Transitioning Your Content Marketing into Key Performance Indicators

When it comes to your content marketing materials, of course, the quality of your content must be established and consistent. People come to expect that from you and you must ensure that you provide that level of content always. So, how do you take your content marketing materials and transition them into KPIs?

Choosing the most effective content marketing strategy for your business

Content marketing materials have to create an impact in many different ways. In addition to solid, compelling writing, the content marketing materials also need to make a positive impression and produce results that allow you (as the business owner) to give your prospects and existing clients what they want and need. 

On the other hand, another aspect (or result) of your business about which you should pay particular attention is your key performance indicators (KPIs) and how your content marketing efforts affects your KPIs. At this juncture, it is important for you to understand that there is no shortcut to successfully getting your content marketing content to result in improved KPIs.

You need to be able to identify which KPIs are the ones that you need to pay attention to and to measure. Each business has a different (or, at least, slightly different) set of goals in mind and the content marketing materials will be reflective of that. Some of the factors or features that will have an impact on your KPIs are whether your business is small, medium, or large; how much money you have to spend on marketing; who you have to generate the content marketing materials; a pattern of KPIs; and some other factors that you may not even have considered yet. 

Very possibly, your most effective marketing approach might be to identify your business’ goals and marry those goals to your KPIs initially. The question is, what is the best way to go about accomplishing that?

Identify your content marketing goals and key performance indicators

As you are going through this process, it will probably be very sensible for you to keep a written record of everything that you are doing with regard to your content marketing strategy. If you do that, it will be very easy for you to refer to that written record whenever you wish. That will prove to be very helpful. It is not a good idea, in general, to commit a large amount of information to memory. Even a person with an excellent memory is bound to forget something (and probably something important), which could prove to be a disaster. As you are noting your content marketing goals, it is a really good idea to make sure that you are creating content with the right ideas in mind. Some of the KPIs that are important for you are unique visits, geographic location, and readership on mobile devices. Comments, interactions, and reader engagement are also critical to your success.

• Write content for the right reasons: When you actually sit down to write your content marketing materials, you should always make sure that you are writing for the right reasons. In other words, you should right with the goal in mind to produce a specific result. The result may be different for each business; however, the goals should be established way before the results actually occur. You should write content that communicates to your reader exactly how you are going to solve his or her problem(s).

• Work on your business’ brand awareness: You want your content to get noticed by other people. That means that it needs to be compelling, educational, exciting, and basically, extremely valuable to your readers. There are several different ways in which you can increase brand awareness. You can share information using SlideShare, eBooks, white papers, webinars, etc. You can also create a series of short videos. Videos work very well in many cases because a large number of people are visual and they respond more positively to videos than to the written word.

• Generate increased traffic to your website: If your content is doing its job properly, it will generate more traffic to your website. Once people visit your website, you will be able to show them what you can really do and how you can solve their problems. Of course, that is considering that your website content says what it should say and in the way that it should say it. If you are presenting the information in a way that really produces results, you will be able to progress significantly with what you are trying to accomplish. A higher volume of traffic ties in closely with your KPIs.

• Create more leads: Once you have increased the volume of traffic to your website, the next logical step is that you will be able to create more leads for your business. You want to make sure that you offer your online connections something of enhanced value so that they stay connected to you and eventually become loyal to you on a permanent basis.

• Take your leads and convert them to clients: Now that you have managed to increase the number of leads that you are able to generate, the next step is to turn at least a portion of those leads into new clients. As always, you will need to focus your content with that in mind. The types of content that may help you to accomplish that are videos, case studies, compelling graphic images, and other forms of content with a graphic side to them.

• Holding onto your clients: If you think in terms of your ultimate goal, it is not just acquiring new clients. More importantly and more sustaining (the proverbial jewel in the crown) is retaining those clients on a permanent basis. You will see that your KPIs will be closely linked to your success. It is important to remember that the more clients you manage to retain, the more successful your business will be in the long run.

Conclusion

So, now it is time to map out your strategy. If your strategy is solid and well thought out, it will get you to where you need and want to be. Always bear in mind that your content marketing and your KPIs must always be closely connected.

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