Content marketing is crucial to SEO and driving traffic, and providing valuable information for your customers and potential customers. Yet, only 42% of B2C and 41% of B2B marketers have a mechanism in place to measure the business value, according to Gartner.
How you can determine success if you’re not measuring it against clear goals? That’s a problem.
To be truly effective, your content marketing efforts need to be aligned with your organization’s strategic business goals. That means setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reflect those goals and measuring the success of your content marketing efforts against them.
Here are some of the steps you need to take to ensure you align content marketing KPIs with your organization’s strategic business goals.
Step 1: Define your strategic business goals
Before you can align your content marketing KPIs with your organization’s strategic business goals, you need to have a clear understanding of what those goals are. This might include things like increasing sales, boosting customer retention, improving brand awareness, or expanding into new markets.
Once you’ve defined your strategic business goals, you can start to think about how your content marketing efforts can help achieve them.
Step 2: Identify KPIs that reflect your business goals
Next, it’s time to identify the KPIs that will help you measure your progress towards achieving those goals. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, your KPIs might include things like website traffic, lead generation, or conversion rates. If your goal is to improve customer retention, your KPIs might include things like customer engagement, social media followers, or email open rates.
The key is to identify KPIs that directly reflect your strategic business goals and will help you measure the success of your content marketing efforts.
Step 3: Create content that supports your KPIs
With your strategic business goals and KPIs in place, it’s time to create content that supports those KPIs. For example, if your KPI is to increase website traffic, you might create blog posts or videos that are optimized for search engines and designed to attract visitors to your site.
If your KPI is to improve customer engagement, you might create social media posts or email newsletters that encourage your followers to interact with your brand.
The key is to create content that is aligned with your KPIs and designed to help you achieve your strategic business goals.
Step 4: Measure and adjust your content marketing efforts
Once your content marketing efforts are underway, it’s important to regularly measure your progress against your KPIs and adjust your strategy as needed. This might involve using analytics tools to track website traffic, social media engagement, or email open rates, or conducting surveys to gather feedback from your customers.
By regularly measuring your progress and adjusting your strategy, you can ensure that your content marketing efforts are aligned with your strategic business goals and are delivering the results you need to grow your business.
Aligning Your Content with Business Goals
It just makes sense. Aligning your content marketing KPIs with your organization’s strategic business goals is essential for achieving success. However, many companies continue to churn out content without ever creating clear goals or evaluating success. That’s not a good way to drive revenue.
By defining your strategic business goals, identifying KPIs that reflect those goals, creating content that supports your KPIs, and measuring and adjusting your content marketing efforts, you can ensure that your content marketing is helping you achieve your business objectives.