When we talk about KPIs, we are referring to Key Performance Indicators - something which is important to consider when producing content. This is because they allow content creators to measure the success of each piece of content against their business goals. But, deciding on what these KPIs can be tricky, which is why in this article we will highlight which KPIs you should be looking at for your content and why they matter.
Before we delve into the nuances of KPIs, it’s important to understand exactly what content marketing is and why content marketing is a critical part of any digital marketing strategy. In simple terms, content marketing is the creation, publication and distribution of content that is designed to:
As you can see, content plays a key role in every element of the customer journey, which is one of the reasons it’s such an integral part of successful digital marketing. However, this isn’t the only reason why content marketing should be a top priority for any business.
Content marketing is arguably one of the most important aspects of a digital marketing strategy, but why is content marketing so important? As well as being a valuable activity in its own right, it also forms the basis of many other marketing activities, including:
After all, these marketing activities rely heavily on ‘content’ to engage and motivate the audience. From drafting informative, keyword-rich blog posts to drive targeted traffic to your website to crafting compelling ad content to entice users to click-through to your landing page, content marketing underpins so many aspects of a digital marketing strategy and has a critical impact on the success of marketing activities.
It’s easy to assume that, if you create engaging and compelling content, it will automatically bring users to your site and convert them into paying customers, but the reality is a little more complex. Without effective distribution, your reach will be limited, and the impact of your content marketing will be reduced.
Once you know how content marketing works and how to set KPIs, however, you’ll be well on the way to implementing an effective strategy. You may want to create content that targets search terms and keywords your target audience are frequently searching for so that you can drive organic traffic to your site, for example. Similarly, you may decide to create social media content focused on targeted hashtags to increase the reach of your content or original and innovative video content that has a high chance of going viral.
While the quality of your content is obviously of paramount importance, an effective distribution strategy is also critical if you want to get the most out of your marketing and setting meaningful KPIs can help you to achieve this.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable metrics that track your progress towards a specific goal. Essentially, they give you an indication of whether your performance is on track to meet your objectives and allow you to gauge the success of an activity or campaign while it’s still ongoing.
KPIs are important because they provide useful and actionable insights that can be used to optimise campaign performance and deliver better results. Rather than waiting until the end of a campaign to assess its performance, you can use KPIs to undertake mid-campaign analysis. This gives you an opportunity to adjust the campaign to achieve optimal results and, therefore, avoid unnecessary losses and increase the ROI.
There are many metrics and KPIs that can be used to monitor the success of your content marketing, including:
However, the specific KPIs you use may depend on the type of content you’re publishing, as well as additional marketing activities that you’re undertaking and the overarching goal you’re aiming to achieve.
If you want to raise brand awareness via social media marketing, for example, your content marketing KPIs may be CTR, engagement, page views, and likes, shares and comments. Alternatively, if you’re using SEO to generate targeted website traffic, SERPs rankings, page views, share of voice and leads generated may be your most important KPIs.
Before you can set KPIs, however, you’ll need to define your overall goals. For example, what’s the purpose of a specific piece of content and what do you want to achieve with it? If you’re publishing a blog post with the intention of generating leads, then you’ll need a way to define a ‘lead’ and measure how many leads are obtained via the post.
Once you’ve set your overall goal, you can set KPIs accordingly. If you want to achieve 40 leads within a 4-week period with an 8% conversion rate, for example, your corresponding KPIs can be broken down to 10 leads per week, 120 page views per week etc.
All KPIs should be quantifiable, but how do you go about measuring them? Fortunately, there are many analytics platforms that make it easy to access the data you need to measure KPIs. If you’re using GA4 and Google Search Console to monitor website performance, for example, you can use this data to analyse key metrics of specific content pages, while external platforms, such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager or Meta Business Suite provide in-platform metrics too.
As this post shows, an effective content marketing strategy is about much more than simply creating great content. To succeed in a competitive digital world, you’ll need to take a strategic and holistic approach to content marketing – and we can help.
To find out more about our bespoke content marketing services, get in touch with our team now!
