With more brands and enterprises making the transition to full-blown digital publishers and media entities, demand is greater than ever in two crucial areas:
As a result, marketers are pushing harder to measure content – not just at the transactional level but also at touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Establishing a basis for measuring performance is key. It's a critical cornerstone of any content marketing program, strategy, and/or tactic. When considering the big picture, it can sometimes be tricky to speak to the efficacy of your content marketing program.
Whether your next baseline analytics strategy is happening right now, next month, or next year, the following 15 considerations should be top of mind when you and your organization think about content marketing KPIs and metrics. Consider each point and ask yourself (and your organization) to address the questions as well.
1. Map Specific Business Goals To Content KPIs & MetricsThe goal of this exercise is to get a clear picture of your content marketing goals. What are your business objectives at a tactical, strategic, and even logistical level.
Ask yourself:
Establishing KPIs and metrics shouldn't be a static, one-time event. In order to run an effective program, you should assess data, seek and find insights, discover new parts of the ongoing project, and find new stories within your data to match business goals.
KPIs and metrics should be evaluated for relevancy to the program. Being fluid in how you measure results may open up substantial opportunities to expand business goals and performance.
Ask yourself:
When measuring the effects of your publishing efforts, it's important to distinguish between your on-site assets (such as your website or blog) and off-site assets (areas where you interact but don't control at the domain level). Remember to tag your off-site assets when appropriate.
Measure the overlapping areas as well, such as traffic from social spaces and reciprocation between social and search returns.
Ask yourself:
There is just as much art to analytics as there is science. You and your teams need to be creative in translating your data into actionable insights for your business.
Don't get stuck in a rut of churning the same old data over and over again. Challenge yourself and your team to think differently about your data and how you can apply your data insights in different ways.
Ask yourself:
Remember that data, KPIs, and metrics are useful only when you apply insight and take action. Your insights show you where a problem or opportunity might exist, and only when you take action will you solve that problem or seize the opportunity.
Ask yourself:
Plain, old-fashioned common sense will help guide you to the most viable or feasible solution. With any type of data, you will most often find short-term, medium-term, and long-term issues. And those require an appropriate solution as it relates to your own business situation and resources.
Ask yourself:
It's important to see the big picture for your website and overall content performance. But measure the details, too! After all, looking closely at the "weeds" can tell you how much traffic/interest a particular page or keyword idea is generating and whether it's a good idea worth pursuing further.
Detailed data can also serve as a radar for identifying emerging trends as they happen. Analyzing your data down to the URL level can indicate how well your content efforts are resonating, especially when those page-level efforts are reasonably extrapolated to wider sections and themes of your digital assets.
Ask yourself:
To focus on the signals that matter most, consider your major interactions and content pushes as "events." This may be something that exists on your site (a page, a section of your website, a keyword phrase, an entire keyword theme) or a content or technical implementation.
Once your event is marked, you can hone in and measure all the data in the form of search traffic and social engagement. As you create successful events that produce a positive return on investment (ROI), reinvest and replicate those events that align with your business goals.
Ask yourself:
One of the worst sins of modern marketing is thinking of people as data points. This might involve cornering a person into a spreadsheet as a unique visitor, a keyword referral, or other traffic stat.
It's important to remember that those data points are actually people. In many cases, they have a search intent or a problem they are trying to solve.
This is often a problem in the way analytics providers are set up. But the good news is that some providers are trying to tell you more about who your audience really is. Try to look for the person, the user experience, or the thinking behind the data.
Ask yourself:
For all the talk about analytics and measurement in the digital world, there is no greater tool than your brain. Your brain contains the key link to interpreting data into actionable insights and is the connective element between your business intelligence, goals, execution, and data.
Ask yourself:
Avinash Kaushik, an analytics evangelist for Google, is considered one of the world's leading authorities for proper analytics strategy and management. Just as your brain is the most important tool of all, Kaushik recommends spending 10 percent of your analytics budget on tools and 90 percent on the brains you will need to make sense of it.
Even if you believe your expensive and shiny new analytics widget is the best thing ever, you won't be able to use and interpret it properly without the right amount of brain power to translate it into business intelligence.
Ask yourself:
Be sure to spread your findings to other parts of your organization. In some cases, you might not have the direct knowledge to properly interpret the data, so forwarding it to someone with more specific knowledge can help turn the data into an actionable insight.
Consider forwarding relevant data to product managers, sales associates, customer service representatives, hiring organizations within your company, and your IT and creative teams, among many others.
Ask yourself:
Two of the most forgotten or unspoken metrics in all of analytics are:
As you prioritize your metrics, make sure you strike a realistic balance between the juice you're going to get vs. how hard you have to squeeze to get it. This is the difference between focusing on the right areas and going off on a tangent that yields no positive results.
Ask yourself:
Content marketing measurement can be complex. It takes a lot of time and patience to build the big-picture view for your business, as well as a real-time view. Because you will be dealing with data points from varying sources, it's important to approach analytics with the right balance of effort and insight.
A problem often occurs when marketers or business owners get overly obsessed with a signal data point, to the extent that all resources are focused on a problem or solution that is not proportionally important to your overall goals.
Bottom line: if you're generating a positive ROI for your spend using either direct response or branding metrics, then you're generally in a good place, especially when compared to many other forms of advertising and marketing.
Don't take away from resources in content production, social media management, or search optimization in order to go chasing ghosts. Focus on what is real and on generating positive ROI, and keep reinvesting in those areas.
Ask yourself:
One of the biggest pitfalls of analyzing the benefits of search, social, and content is when business owners and marketers try to apply direct-response metrics to branding. If you are trying to measure branding goals by the same standards as direct monetary return, then you are doing it wrong (that is, unless you have strict monetary values applied to each branding goal and action).
Not all branding goals should have a monetary value assigned. These goals are more qualitative.
Branding is one of the largest untapped areas in all of content marketing. Marketers are obsessed with the online channel as a direct-response medium, while largely saving their brand budget for more traditional areas like the aforementioned TV, radio, and print. By doing so, they have ignored the massive exposure that can be obtained in online channels, beyond banner ads and rich ad placements.
"Traditional" branding ad platforms of the future — even in TV, radio, and print — will be run by a robust technology company like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or even Apple. But before we get there, marketers will need to change their perceptions about direct response and digital branding.
As you begin to establish metrics, be careful of the goals you assign to different directives. If you aren't fair in your comparisons or expectations, then you will essentially be holding back your content marketing strategy from ever performing as well as it could.
Ask yourself:
Whether you're setting your metrics and KPIs for brand business goals, transactional goals, or something more complex and in-between, it's important to think carefully and critically before making them a firm part of your measurement strategy.
Take one — or take all — of these considerations, and you will find yourself getting much more from your content marketing program than you are now.
Use these tips and revisit them periodically to ensure you are getting the most out of your content marketing program efforts.
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Source: Content Marketing KPIs & Metrics: 15 Important Considerations
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