How to Set KPIs for Content Marketing Campaign?

Set the KPIs for your Content Marketing Campaign, while keeping in mind, your marketing objectives and goals. At the same time, essentials and components of content marketing strategy are also very important. Any Successful Content digital Marketing Campaign is the wholesome of objectives, goals, essentials, and components. But

without setting the KPIs, success is just a dream. By setting the KPIs and measuring the metrics, and consequently, incorporating and updating the results into your content will lead you to sure success.

Essentials of content marketing strategy

• Keeping the fundamentals of content marketing in mind.
• Developing your content marketing strategy.
• Documenting content Marketing strategy and its essentials.
• Content strategy.
• Brand Trends research.
• Setting the bench marks.
• Allocating the budget..

Components of content marketing strategy

• Purpose of content (Objectives) and goals.
• Your audience personas.
• Buyer’s journey.
• Unique perspective of your content.

Content Marketing Objective and Goals

Although the content marketing strategy mainly depends on these essentials of content marketing but to frame KPIs, you need to consider objectives and goals. Here, we will discuss only Objectives and goals leading to set KPIs for content marketing campaigns.

Strategic and clear marketing objectives are the brand’s defined goals, which specifies and clearly outline the intentions of the executive, for his marketing team,  other team members and stakeholders alike.

Setting the objectives is the first step of any marketing plan to develop a successful marketing strategy. Your marketing objectives are drawn from the vision which you have for your marketing strategy.

Different types of content works differently in pursuit of goals, and define the success of your organization’s perspective in achievement of goals. Goals can only be achieved when they are clearly defined, objectively outlined and compiled into comprehensible, measurable marketing KPIs. To reach up to this, always keep in mind the SMART marketing objectives. The SMART method of selecting marketing objectives, works best and worth pursuing.

                           S = Specific

                           M= Measurable

SMART =          A= Actionable

                           R= Relevant

                           T= Time Bound

Content Marketing Objectives:

Keeping in view of your brand and options available, you have to market the brand. Always, select just two or three marketing objectives, as, setting too many objectives will blur your vision, and make it difficult to achieve the results in a satisfactory manner.

Your objective could be any of these or for that matter whatever you think;

• Promote new products or services. (In this content will describe the benefits and features of the product or service).
• Grow brand awareness. Brand awareness content means getting discovered by the right consumers).
• Lead Generation/Nurturing. This content will take the visitors to the desired page and convert them to customer.
• Audience Engagement. Content to drive the casual audiences and nurture them to subscriber.
• Retain existing loyal customers. Content to create positive perception and motivation to retain the audience).
• Target the new customers. Content is created in a manner that it entice the new customers for the product or service)
• Enhance digital presence. A useful content, so that people should share with each other, hence, enhances your digital presence).
• Developing brand loyalty. A Content that invites feed backs and comments.
• Increase ROI (profits). With the help of content you reduce the marketing cost and increasing the sale).
• Expand to new markets. Content introducing the product and service in an impressive way.
• Grow market share. Content asking for the call-to-action for maximum conversion and sales.
• Build industry authority. Content like case studies and interviews to highlight the benefits and usefulness of your industry.

Setting Goals:

Okey! You successfully identified your objectives, now! is the time, to finalize the goals in that particular area. In general there are three goal categories to delve upon:

• Sales Goals.
• Cost-Saving Goals.
• Business Growth goals.

Whatever the category of goals it may be, to achieve it successfully, you need to set the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators ). Hence, KPI’s (A set of  specific and measurable metrics) must match with the goals. If you succeed to match KPI’s and goals, As a result, you will become an effective content marketer and success is your destiny. Some of the goals could be:-

• Sale Growth.
• Lead Generation.
• Market Share.
• Targeting New Customers.
• Enhance Customer Loyalty.
• Customer Spending.
• Conversion Rate.
• Website Metrics.
• Social media Engagement or Audience Engagement Goals.
• Brand Awareness.

Setting KPIs for Content Marketing campaigns:

 

So far, you determined the objectives and set the goals, for your content marketing campaign, but the job is not over, as you have to achieve these as well. In the process to see, whether you are moving ahead or not, you have to measure your progress and success. To measure the output of your efforts and the efforts of your team, always place some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). KPIs vary with the change in objectives.

First see as, what are KPIs (key performance Indicator)?

There is no exact definition of KPIs but to put it into simple term it is A set of  specific and measurable metrics by which you, constantly measure the impact, that your content marketing is having on your business. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity. To add further, choosing the right KPIs is important to the organization, in terms of making progress towards achieving its strategic goals.

Find below, some of  the examples of KPIs;

1. Sale Growth:

Measures could be:-

• See the Sales conversion Rate: Can be improved by trust building, addressing the objections, Customer’s pain points and questions.
• Your revenue: Conversions, translate into sales and revenue.
• Total Sale: Number of units sold or services provided, to so and so number of clients.
• Monitor the sales cycle length: Decrease the average sales cycle length, to sell more number of products and services.
• Decrease Content barriers. The content should be easier to sell.

Important: Plan these in a specific time frame, to determine your sales growth, during the marketing campaign initiative. See the trends and fluctuations as well.

2.  Lead Generation.

a.  Your objectives for lead generation will guide you to have measures accordingly. These may be:-

•  Click Through: For this your call-to-action must be very clear. Find out what prompted your readers to click and the kind of content they are tracking.
•  Total number of new leads, brought in by this campaign.
•  Increase in leads, in a specific time frame.
• Cost per lead. Deduce the ratio between CPC and conversion.
• Conversion rate. How many converted.

Important:   In this you have to see, as how many visitors are converting into leads on your site. With this, you will be able to determine the cost per lead.

3.  Market share:  

To determine your market share first of all, define the overall size of the market and revenue.

• Consider the competitor’s share from the market size.
• Your company’s total revenue.

Important:   Divide your company’s total revenue with total market size and you will get your share in the market. Similarly determine the share of the competitors and compare.

4.  Targeting New Customers:

Measures could be:-

• Number of new customers over a period of time.
• Increase in new customers in percentage.
• Cost per new customer to see how much amount has been spent to acquire that customer.
• Leads-to-customer ratio to find out how many leads convert into paying customers.

5.  Customer Loyalty:

To measure this KPI’s could be:-

• Number of customers who return or repeat in activity on your website.
• Percentage of customers who return.
• Average time and amount spend with the company over lifetime.

6.Customer spending:

Measures could be:-

• One time purchase.
• Average spending per customer.
• Average spending by the customer in the number of visits.

7.  Conversion Rate:

The number of people who performed these actions will determine the conversion rate.

• How many people performed the desired action, it may be purchase, signup for newsletter, reaching to landing pages, website opt-ins, email links, free trail signup or any other “call – to – action”.

8.  Website Metrics:

By web analytics, you find out the health of your website, measures could be;

• Find the number of visits to a website (sessions). One session is of 30 minutes.
• Unique visitors, meaning by, number of people who visits your website first time.
• Page views per visit: How many pages visitor visits in one view.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leaves a site after viewing only one page. This will give you the direction to improve the page and make it relevant and creat customer friendly content.
• Time on site: How much average amount of time visitor stays on the website.

9.Social Media Engagement/ audience engagement goals:

Following KPI’s are of great importance to find out the social performance when engaging in digital strategies:-

• Increase in fans/ followers. Find the amount of new follower and fans over a certain period of time.
• Comments: Number of comments received on your post or update or on any other news.
• Shares: How many people further shared your content and number of times?
• Opt-ins: How many leads generated through this post or social campaign.
• Traffic to your website from social media; how many visitors referred by social media visited your site.

10.  KPI’s for Brand Awareness:

Although it’s difficult to measure, but! to some extent, you may get some insight for decision making.

• Article views:   Tools are there in market to measure the views on external media while for owned media it is easy as you have the access.
• Track social media engagement, and find what type of content and in which format is more useful to the audience.

To conclude; when planning your next Digital Marketing Campaign, follow the Guidelines above and various measures (KPI’s). Assign Numbers and Bench Markings to the Goals; define measurable and achievable Objectives.  Set the system, to track and measure, will certainly lead you to achieve your Goals. Find the Metrics that achieve the best measures related to your Goals and Objectives.