Content marketing is a vital component of any successful inbound marketing programme. Today, marketers can attract prospects, nurture leads, and retain customers through publishing helpful content that answers peoples’ questions and concerns. An on-brand relevant variety of content like blogs, infographics, podcasts, webinars and videos help attract and convert leads. Content marketing is equally important to both B2B and B2C businesses. But is your content marketing strategy measuring up? Are you consistently tracking KPI’s? An integral part of a successful content marketing plan is setting objectives and measuring success.
We have put together four content marketing key performance indicators you should be tracking, but probably aren’t.
1. Website Traffic
Google Analytics can report approximate numbers of visitors to your site, the bounce rate, the average time spent on your site, and the geographic areas of your website’s visitors. This helps the company tailor content to their website users’ needs, consider setting up a site in a different language with a local URL, and determine whether technical site changes like the hosting IP address needs to be changed.
2. Conversion Rate
The purpose of content marketing is to attract marketing-qualified prospects who may one day become customers. Your website’s conversion rate is how many visitors respond to your call-to-actions. You may be searching for leads, newsletter sign-ups, trials downloads, or account registrations. Calculating conversions should be a priority and is easy to do. E-commerce companies may monitor neglected shopping carts. Google analytics can determine whether newsletter sign-ups or e-zine downloads are converting leads to customers.
3. Customer Retention
Once leads are converted into customers, they must be retained with great content. Delight your customers with relevant and valuable content that answers their questions. Helpful blogs, newsletters, and website content will ensure customers stay loyal to your brand and become promoters of your brand. Track customer retention rate, profit from upselling and percentage of repeat customers. These KPIs can be evaluated through Google Analytics, social media and email marketing metrics, and through liaising with the sales team who work closely with new customers and renewals.
4. Return on Investment
Your ROI determines how profitable a marketing strategy is. To calculate your marketing department’s ROI: gauge your cost per lead i.e. how much revenue is spent on resources, work hours, and software to gain a lead. Compare this cost-per-lead to your lead-to-close rate, and average revenue earned per lead.
Content marketing is an essential element of any successful marketing campaign. A successful content marketing strategy requires setting realistic goals, and measuring results. Tracking key performance indicators helps ensure targets are being met, and improvements are made. Five important key performance indicators to measure are: traffic to your website, lead conversion rate, customer retention, and return on investment.
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