand Brand Awareness

Your content marketing strategy should include creating branded content that people love and want to share with others. A big part of digital marketing includes the social media sphere. KPIs to measure the success of this objective include social shares and views from partnership audiences.

Producing Lead Sales

A reliable strategy to meet this target is to compile valuable content offers that you gate with a lead generation form. You not only want people to view your website, but you want them to do something about it. Landing page conversion rates and the number of leads generated from each piece of content are a few of the KPIs related to this objective.

Enhance Retention and Drive Upsells

Meeting this goal provides customers with relevant, valuable content that informs, educates, and entertains them. This is a huge factor in helping you brand your business and become known as an expert in the field. A few content marketing KPI examples include revenue from upselling, percentage of repeat customers, and retention rates.

Convert More Leads to Customers

To meet this target, focus on creating content that educates your leads about your business and its unique products or services. More knowledge available to customers can help them feel more content in purchasing. Engagement and quality content should be aspects considered. KPIs may show lead-to-customer-conversion rates for each campaign you develop or content piece delivered an average conversion time for new customers.

In the end, high-quality content focused on the right KPIs will help you convert leads into new business. That means your measurement should reveal the success of your efforts toward that goal. Take some time to sit down and determine your goals at a high level, then map out a strategy to help get there.

4. Identify Targets

Once you’ve settled on some great content marketing KPIs, the work is not quite done. You need to set up some KPI targets to make these goals meaningful and effective. A target is a specific number that is quantifiable, allowing you to know exactly how above or below you are with your goals.

You’ll likely need to mathematically determine your targets so that they are reasonable and accurate. Many businesses plan five years into the future to really see an improvement in company efforts. Once your five-year targets are planned, you can work backward to determine an accurate target that is attainable.

Not all targets can be calculated mathematically. You may have a handful of both quantity and quality goals. Some may be completely focused on your consumers’ behaviors and not numbers. Consider these perspectives and how you can improve customer service and the overall satisfaction of customers.

Content Marketing KPIs Are Smart and Achievable

Although big business goals can seem daunting, they are a great way to focus on making real progress. Creating realistic and personal content marketing KPIs can be the secret to great digital marketing success. Having a plan in mind with steps you can measure along the way will keep your marketing team busy in the most efficient way.

Remember that there are many ways to make your KPIs achievable. One of these ways may be hiring a content writing agency to do most of the work. Finding a reliable agency that can help you fulfill your writing and SEO needs can make KPIs easier to track and allows your team more time to publish, promote and optimize your content.

Let us know what you think about content marketing KPIs in the comments!