6 KPIs to Measure Your Content Marketing Performance
Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2024 9:52 am
Your content marketing efforts are the backbone of your business growth. By creating quality, optimized, targeted content, you can put your business in front of your audiences and gain brand awareness, authority, and trust.
But creating content isn’t enough to get you there. You also need to track and analyze specific metrics. Unless you’re consistently tracking a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you could be wasting time, money, and effort on a losing strategy.
By tracking KPIs , you can measure your overall success or failure as a content marketer. With KPI analysis, we can determine where we are, where we are at, and how far we still have to go.
So what KPIs should you measure to gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing? This article will walk you through the various KPIs you should track to run a successful content marketing plan.
How to Get Started with Content Marketing?
When we say content marketing armenia phone number resources we’re talking about a marketing plan based on creating and distributing quality content. This can mean text-based content like blog articles, but it also includes video content, audio content, e-books, and more.
But you have to start somewhere, and we recommend creating long-form content as a solid starting point.
Long-form content is a great way to build trust with your audience and present your brand consistently. Well-crafted and properly optimized long-form articles can benefit your audience and build your brand’s reputation. Long-form content also tends to attract more backlinks.
If you’re looking for inspiration on how to create a successful blog and articles, you can follow the example of Tailor Brands. The company is a one-stop shop for those looking to start a business . They create long-form content related to building a business and branding.
The brand creates easy-to-read content that goes into depth without being confusing. These articles answer the most common questions customers have. Their article on the role of a registered representative when starting a business is a great example of creating engaging content with your target audience in mind.
Easy to Read Content
Source: Tailor Brands
Content like the article pictured above not only informs your audience and answers their questions, it also cements you in their hearts and minds as an authority on the subject, meaning you’ll be top of mind when they need to turn to a professional for services related to issues they’re struggling with.
The most effective marketing plans are those that are collaborative across the company . Your marketing team can’t ignore the content marketing plan. It should be distributed and understood by every team in your company. Using operational analytics, you can move data from multiple collection points and storage areas into the hands of your different teams to create more effective workflows and foster greater understanding across teams.
When other teams in your company understand what you’re trying to achieve, they can offer support and streamline your content creation process. For example, a sales assistant can reach out to content writers in marketing to let them know the most common pain points and objections they encounter when speaking with potential customers. The marketing team can then build content around this information and develop a content plan for social media. Using existing online tools, such as an AI writer to speed up your blogging process or a social media post scheduler to organize content, will help marketing teams succeed.
How Should You Track Each KPI for Content Marketing?
Before we get into what KPIs you should be tracking, let’s discuss how to track them. For starters, you’ll need some tools. For example, a tool like Google Analytics would be a great platform for tracking web traffic KPIs .
Then, session replay and heatmap tools like DataDog and Hotjar can help you determine how your audience is interacting with each page. Social media marketing tools like Hootsuite can help you track changes in likes, comments, followers, and overall engagement. You can also use these tools to measure the effectiveness of each post, including how many people saw your posts (impressions) and how many people engaged with them (clicks or shares).
In terms of your SEO content marketing, tools like SurferSEO and Frase can help you optimize your content for SERPs. While these tools are powerful allies in content creation and you need to optimize them first to have data to analyze, they don’t offer the analytics you need to track KPIs.
This is where tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush come in. They are the leaders in the SEO industry and can track metrics that are crucial to your SEO strategy.
Ahrefs stats - SEO Strategy
Source: Ahrefs
This will help you identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in your content strategy.
Tools like these offer a wide range of features, including rank trackers, site explorers, and reports on specific KPIs. You can run these reports manually or schedule them to run automatically and have the results emailed to you.
These tools complement Google Analytics 4 to provide the most detailed and accurate information.
What KPIs Should Content Marketers Track?
Now that you understand the background information, it's time to start exploring what KPIs you should be tracking.
Bounce Rate
While it’s great to know how many people are coming to your site, it’s equally important to understand what they’re doing and how long they’re staying.
This is where our first content marketing KPI, bounce rate, comes in. Your bounce rate tells you the percentage of website visitors who leave after viewing just one page.
But creating content isn’t enough to get you there. You also need to track and analyze specific metrics. Unless you’re consistently tracking a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you could be wasting time, money, and effort on a losing strategy.
By tracking KPIs , you can measure your overall success or failure as a content marketer. With KPI analysis, we can determine where we are, where we are at, and how far we still have to go.
So what KPIs should you measure to gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing? This article will walk you through the various KPIs you should track to run a successful content marketing plan.
How to Get Started with Content Marketing?
When we say content marketing armenia phone number resources we’re talking about a marketing plan based on creating and distributing quality content. This can mean text-based content like blog articles, but it also includes video content, audio content, e-books, and more.
But you have to start somewhere, and we recommend creating long-form content as a solid starting point.
Long-form content is a great way to build trust with your audience and present your brand consistently. Well-crafted and properly optimized long-form articles can benefit your audience and build your brand’s reputation. Long-form content also tends to attract more backlinks.
If you’re looking for inspiration on how to create a successful blog and articles, you can follow the example of Tailor Brands. The company is a one-stop shop for those looking to start a business . They create long-form content related to building a business and branding.
The brand creates easy-to-read content that goes into depth without being confusing. These articles answer the most common questions customers have. Their article on the role of a registered representative when starting a business is a great example of creating engaging content with your target audience in mind.
Easy to Read Content
Source: Tailor Brands
Content like the article pictured above not only informs your audience and answers their questions, it also cements you in their hearts and minds as an authority on the subject, meaning you’ll be top of mind when they need to turn to a professional for services related to issues they’re struggling with.
The most effective marketing plans are those that are collaborative across the company . Your marketing team can’t ignore the content marketing plan. It should be distributed and understood by every team in your company. Using operational analytics, you can move data from multiple collection points and storage areas into the hands of your different teams to create more effective workflows and foster greater understanding across teams.
When other teams in your company understand what you’re trying to achieve, they can offer support and streamline your content creation process. For example, a sales assistant can reach out to content writers in marketing to let them know the most common pain points and objections they encounter when speaking with potential customers. The marketing team can then build content around this information and develop a content plan for social media. Using existing online tools, such as an AI writer to speed up your blogging process or a social media post scheduler to organize content, will help marketing teams succeed.
How Should You Track Each KPI for Content Marketing?
Before we get into what KPIs you should be tracking, let’s discuss how to track them. For starters, you’ll need some tools. For example, a tool like Google Analytics would be a great platform for tracking web traffic KPIs .
Then, session replay and heatmap tools like DataDog and Hotjar can help you determine how your audience is interacting with each page. Social media marketing tools like Hootsuite can help you track changes in likes, comments, followers, and overall engagement. You can also use these tools to measure the effectiveness of each post, including how many people saw your posts (impressions) and how many people engaged with them (clicks or shares).
In terms of your SEO content marketing, tools like SurferSEO and Frase can help you optimize your content for SERPs. While these tools are powerful allies in content creation and you need to optimize them first to have data to analyze, they don’t offer the analytics you need to track KPIs.
This is where tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush come in. They are the leaders in the SEO industry and can track metrics that are crucial to your SEO strategy.
Ahrefs stats - SEO Strategy
Source: Ahrefs
This will help you identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in your content strategy.
Tools like these offer a wide range of features, including rank trackers, site explorers, and reports on specific KPIs. You can run these reports manually or schedule them to run automatically and have the results emailed to you.
These tools complement Google Analytics 4 to provide the most detailed and accurate information.
What KPIs Should Content Marketers Track?
Now that you understand the background information, it's time to start exploring what KPIs you should be tracking.
Bounce Rate
While it’s great to know how many people are coming to your site, it’s equally important to understand what they’re doing and how long they’re staying.
This is where our first content marketing KPI, bounce rate, comes in. Your bounce rate tells you the percentage of website visitors who leave after viewing just one page.