For content marketing professionals from Utah to New England, being able to accurately measure your marketing performance is absolutely essential. Many marketers have a tendency to focus too much on buzzworthy keywords and conversion rate optimization (CRO) and could potentially miss out on other key performance indicators, or KPIs.
According to a survey from the 2016 Content Marketing Benchmark Study, only 30 percent of marketers find their content marketing programs effective, down from 38 percent last year. While organizations from the East Coast to Utah are spending more on content marketing than ever, they aren’t finding the campaigns as effective.
Content marketers’ campaigns may seem less effective because they’re using the wrong KPIs to rate performance. Typical effective KPIs include return on investment (ROI), profit margin, sales figures, website visitors, conversions and customer complaints.
Content marketing professionals are in a unique position to track some of these key metrics — in particular website visitors, engagement and conversions — merely by nature of the industry. Social media makes tracking consumer engagement easy, and Google Analytics can tell you everything you need to know about traffic to your website.
For content marketers, though, it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees. Just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean you should. For example, if a lot of people visit your website but not very many are converting, you should focus less on the Web traffic and more on how visitors are actually interacting with the website.
Big data is high for content marketing, but marketers should be sure to use both quantitative and qualitative KPIs. While quantitative KPIs can tell you how prevalent something is, quantitative KPIs can tell you why.
For content marketers and other business owners alike, KPIs should accurately represent the overall goals of the company. Whether your business is located in the Big Apple or in sunny Utah, you should pick an attainable, measurable goal and focus on the indicators that will lead you directly to that goal.
