You can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken. In fact, the only way to avoid that problem is to establish how processes are supposed to work and regularly monitor them for any issues that arise.
Take this approach when starting your content marketing program. More specifically, establish your goals and track your KPIs to identify areas of your program that require work and strengths that you should capitalize on.
What are KPIs?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics you can use to measure performance in a digital marketing program.
The primary reason you’d use KPIs in marketing is to ensure you’re on track to receive a good return on investment (ROI) for the amount you’ve spent on your content marketing initiatives. Remember that KPIs aren’t limited to revenue. Indeed, you can also use them to measure customer satisfaction, customer retention and to lift your brand value.
How to apply KPIs towards content marketing
Depending on what stage your program is in, there are several different sets of performance indicators you should use. Start with top-funnel activities, and as your content program evolves, introduce them at the middle and bottom funnels too.
Tempesta Media recently rolled out our Google Analytics integration to help you further track KPIs. By connecting your Google Analytics account to your Tempesta Media platform, you’ll instantly get a top-funnel dashboard highlighting your main performance indicators. Furthermore, you can track how they’ve performed over a period of 30 days, 60 days or up to the entire previous year.
Tracking KPIs for long-term success
Unlike other marketing programs, you’re won’t see immediate results with content marketing KPIs. On the contrary, it takes months of additive work to generate results. If you check on a daily, or even weekly, basis you’re not going to see the results you want.
With this in mind, for companies just getting started with a content marketing program, we recommend first setting the metrics associated with the top of a sales funnel. Monitor these on a monthly basis so you can measure progress.
After a few months, you can get more aggressive and start introducing mid- and bottom-funnel metrics to the program. At this point, checking weekly will help you track more detailed changes.
If you have a content marketing program, or are planning one, download our ebook: 100 mistakes businesses make when starting, optimizing and scaling content marketing programs. Learn from the mistakes of hundreds of other companies. 100 mistakes walks you through common and uncommon challenges that they faced with their content marketing programs.
To learn more about how Tempesta Media’s content and analytics solutions can help you generate the content marketing results you desire, contact us today.
