content marketing KPIs - Express Writers

Content Marketing KPIs: Which Ones Do I Track to Identify Real Success? (& How to Track Them)

March 24, 2022December 10, 2019 by Adam Oakley

How do you track your content marketing successes (or failures, to learn from and improve next time)? It all boils down to tracking the right content marketing KPIs. Note that we didn’t say all the content marketing KPIs – just the right ones. You aren’t alone if you’re wondering why some content marketers succeed and others fail. What makes the difference between the two? ? Is it the volume of website traffic? The number of likes, comments, and shares? Revenue from unequivocal quality content? All those are examples of content marketing KPIs (key performance indicators). Some matter more than others. If you want success, you need to know which content marketing KPIs to track. Here are the top twelve that should be at the top of your list. Let’s dive in! Content Marketing KPIs: Which Ones to Track & How to Track Them Correctly Why Track Content Marketing KPIs? The Top 12 Content Marketing KPIs to Track Content Marketing KPIs for User Behavior 1. Bounce Rate 2. Scroll Depth 3. Time on Page Content Marketing KPIs for User Engagement 4. Shares 5. Comments 6. Conversations Content Marketing KPIs for SEO 7. Backlinks 8. Organic Traffic from Search Engines 9. Keyword Rankings Content Marketing KPIs for Company Revenue 10. Leads 11. Conversion Rates 12. ROI How Do You Track Content Marketing KPIs? Use These 6 Handy Tools Content Marketing KPIs Measure Your Success [bctt tweet=”How do you define real success in the world of content marketing? ?️ @JuliaEMcCoy lists down the top 12 content marketing KPIs that you should keep track of to identify if your efforts are producing great results. ☝️” username=”ExpWriters”] Why Track Content Marketing KPIs? In sports, it’s easy to track success. For example, think of soccer. In soccer, your aim is to get the ball through the goal. One goal equals one point. The team with the most goals wins the match. But content marketing isn’t that simple. It’s like playing soccer with a hundred goals instead of two. What’s more, when you shoot the ball into the goal, you aren’t sure what score you’ll get. Some goals give you a hundred points while others give you two points. The key with this type of soccer is first to find out which goals give you the highest points. Then you start putting energy into shooting the ball into them. This is what tracking content marketing KPIs is all about. You need to find out which content marketing KPIs are important and give you the highest improvements (scores). Then, you set out to outperform yourself on them. When you track the right content marketing KPIs, you’ll start winning in content marketing. [bctt tweet=”Why bother tracking content marketing KPIs? ?️ Getting to know which KPIs perform well gives you an idea of how you can further boost them. It’s also good to know which ones badly need a strategy makeover. ?” username=”ExpWriters”] The Top 12 Content Marketing KPIs to Track These 12 content marketing KPIs are your safety net and formula for success. Let’s dive in! Content Marketing KPIs for User Behavior First of all, let’s look closely at content marketing KPIs that show you how users interact with your content. 1. Bounce Rate Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors who view only one page of your site. It’s one of the top content marketing KPIs because it tells you what visitors feel about your content. Here are 5 reasons visitors click on your site, scan it, and immediately click the back button. Your content is boring. Your paragraphs are too long. Visitors can’t find what they’re looking for. Your site isn’t user-friendly. Your writing style doesn’t fit user needs. For example, if you’re a user and you find this as the opening paragraph of a blog? Source: Grammarly You’ll most likely run for the hills with your go-to back button. The more visitors click the back button without visiting any other pages on your site, the higher your bounce rate will be. So what’s a good bounce rate? According to The Daily Egg, it depends on what industry you’re in. However, a good rule of thumb is to keep your bounce rate below 70%. 2. Scroll Depth Scroll depth is one of the content marketing KPIs that’s closely related to bounce rate. Scroll depth indicates how far down the page your reader goes before leaving. What causes a reader to leave your page halfway through reading it? Mostly, it’s when you don’t follow through with the promises you made in your headline. For example, maybe your headline looks like this. Source: Have The Relationship You Want from Rori Raye This headline makes one promise: After you read the article, you’ll know the secret to winning the man of your dreams. Forever. Now, what if you’ve reached the halfway mark and you’re nowhere near discovering this secret? You guessed it. You’re going to click back. The point where you stopped reading is your scroll depth. Keeping track of your readers’ scroll depth will help you figure out exactly where your content stops working. This is one of the content marketing KPIs you can rely on because it helps you measure the success of your content. 3. Time on Page As the name suggests, time on page refers to how long users spend on your page. Using this valuable content marketing KPI, you can tell what your readers feel about your words. According to Capitalize My Title, it takes an average of 1 minute to read 300 words. Now, if your blog has 1,500 words and your reader spent only 2 minutes on it? That’s right. He didn’t read everything. What you need to track is reader time on page corresponding to how many words your post has. If readers are clicking back after less than a minute but scrolling to the end of the page? They’re scanning your headings but not devouring your content. As a valuable KPI for content marketing, time on page shows you … Read more

How to Connect Your Content Marketing to the Sales Funnel (Without Being Sleazy & Turning Off Your Audience)

June 19, 2024September 4, 2018 by Adam Oakley

Here’s a truth for all content marketers: connecting your content marketing to the sales funnel is easy to ignore, but important to do. You need a sales strategy for your content if you’re trying to generate brand awareness, increase engagement, or sell more products or services from the content you publish. Have you heard about my all-NEW writing course? We’re about to open enrollment! See more here. And now, to continue my habit of staying brutally honest with you, here’s a second truth when it comes to content marketing and a typical sales funnel… Written online content, when done well, is valuable, relevant, and attractive to your leads (a.k.a real humans) Many “sales funnels” are sleazy, downright annoying, and sometimes paint a false picture just to gain your money So, today, we’re not talking about the sleazy kind of funnel built inside of software with a surrounding campaign of 15 annoying emails and a “timer” on your money. (See my vlog on the Content Strategy & Marketing Course site to learn just how anti- sleazy sales funnel I am.) We’re talking about the physical strategies behind attaching your content marketing to sales. This sales funnel is critical. Having a low or zero connection from your content to sales can mean low or no sales. And that’s something you (or/and your boss) definitely don’t want to experience after investing in and publishing content. Never fear, we’ve got you covered today with a new, engaging way of looking at how content marketing drives sales, sure to help you achieve your marketing goals. Ready for the big reveal? The Bucket List: 3 Way to Stronger Sales Through Content Who doesn’t love a bucket? Buckets are fun! You can fill them with sand at the beach to build a sand castle, use them to carry your shampoo into the shower, plant them with flowers, or use them in any number of creative ways to enhance your life. But in content marketing and sales conversion, buckets are critical. Using our unique three-bucket strategy to fill in your online strategy and built a well-developed intricate castle of content will help supercharge your sales and boost your content’s ROI. Read my full post explaining the three-bucket topic strategy. Each bucket represents a goal you need to achieve for outstanding keyword research and online content success. As the image shows, you’ll want to work on filling your buckets with strong content for three main goals: SEO rankings Sales and connections Brand awareness This is the step that most brand strategists gloss over in a hurry to get out there and start creating content. But skipping the bucket step would be a mistake. This is the foundation for your content marketing sales process and the one that’s going to make sure your return on investment (ROI) is sky-high. Let’s look at it this way. According to Wolfgang Digital’s 2017 report on e-commerce, the average conversion rate was 1.56%. That means in order to get high ROI content out there, you must assist your visitors at every lifecycle stage — even the one that comes before the funnel! So, let’s see what we should put in each of our buckets. [bctt tweet=”Discover a new, engaging way of looking at how content marketing drives sales that is sure to help you achieve your marketing goals in today’s blog via @JuliaEMcCoy ” username=”ExpWriters”] Bucket #1: SEO Rankings At this stage, you’ll want to fill your bucket with all the keywords you want to rank for. You don’t have to be super-focused, but you do want to have a good understanding of keywords that are hot in your industry. Want to learn the ins and outs of SEO content writing? You need to check out my new writing course! After you get a solid number of keywords, you can fill your bucket to the brim by including broad match or broad stem keywords for this task. Broad stem keywords are relevant variations of your keywords that will help your website attract more visitors. They’ll also save you time on building lists of keywords before you get a good persona in place (more on that later). These keyword variations include singular and plural forms, synonyms, stemmings (such as make and making), related searches, and even possible misspellings. You can generate these on your own or use a Keyword Variation Tool, as shown below. Once you’ve filled this bucket, move on to the next step. Bucket #2: Sales and Connections Here’s where you start to delve into the area where sales and content marketing become fully integrated. This is where you’ll build the kind of engagement and connections that drive sales and keep clients coming back for more. Take time here to focus on how you’re going to build trust. To do this, you can put a wide variety of things in this bucket, including: Company announcements and product reveals Interviews with top influencers Spotlight on how your employees work as a team A case study focused on customer success Customer-focused interviews or articles There’s really no end to this kind of content that focuses on developing a personal relationship with your prospects. A personal relationship is going to give a tremendous boost to brand awareness — which brings us to the final bucket. Bucket #3: Brand Awareness This is one big bucket. Brand awareness helps your content generate more sales leads per impression and leads to enduring customer loyalty, which then translates into repeat business. In fact, working hard on determining how to fill this bucket properly ensures you’ll get the maximum Lifetime Value (LTV) from your customers. In a nutshell, LTV represents the amount of money generated by a customer over their lifetime. The screenshot from smile.io shows an easy way to calculate this for your business. You start with the first calculation: Then build on it, for the final figure: But, to get high LTV, you need to boost loyalty. To boost loyalty, you must become a resource that your customer trusts. You can increase loyalty through a number of tactics, including: Outstanding customer service (and content that promotes … Read more