The Most Important Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy: Developing the KPIs

If I asked you to join me on a road trip but you learned I had no idea where I was going or how I was going to get there, you might think I was slightly unhinged, or, at the very least, an adventurous traveler. Yet we hear lots of stories about marketers who have embarked on content marketing programs without setting KPIs (the program goals) and creating milestones (how they will achieve their goals).

These same people then wonder why they struggle to justify the investment they have made. And this is supported by data¹. According to SEMrush, while 84% of the more than 1,500 clients who responded to a recent survey have a content marketing strategy, only 61% measure their content marketing ROI. Furthermore, only 11% rate their strategy as “excellent.” I suspect not measuring, or being able to prove, ROI is one of the main reasons for dissatisfaction with their strategy.

What to do about this?

It’s actually a relatively easy problem to fix.

Firstly, before you can begin to establish your KPIs, you need to consider what your content marketing program is really setting out to achieve. Research¹ consistently tells us that an overwhelming number of businesses are seeking to generate quality leads and increase traffic to their website. Relatedly, and after that, we see “softer” goals like improved brand reputation and increased engagement. Content marketing is great at meeting these top-of-the-funnel objectives. And as you can see below, it also justifies itself across the entire consumer journey. As John von Brachel, SVP, Content Marketing Executive at Bank of America puts it: “it’s really just as important to set a measurable goal for your content, as it is to ensure its level of quality.” John goes on to add, “without data-minded goal-setting, you really can’t say you have a strategy--and there’s little chance you’ll be able to deliver your content to audiences in a personalized way, when and where they need it.” 

So, let’s address the obvious and easiest metrics to put in place and measure—website analytics. Some marketers consider these to be mainly vanity metrics, arguing that they don’t really give you a picture of the ROI your content is generating. However, we’ve heard it said often enough that marketing is really just a big funnel. The goal for marketers is to introduce enough customers at the top of the funnel, so that you can work them through the buyer journey / funnel, and so you have enough left at the bottom (conversion) to hit your sales targets. Ultimately, the more traffic you can bring to your website, the more leads you can convert, or hand off to the sales team.

• So, for the top of the funnel, tracking things like unique users, total impressions, time on page, comments, referral sources, bounce rates, and exit rates and comparing them against the prior month and prior year is an important start in your journey to prove the efficacy of your content. All of these areas are easy to track using quantitative data and they all speak to increased awareness. Clearly, the goal here is to see an upward tick in these metrics. Pardot¹, a leading marketing automation platform, provides a handy list of metrics you can measure here.

• Next up are some of the metrics that impact mid-funnel, such as shopping cart abandonment, repeat visits without conversion, extended sales time (indecision) and increasing preference. While the top-of-funnel metrics are easy to measure using digital analytics tools, measuring increases in preference is a tougher area for content to prove its value. Typically, I’d look to a marketing tactic to explain what the product does and how it’ll benefit the consumer and then we’d measure that impact using qualitative research studies. In this instance, that’s somewhat at odds with what good content marketing should be doing. When done correctly, content marketing isn’t created to sell product directly. On a project we worked on recently for a health insurance client, we were aware one of the main barriers (outside of cost) that stops the uninsured from buying insurance is they don’t understand how it works and what the benefits are. There are so many complex terms used in that industry that most people don’t understand. The job we had was to explain those terms and give real-life examples of how they impact people. We then recommended that the client do qualitative research to see how prospects who had read their content understood the product versus those that hadn’t. The resulting delta helping to explain the value of the content program.  

• Finally, let’s look at some of the harder metrics or “high-value tasks” associated with the lower funnel. This, for many people, is where the rubber meets the road. The “tasks” will depend on the specifics of your business and website. Typically, these actions are steps that you have identified as part of your buyer journey and have created corresponding webpages/tools to help customers navigate through the sales process. Examples include “Shop & Compare,” “Live Chat,” “Contact Us,” “Set up an Account,” and “Subscribe to our eNewsletter.” Can marketing be fully responsible (and accountable) for the actual conversion? The answer to that question largely depends on how much of the sales process marketing controls. There are elements like product features, price and the actual sales experience that are outside of marketing’s control, so you might want to limit marketing accountability to what’s often called “Marketing Qualified Leads³” or MQLs. This article breaks down MQLs in more detail and shows the process during which marketing passes a lead over to sales and sales takes over. I’d argue that leads are the joint responsibility of BOTH sales and marketing and it’s vital for all organizations to have alignment between these two teams⁴, so there’s no disconnect on what makes a good lead.

Ultimately, measuring success is really a yes or no question. Did it succeed or not? What we learn and how we react to those learnings is what makes marketers better. If you want to dig deeper into some more tactical ways to measure content performance, Michael Brenner’s⁵ article here is a really good additional resource for you.

At the end of the day, for me, your KPIs should really be used to measure progress on three things, increasing awareness (top of the funnel) building preference (mid-funnel) and delivering leads (bottom of the funnel). Keep these points in mind and you won’t go far wrong.

BIO

Robin Riddle is the lead content marketing strategist at Foundry 360. He works across B2B as well as B2C and specializes in financial services, insurance, and health care. Prior to his time here, he led content marketing businesses at both The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

A passionate advocate for the value of content marketing, Robin is also heavily involved in industry issues and speaks at many events on the topics of content marketing and native advertising.

Sources:

1. https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics/
2. https://www.pardot.com/blog/14-content-marketing-kpis-you-should-be-tracking/
3. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/06/prove-content-revenue/
4. https://blog.marketo.com/2017/09/real-world-marketing-sales-alignment.html
5. https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/metrics-to-measure-content-performance/