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Are you effectively managing your
key performance indicators
(KPIs)? Working towards success begins with selecting a destination. Your key performance indicators will provide you with reliable goal posts throughout your journey — but first you need to find them.
Defining Your Content Marketing KPIs
Before you develop your KPIs, you need to ask yourself a simple question: what do you define as success? Traffic? Revenue? Conversion? All of the above? A key performance indicator is not a universal constant; it must be tailored to your personal needs.
A blog’s key performance indicators ( overall blog visits, top viewed posts ) may be vastly different from an e-commerce site’s key performance indicators ( pay-per-click, affiliate performance ).
In content marketing, your KPIs will generally relate directly to the effectiveness of your content strategy . Are readers satisfied with your content? Is your content encouraging conversions?
Analyzing Your Content Marketing KPIs
Your KPIs give you a metric by which to measure success, but they won’t necessarily tell you why your content is a success. For that, you need analysis.
When developing your content marketing KPIs, part of your focus should be on developing performance indicators that are useful for analysis. An analysis of your KPIs should give you insight into your marketing strategy. Tracking how long a reader lingers on your content is an example of a meaningful KPI. If revenue has gone down and readers are viewing content for shorter periods, it’s clear that engagement is a factor.
At the same time, companies need to avoid KPI overload. When too many metrics are tracked, a company starts falling into “big data” territory. Unwieldy data sets often yield no actionable results; with too much information available, the analysis becomes muddled and confusing. Instead, marketers should narrow down to their most important KPIs and ditch the rest.
Monitoring Your Content Marketing KPIs
Content marketing KPIs are not marketing strategies or marketing goals. Instead, they are designed to be compared to themselves historically. They are intended to give a marketer a fuller picture of whether their strategies are working and whether there are any developing trends.
To be useful, content marketing KPIs need to be collected and monitored on a regular basis. If the KPIs aren’t being reviewed, a marketer has no idea whether or not their current strategies are successful. Likewise, if KPIs aren’t being collected accurately , they aren’t useful.
Key performance indicators are a critical component to any marketing campaign, and they must be integrated into every level of marketing analysis if they are to remain a useful indicator of success. The thoughtful development of appropriate KPIs will go a long way in any content marketing strategy.
If you need help in identifying and analyzing your content marketing KPIs, contact us today for a free consultation. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
