With numerous marketing KPIs to measure, learn which ones to use for each stage of the customer’s journey.

Investing in content marketing is a long-term commitment. The results usually take a while to materialize, so business owners and content marketers alike must learn to be patient.

However, depending on where a customer is in the customer’s journey, it’s possible to measure partial content marketing KPIs.

In this article, you will discover how to cater your content for each stage of the customer’s journey and how to map your content to various KPIs.

AWARENESS

Brand awareness KPIs are designed to help you grow your brand’s popularity with your target demographic. This usually involves introducing your brand to your target audience and connecting with them in hopes of generating engagement.

Page Views

Page views indicate how often a webpage is loaded, but just because a post garners a lot of views doesn’t mean it’s automatically popular.

Yes, it’s great to gain multiple views per visit. But does this suggest that visitors actually like the content on your website, or are they just unable to locate what they’re searching for?

To be an effective data analyst, you have to constantly evaluate the data you’re working with. You can’t get much information from a single metric, but you can always work with the context it provides.

For instance, if a page gets plenty of traffic, you can use it to create a call-to-action (CTA), clickable link, or any other interactive content. High page views may also indicate how good the SEO is on that page. You can also identify which blogging trends worked so you can replicate the strategy on your other pages.

Unique Visitors

Unlike page views, the Unique Visitors metric counts the number of individuals who visit your website during a specific period. Whether a person views your page one or ten times, they only account for one unique visitor.

While this single metric isn’t enough to measure your marketing KPIs on its own, it can help you analyze web traffic and plan your digital strategy. Google Analytics shows exactly how many Unique Visitors you have for each web page, providing you with insight into the size of your audience or how well an ad is doing.

Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement has become a key metric in today’s connected world. Measuring how many likes and shares you get can tell you a lot about your audience and whether you’re reaching your target population.

Learn more: The EASIEST Ways to Measure Your Social Media Engagement

Such information is particularly helpful in optimizing future posts and improving your products and services. When you see your content getting plenty of organic shares, it means that people are finding value in it. It’s probably a smart idea to keep this momentum going.

Tracking your social media engagement also allows you to gauge your performance over time. If you aren’t gaining followers or have only been reaching the same hundred people, it’s probably time to change your content strategy. You can try several clever ways to boost your social media engagement, including developing a unique brand voice and quickly responding to messages and comments.

Inbound Links

Building your online authority is an important part of your content marketing KPIs, and inbound links are a great way to measure this. This figure represents the number of websites linking back to yours.

Whether it’s a landing page or a blog post, these inbound links improve your website’s credibility and make it easier to find. After all, the more sites mention your page, the higher you’ll rank on search engines.

Of course, this isn’t as simple as asking other sites to mention yours. You first need to create content that they find valuable. Only then will you become a reputable source worth linking back to.

ENGAGEMENT

After establishing your brand name and making sure your content reaches your target audience, your next task is to maintain their interest. Unless your content gets people returning to your page, it’s safe to assume your brand isn’t creating a strong first impression.

Time on Site

The time on site, also referred to as session duration, starts the moment a visitor lands on your website and ends when they leave. This is different from time-on-page, which measures how long a visitor stays on a page and then moves on to the next page within your site.

As revealed in Contentsquare’s 2022 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, the average time spent per session is four minutes and 17 seconds. This varies per industry, though, with media sites gaining the lead at an average of five minutes and 22 seconds.

When analyzed correctly, the time on site tells you how engaging your content is to your audience. For example, if your visitors only stay on a page for three minutes when it should really take them ten, you probably need to make some changes.

Return of Visitors Rate

Your marketing efforts don’t end with building brand awareness and getting your name out there. You have to make sure that you’re gaining customers and effectively retaining them.

To measure your success in this area, take a look at your return rate of visitors (RVR). It measures the number of repeat visitors to your site, which helps you track how well your content marketing strategy is performing.

If you notice an uptick in your RVR, it means that your visitors find your content valuable. In contrast, if they don’t return, it may mean that you need to upgrade your content marketing efforts.

Asset Downloads

You can provide visitors with value far beyond what they can immediately digest on your website. You can use downloadable assets to help them learn and increase engagement.

These assets typically come in the form of a short eBook, a video, or any other consumables relevant to your content. They are typically longer than blog posts simply because they pack in more information for your audience. More often than not, they are downloaded after a visitor puts in their email, allowing you to get a new set of leads while building credibility.

To include this metric in your content marketing KPIs, you simply count the total number of asset downloads in a specific duration.

CONVERSION

Out of the leads that you have engaged with, how many have actually ended up as customers? For every thousand individuals that express interest in your brand, only a few dozen might end up as actual sales. It is critical to gauge your progress at this stage.

Qualified Leads

So, you just launched a brand new piece of premium content and are excited to watch tons of new leads flood in. However, every effective marketer knows that unfiltered leads aren’t part of great marketing KPIs.

It’s important to note that not every lead will convert to a sale. This means that although you received a thousand new emails from your latest landing page, it’s important to recognize who among them deserves your attention.

A qualified lead possesses all of the characteristics you’d find in an ideal client. Knowing how many leads are actually qualified is important so you can plan how to nurture them into a closed sale.

Deals Closed

Most stakeholders and business owners are more interested in closing deals than anything else. After qualifying all the leads you’ve generated, the next step is measuring which ones lead to a close and became actual revenue.

To calculate your Return on Investment in percentage, take how much you’ve spent (investment) and subtract it from the closed sales (return). Divide this new number by the return and then multiply by 100. If you get something greater than 100, your marketing efforts have paid off.

How many deals you close isn’t the only way to tell how much you’ve earned. You can also use it to set realistic goals. Suppose you get 8% qualified leads from your blog posts and 10% of those request your service. You now know what figures you need to target in your next marketing KPIs.

SEO Ranking

To gain quality leads, you want to make sure your site is in the top results when people search for keywords relevant to your product or service. This is where Search Engine Optimization plays into your content marketing KPIs. However, it’s not enough to just create an SEO strategy, implement it, and then be done with it.

For SEO to work in your favor, you need to constantly measure it. Several things you need to check to include:

• how well your content ranks for your target keywords
• whether you’re visible in answer boxes for related terms
• how high your domain authority is (aka how many inbound links you get)

RETENTION

This is the point at which you start building loyalty to your brand. Among your closed deals, what percentage has consistently utilized your services? Consistent customers are more likely to spread your good work to other potential clients.

Referrals

When your customers have nothing but positive reviews for your product or service, it’s more than likely that they would refer you to their network. You can measure this by adding a “How did you hear about us?” question on your signup form or inviting your loyal customers to join a referral program.

Inside the referral program, you can look at five key metrics to see how well this strategy is working.

• Participation: how many customers in your program are actually referring people.
• Referral: how many referrals have been made
• Impression: how many actually saw/opened the referrals
• Response Rate: how many engaged with the referrals (e.g., clicked a link, signed up for a trial)
• Conversion: how much you’ve made from the referrals.

Renewal Rate

If your product or service is of the subscription model, the renewal rate should be part of your marketing KPIs. This is basically the percentage of your existing customer base who wants to extend their relationship with your brand by renewing their subscriptions.

You can measure your customer renewal rate with a simple formula. First, divide the number of customers who renew within a specified period by the total number of customers who were up for renewal, then multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

Review Scores

The advent of the internet has made it easier for people to look up a product or service first before continuing with the customer journey. This means that a single negative review about your brand could ward off potential buyers.

Of course, no company would get a perfect review score online. Even the biggest and most established names experience a PR nightmare at one point or another.

However, this doesn’t mean that you ignore the reviews completely. Instead, track these reviews and learn from them.

You can check what customers say about your brand in general, then you can read up on their reviews about individual products or services.

Churn Rate

In an ideal world, all of your customers stay with you forever, but this isn’t the actual case. Losing customers is part of the natural business cycle, and this is what the churn rate measures.

This figure refers to the percentage of your customers who stopped using your service within a predetermined period. It is a good way of measuring customer retention and satisfaction, especially in the SaaS and subscription industry.

When you analyze the impact of customer churn on your brand, you can effectively reduce this rate and increase (or at least retain) your active users.

Get Effective Content Marketing Solutions From WriteForMe

Whichever content marketing KPIs you end up measuring, know that most of these indicators boil down to having the right content for the right audience.

WriteForMe helps brands produce quality content that drives traffic and converts your leads to closed deals. Backed by our strategic marketing plan and dedicated client success managers, you get professionally written content delivered consistently.

Ready to grow your business with an effective content marketing solution?

Reach out to the content marketing experts at WriteForMe today!