How To Build Content Marketing Goals and KPIs for 2024
As you take stock of the year 2023 and look forward to the future, it has never been a better time to reconsider how your business is measuring the success of your content marketing efforts. But how do you do that exactly and why should you? Below, we discuss the importance of key performance indicators (KPIs) and how to set them up for success.
What Are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a series of metrics that businesses use to check-in and evaluate their progress and success as they pertain to achieving specific goals. Both quantifiable and measurable, KPIs provide a clear understanding of performance levels while highlighting areas that require improvement.
KPIs serve as performance benchmarks, allowing businesses to track their progress over time. By setting measurable targets, organizations can identify strengths and weaknesses within different aspects of their operations, whether it be sales, marketing, customer service, or financial performance. These indicators help align individual and team goals with the overall strategic objectives of the organization.
Why Are KPIs Important?
As we highlighted above, KPIs primarily serve as performance benchmarks used to track the progress of an organization towards its objectives. They answer questions such as: How well is our company doing? Where are we headed? And, how can we improve our performance?
KPIs are also important because they help you plan and prioritize—they provide a clear picture of what’s happening and where your organization needs to focus its efforts to achieve success.What's more, KPIs foster a culture of accountability and transparency, encouraging owners and employees alike to take ownership of their responsibilities and continue to contribute to the collective success of the business.
How Are KPIs Different from Goals?
While both KPIs and goals are similar in that they both measure and track progress towards achieving a desired outcome, provide frameworks for businesses to set targets and evaluate performances, there are distinct differences between the two.
Particularly, goals are broad, high-level statements that define what a business wants to achieve. They are long-term, and usually reflect the overall strategic nature of the business. Qualitative in nature, goals focus on outcomes, for example, increasing market share, expanding social media presence, or improving customer satisfaction.
Popular KPIs to Track
A good KPI is one that not only measures performance but also aligns with your business objectives, guiding you towards the creation of compelling content that informs your target audience, while building trust, authenticity, and meaningful relationships. To effectively track and gauge the success of your marketing efforts, these popular KPIs are essential:
Click Through Rates (CTR)
A metric that measures the percentage of people that click on a specific link or call-to-action (CTA) compared to the number of people that viewed it, CTRs help assess the effectiveness of your messaging in attracting and engaging your audience.
A higher CTR indicates engaging and relevant content that speaks directly to your target audience and compels them to click forward and explore further. While a lower CTR warns you that it may be time to reassess your copy and content to determine what is working and what needs improvement.
Leads Generated
Necessary for evaluating the efficiency of your lead-generation channels as well as market demand and interest, lead generation is an important KPI to monitor. These leads typically comprise individuals who have completed a form on your website, subscribed to your newsletter, or otherwise indicated interest in what you offer.
By consistently monitoring and analyzing this metric, you can evaluate both the quantity and quality of leads generated. This information empowers you to identify the most fruitful lead generation channels and make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing efforts.
Page Views
A page view KPI will measure the total number of times that a specific page on a website is viewed by visitors. This can be incredibly helpful, not just by providing an indication of how many visitors are viewing a page, but also by providing insight into which pages are most popular. This can help you understand what content is resonating with your audience and make it easier to create new content that will be more effective at driving traffic and conversions.
Website Traffic
Tracking your web traffic allows you to measure the number of visitors or users coming to your website to understand its overall performance and popularity. Additionally, you can monitor the traffic sources that are driving the most traffic—whether it’s organic search, paid ads or referrals from other websites. This information enables you to identify your most effective marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize future campaigns.
Conversion Rate
Often considered the 'be all-end-all' KPI, the conversion rate tracks the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action or goal out of the total number of visitors to a webpage.
Conversion rates indicate the efficacy of marketing and sales efforts, and help you understand what aspects of your website are most effective at converting visitors into leads and sales. This can help you make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts for maximum return on investment.
Psst: BitterRoot offers a FREE downloadable SMART Goals and KPI Calculator Toolkit. Simply follow the prompts to devise your own SMART goals and discover KPI benchmarks you should be striving for. Download now!
Content Marketing Goals for an Ecommerce Brand vs. B2B
While KPIs can be utilized similarly between both B2B and B2C businesses to assess the progress of a content marketing strategy, the goals of both may look different. For example, a B2B company may want to drive more leads or increase website traffic and conversions. A B2C eCommerce brand, on the other hand, may want to increase customer loyalty and revenue from existing customers.
As such, when setting the content marketing goals for your brand, it’s important to consider what you want to accomplish with your content.
Specific
A goal that is specific will have a clearly defined outcome that is so clearly articulated that anyone within the organization can understand. For example, “Sell 50 of our company branded sweatshirts via blog posts” is more specific than simply, “Achieve 50 sales”. In setting a specific goal, you will need to define what the outcome is (here, ten sales) and the actions that lead to it (selling the sweatshirts through blog posts).
Achievable
Sure, it might be nice to set a goal of selling a million company branded sweatshirts…but is that actually attainable in your first year of business? By ensuring that your goals are achievable you are able to set yourself up for steady success and realistic growth.
Time-Bound
Finally, it is important to remember that all of your goals need to act within a specific timeframe or deadline for completion. This creates a sense of urgency and promotes accountability through the focus on a timely execution.
Setting SMART Goals for Content Marketing
When in doubt, think SMART. That is: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound objectives that provide a comprehensive framework for success.
Measurable
This is your quantifiable objective that allows you to track the progress towards the goal. In the example above, the data we are collecting is the amount of sales, which allows you to measure the success of your efforts.
Relevant
The goals you set for yourself should be relevant to your business. You have to ask yourself why you are going after this goal in particular.
How to Use Your Goals to Decide What KPIs to Prioritize
By determining your goals through a SMART framework and then prioritizing them according to their importance, you can better understand which KPIs are most important for your business. This will help you focus on the metrics that matter most when measuring your performance and making strategic decisions about where to spend time and resources.
Define Your Goals
As we described above, using the SMART goal framework allows you to set clear and measurable objectives. Start by defining your goals based on specific outcomes you want to achieve. Just remember to maintain realistic goal expectations, particularly as you begin measuring your performance.
Consider Relevant KPIs
The goals you set will determine the KPI metrics you measure progress with. For instance, if the goal is to enhance lead conversion through on-page tools by 25% by December, relevant KPIs would include CTRs of calls to action and page visits. These metrics can then shape your SEO and content optimization strategy.
Examine Data Availability
Of course the KPIs that you set will be influenced by the data that's available and how easy it is to access. This will have a significant impact on the types of goals you set, as well as how quickly you can measure performance against them.
If you're in a situation where there are no existing tools or KPIs to measure your website's performance, then you'll need to invest time in developing them before making any changes. Google Analytics is a free tool that is incredibly useful for accessing and measuring data. If you're not already using Google Analytics, then this is an excellent place to start.
Prioritize Your KPIs
Last but not least, before you start working on any changes to your website, it's important to prioritize the KPIs that are most important. This will help you focus on improving the data that makes a difference, rather than wasting time on things that won't have a significant impact.
No Content Marketing Strategy is Complete Without KPIs
Have you started tracking your own KPIs? If not, it's time to get started! Use the tips above to help you create a content marketing strategy that works. Looking for extra help? BitterRoot can help. We can devise custom KPIs that will help you measure the success of your content marketing efforts. We'll take the time to analyze and understand what's working and what's not, so that you can make better informed decisions about how to move forward.
Schedule a discovery call today and we'll provide three key performance indicators that will help you improve your content marketing strategy.