Content Marketing is a booming industry with a 91% success rate from businesses in their marketing efforts.
It is bound to increase the overall global revenue by 106 billion by 2026, especially with the onset of automation in the industry.
Creating and publishing content online has skyrocketed the industry’s growth in the past few decades.
Businesses need to spread brand awareness, promote products and services, and forge a strong partnership with customers, built from the foundations of trust and loyalty.
A large mass of content is being distributed every day which necessitates means to track and record the success of your marketing campaigns.
This success is a spectrum and to measure this, several indicators are serving as benchmarks to compare you to your competitors.
Read along to know the Key Performance Indicators in content marketing that you should care about.
Table of Contents
Key Performance Indicator: Metrics to Evaluate Your Marketing Progress
KPIs are quantitative measuring values to estimate how well your marketing campaigns are performing in alignment with your goals.
These indicators define the progress of your content marketing campaigns in channels like newsletters, website blogs, social media posts, ebooks, case studies, and more.
The measurements span across all industries and provide transformative insights through quantifiable data.
KPIs differ from metrics by their higher-level perspective and definitive, overall goals. Metrics come under KPIs and try to fulfill one purpose at a time. In a nutshell, all KPIs are metrics used to evaluate a particular thing.
Importance of KPIs in Content Marketing
Analytics has become a part of our everyday lives as content marketers.
Tools like Google Analytics, Google Trends, and Hootsuite help us understand how customers interact across your sites and socials, and whether your content resonates with your audience.
This, in turn, helps us predetermine possible customer actions, what content is working, and optimize your marketing strategies according to that.
To uncover your performance report, some metrics or indicators have to be considered to analyze the results.
Deciding which metrics to follow is a crucial task as aimlessly wandering can lead to wasting time and does not produce results.
Moreover, it allows more revenue with automated marketing, make better financial decisions, and increases efficiency.
KPIs to Improve Brand Awareness
The top-of-the-funnel marketing motive is to create brand awareness among your target audience by making your products and services known, and by showing what values you represent beyond your products.
The KPIs associated with brand awareness include,
- Website Traffic
This metric evaluates the traffic driven to your websites and how many have successfully landed and viewed your page.
By identifying what type of article or blog post catches your audience’s attention and leads them to your website, you can manage what content has better reach in the future.
One of the best tools to manage website traffic is using Google Analytics which shows data on unique visitors, where they come from, and how they navigate around your website.
You can also analyse which keywords helped you rank in search results and optimise SEO to rank higher. This is one of the important benchmark KPIs.
- Social Shares and Social Media Metrics
Web pages shared on socials like Facebook and X rank better on Google Search Results.
Content shared on social media has a separate set of metrics aligning with your goals. They include the number of followers, impressions on posts and pages, and post reach.
Tags and Mentions on social media platforms indicate your brand identity and that people are aware of it as they use it.
Hootsuite is an easy-to-use tool to get reports on your social media content performance.
- Inbound links
Links from other authoritative websites linked to yours can drive traffic and help establish topical authority by acknowledging the value you produce through content.
It increases your chances of ranking in Google search results. Therefore, it is an important KPI to consider.
KPIs to Check on Engagement
Audiences engage with posts that are up to their interest and resonate with them on a deeper level. These audiences are more likely to consider buying your product and belong to the middle of the marketing funnel.
Following are the engagement metrics to be measured to increase the probability of customers’ decisions and to fulfill your marketing goals.
- CTR
Click-Through-Rates indicate how many people have clicked the link on your target pages and articles that lead to a page on the website.
This metric also decides whether your content is found to be interesting by the audience and which category they belong to.
It depends on factors like CTA (Call to Action), impressions, and the number of visitors on your page.
- Time on Page
This KPI calculates how long a visitor stays on your page and it determines whether your content is captivating or not.
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- Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is one of the metrics you have to be wary of as it indicates the number of visitors who left your page without engaging.
This must be kept as low as possible and can be measured using Google Analytics and other plugins of your site.
- Comments and Referrals
Comments denote that your content has piqued your audience’s interests and any of your CTAs must have worked its due. They may also be interested in referring your content to others as it adds value, which can also mean a confirmed sale.
KPIs to Ensure Conversion
Conversion is a crucial stage in the buyer’s journey, after surpassing brand awareness and engagement. This is the point where your leads decide to make a purchase decision.
- Conversion Rate
The metric measures the number of visitors on your landing page and their successful conversion by signing up to your newsletter, or purchasing a product.
The number of conversions can be acquired from Google Analytics and the conversion rate can be calculated using this formula.
Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions / Number of Visitors
- Customer Acquisition Rate
This rate is calculated to know the cost of customer acquisition through the marketing campaign conducted by you and the resources required to complete it.
It can be calculated using this formula.
Customer Acquisition Rate = Cost of Sales and Marketing campaign / Number of New Customers.
- Customer Lifetime Value
This is a measure to know how much a customer will spend on you in their entire lifetime. It is a useful metric as it denotes the value of your product.
It can be calculated by,
Customer Lifetime Cost = Customer Value/Average Lifetime for Customer
- ROI
Return on Investment is typically calculated by any business to know if the cost you’ve spent is tallied through returns.
Test to Determine if Your Content Is Effective
If any of the above rates are found to be low and have seen little progress, it is essential to take the A/B experimental test. This is used to understand what makes your customers engage or what makes them deflect it.
It involves splitting your audience to conduct variations of the same campaign and evaluate which content variant has worked well.
Conclusion
Automation can maximize your efficiency and motivate you to work on the analysis side of marketing.
Check out our user-friendly platform GoZen Growth to automate email content and get valuable insights with our inbuilt analytics.
Following and keeping track of KPIs is an integral part of content marketing and may also require expert advice. Keeping the above metrics in mind while planning your content strategies can be advantageous to your marketing efforts.
