SMART KPIs for content marketing are a quantifiable measure to evaluate how your business performs to achieve its goals. They are the key factors in making decisions and validating returns on your marketing spending. KPIs differ based on the different factors of a business. After you plan and implement your KPIs, you should measure your results to check whether your marketing efforts were successful and to enforce the same KPIs to be followed over the long term.
Choosing the right SMART KPIs for content marketing to align with your business goals is important to achieve actionable results. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time and resources. To choose efficient marketing KPIs, first, answer these questions.
- What is my business about?
- What results do I need to achieve for my business to grow?
- Do I need sales of my products or services, or do I need to generate subscriptions?
The answers to these questions will help you to choose a KPI that matches your business objectives.
What Are SMART KPIs for Content Marketing?
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. They must be easy to understand for the peers to relate to, and the results must be measured. Businesses need to set SMART KPIs as they lay a path for managers and employees.
It encourages them not to deviate from the track and achieve their goals. It helps managers to evaluate employees based on these metrics.
For example, a SMART KPI for an employee would be to increase the sales figure by 20% in a month. This KPI is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The KPI is specific, as it talks about sales figures, and the increase in the sales figure can be counted, so it is also measurable.
It is attainable as it’s not difficult to attain with the given resources and relevant as an employee in the sales department is expected to increase the sales figures. The KPI is time-bound as it has to be reached within a month.
SMART KPIs for content marketing can be evaluated at the department or top management level for measuring the organization or at the employee level for measuring the employee’s performance during reviews between managers and other heads.
SMART KPIs for Content Marketing
When setting the SMART KPIs for content marketing, have the conversion funnel at the top of your mind. At every step of the conversion funnel, measure the content’s performance at different stages of the customer’s journey. The goals of the content marketing strategies are
- Conversion
- Reputation
- Engagement
Each goal is associated with a few SMART KPIs for content marketing used to measure success across more than one goal. In this article, I have explained a few KPIs for content marketing and how they interact. Read on to learn more about each of them.
SMART KPIs for Content Marketing – Conversions
Businesses are interested in conversing casual visitors to your website with active customers. Depending on your business, the various conversions are sales, leads, email signups, form completions, newsletter subscriptions, and visits to the landing page. Conversions are important, as it brings profit to your business. The ultimate goal of conversions is sales and revenue, but other factors are also valuable, as they help you find leads whom you can nurture and convert to potential customers.
You can understand what interests your customers and what marketing strategies work by tracking conversions. Tracking this information can help you adjust your website, marketing plans, and sales strategies accordingly.
1. Leads
Businesses thrive on the leads generated by website content, products, or services. The challenge is to find unique ways to attract customers to your business. Potential customers must be interested in knowing more about your business and hear from you naturally.
Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to your business and kindling their interest by informing them about your products and services. The ultimate goal is to convert them into customers. You can generate leads through blog posts, forms, job applications, landing pages, and surveys.
2. Sales
You measure the success of your business by the transaction that happened through your website and the revenue it generated. Google offers a versatile tool to track these events through a tool called Google Analytics. This service provides statistics and basic analytical tools for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and marketing analytics.
You can track sources, referrals, and organic searches on your website. You can also customize your metrics and track customers based on them. You can also track how many purchased a product after reading the blog that talks about that product.
3. Goal Accomplishment
You need figures in terms of the number of transactions on your website. The end result is how much revenue is generated, which is very obvious to measure. You can set goals in Google Analytics to monitor your website, even when it hasn’t generated enough transactions or revenue. The goals do not always need to be monetary. They can be non-monetary also, such as filling out a form, making a phone call, or subscribing to a newsletter.
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Content marketing strategy includes how you use email marketing to reach your potential customers. The SMART KPIs you have set for your content marketing strategy also extend to email marketing. Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on the links in your email against the total number of subscribers who received the email.
SMART KPIs for content marketing – Reputation
Businesses must check their online reputation and what is said about them. If it does not give a positive impression, you must find ways to fix it. More than 40% of marketers monitor their company’s online reputation daily, and others monitor it on an hourly basis.
Reputation management analyses what a potential customer, random user, or competitor will discover about your business, products, or services when they search on Google.
1. Influencer Marketing
Influence marketing is the business collaborating with an online influencer to talk about your business or the product or services you sell. This is an effective way to improve your marketing strategy to achieve your business objectives.
The key benefits of Influencer Marketing:
- Brand Awareness.
- Enhanced Content Strategy.
- Quality Lead Generation.
- Cost-Effectiveness.
Influencer Marketing harnesses the power of social media to promote your brand. Most digital marketers use Influencer Marketing to boost brand awareness. An influencer, or an opinion leader, shares your brand’s story, mission, and values with their follower base.
You can create posts or blogs from the influencer’s content and repost them across various social media platforms. You can encourage user-generated content like guest blog writers like other brands.
This brings qualified leads from multiple channels. Customers consider reviews and ‘likes’ before deciding whether to buy from you or not. They are more likely to buy from brands their favorite blogger advertises.
A well-sketched influential marketing strategy would return better results for lower fees. It is noteworthy that for every $1 spent on influential marketing, more brands make $5.20 of profit. At the same time, it improves your brand awareness and online presence and ensures lead generation.
2. Keyword Ranking
Make sure to track your success when you build a content strategy around a targeted keyword. There are many tools in the market to track keyword rankings, such as ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner.
You can find how your website ranks for a specific set of keywords. Tracking your keyword position is important as it determines your SEO strategy’s effectiveness. Keyword tracking helps you to analyze why your organic traffic went up or down. This is an important KPI to track because you see your website moving up on the SERP result page.
3. Sentiment Analysis
Businesses use sentiment analysis to find their own online mentions and emotions attached to them. They can also track competitor mentions for comparison purposes. The goal is to analyze people’s opinions in a way that can help businesses expand.
Businesses can leverage to track the way people talk about their content campaigns. Sentiment analysis measures reputation from social media mentions.
4. Likes and Shares
You establish a rapport with your audiences when you publish quality content with which they can easily engage. Your target audience, as well as Google, notices when you post frequently. The users’ likes and shares support such posts. Each post can communicate a particular purpose or encourage a follower to become a prospect shortly.
Optimizing keywords and content, including quality backlinks to your content, urges users to perform a Call to Action (CTA). Your followers share the blog posts on their social media websites, which indirectly enhances your sales and online reputation.
5. Backlinks
Backlinks are an important metric of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in content. You gain backlinks when your content is of high quality, adding value to SERP results. Backlinks from authoritative sites keep your readers engaged and build your reputation with the users and Google.
Set backlinks as a SMART KPI, and you can check whether another source links to your content. Research says that your website has more chances of ranking if you have at least one high-ranking website pointing to your content.
SMART KPIs for content marketing – Engagement
Client engagement is interacting with customers through various channels to nurture and strengthen their relationships. Keep clients engaged throughout their purchase journey to develop customer loyalty and collect valuable customer information. More interactions help buyers find your brand more valuable and provide you with customer insights.
1. Comments
Comments are the essence of a blog post. It can help your users to communicate with you. With good comments, you will get more user-generated content on your blog that may help you get a better keyword ranking on the search engine results page. Even the comments section brings organic traffic to your website since users nowadays show their speaking talents by engaging with others in the comment section.
2. Scroll Depth
Using Google Analytics, you can track users’ scroll activity to understand how well your users engage with your content. By this, you can optimize your pages for more engagement. Scroll depth describes how far website visitors scroll down a web page.
Scroll depth is one of the SMART KPIs for content marketing you can track to evaluate the performance of your content. You should look at several metrics to understand how users interact with your content. Bounce rate numbers do not mean that your content needs improvement. Users may not need to read other pages or links if your website is well-organized and your content directly answers the user’s questions.
By tracking your scroll depth, you can understand how far your readers have gone on your website pages.
3. Time on Page
Time on the page is another engagement KPI you can track. It shows how long people typically spend reading your content. This KPI is measured in seconds.
Your website must be optimized for visitors to browse and stick around. Users stay longer because they enjoy the content and experience. It is important to note that the longer a user spends on your page, the more they are engaged with your content. A 2500-word article will have a much longer time on a page than a 500-word blog post.
4. Pages Per Session
One of the SMART KPIs for content marketing is to gauge how engaging the content on your website or post is. The business that relies on Adsense, advertising, or affiliate revenue wants to increase the number of pages each user views. More time spent on your website means more revenue growth.
A session is a duration when a user is active on your website. If the user is inactive for more than 30 minutes, it is considered the end of the session for that user. Pages per session are the average number of pages a user views in a given session. For instance, if your website has an average of 3 pages per session, it means that a user has visited 3 web pages before leaving your website.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the importance of tracking KPIs?
Measuring the right KPIs will help you to analyze which metric works and which doesn’t. These metrics will help you to make the right decisions for your business, make relevant changes, and tweak your metrics to improve your campaign’s ROI.
2. What is a KPI?
KPI is a quantifiable value used to evaluate the success of a business or an organization, process, or employee to find out how it meets the objectives or goals.
3. What are the KPIs for a marketing manager?
– To measure the profitability of the business.
– To convert prospective leads to clients.
– To have feedback methods and surveys to understand the business.
– To identify skill gaps and set personal development goals for the employees.
4. What is a content marketing campaign?
Creating and maintaining an entire blog is an example of a content marketing campaign that is part of a larger strategy. Creating practice guides, ebooks, webinars, videos, and podcasts is part of content marketing campaigns.
5. What is influencer marketing?
When brands co-create content with influencers, it is called influencer marketing. It allows businesses to expand their reach on social media beyond their official page and ads. They rely on influencers’ popularity and can quickly get the target audience’s attention.
Closing Thoughts
You must choose the right SMART KPIs for the content marketing strategy to succeed in your business. These KPIs must be measurable, so you can evaluate your growth periodically. Your content marketing strategy should effectively bring in more leads and revenue to your business.
This article lists a few metrics to measure your KPIs, but there are other factors that you can include in your content marketing strategy to measure your success. There is no specific measurement method; you can pick a few of the metrics listed above and try them out for yourself. Be sure of your goals, set the KPIs, and measure them. Keep checking our recent blogs to know more about content marketing strategies for social media, lead generation, and other use cases.
