Analytics in content marketing can help you steer your ship through unknown waters. But all you have to do is knowing the path that leads to your destination.
What we mean to say is, there is no math in content marketing, however there are numbers as well as tools that do that math for you with those numbers.
Although, these tools would not help you understand what’s down under and how they do the calculations.
So, before you go ahead with it all, it is your duty to figure out how it is done so that not only you have a map to success, but you can understand the map too.
In marketing, success is relative for every business. There is no set benchmarks or metrics that can define the same.
What success means to your business, might be failure for mine.
Then how can you get to the map? Well, we will discuss it just in a few moments.
Let’s get the ball rolling.
Make Sure Everyone Has a Clear Idea
Let’s say you have a picture of your final destination, but you have no idea about the route. Well, having shared objectives without having a good hold of the analytics is just the same scenario.
And, when you have a map but, you do not even know what your destination is, is nothing but having analytics understood but without any set objectives.
So, it is quite clear that one cannot work without the other.
Now, what you need is starting with objectives as well as with the understanding about how to apprehend that you have already reached there.
When your entire team has a clear idea about all of it, you can get started with defining it all with numbers.
Consider teamwork above everything and aim to win the game.
Now, every one of you knows that you need to score higher than your opponent to win. But, if you do not even know the benchmark set for your game, how will you and your team get to know that you have scored enough?
The thing is, without proper information regarding the target, two scenarios might take place.
Firstly, you are keeping on increasing your score without having any idea about where to stop and secondly, you might stop before scoring enough points and end up losing it all.
So, what can you do to solve it all?
Well, all you need to do is understanding the measurements of success and finding out and building the shared objectives.
When you do this, you can definitely go ahead in designing the analytics as well as the reports in your hand to get the insight that is required to figure out what is working for you and what is not.
This understanding will help you to find out the path to achieving your shared objectives.
Usually, in corporate companies, marketing heads set objectives and targets for their team while sales heads have their own set of objectives for their team members. And on the other hand, respective team members set their own goals to get their jobs done.
This entire scene happens without any internal discussion or shared understanding, and which is why these set goals are not usually quite aligned as they should be.
What Other Business Leaders Say?
Often times, enterprise owners losing businesses stating the reason behind their loss end up giving you the best of advice cultivating their failure. Yes, and from that you can get a clear idea of what is not going right.
They say, sales teams consider potential buyers who are more likely to convert into customers, and marketing team focuses on increasing the number of qualified leads that they have generated.
Nevertheless, when you dig deeper, you find out that marketing creates numerous leads of potential buyers who are looking for products that are on the introductory level, considering their conversion funnel.
However, sales teams focus on leads that are on the verge of investing in enterprise products.
Here, both the teams are being able to meet their respective targets however, none of them is succeeding as the targets are not aligned.
And, can help you get the basic understanding of the fact that without your entire team having a clear-cut vision of success, it is not possible to come up with anything meaning, irrespective of what niche you are dealing in.
How They Measured Success?
A good lot of marketeers out there have trouble measuring the worth of their content marketing endeavours. So, if you are facing similar issues, then trust us, you are not the only one.
Among all the marketeers, globally only 39 percent can successfully track their overall ROI, although they are not so sure. But practically, 8 percent are sure about what they are doing.
Moreover, only 65 percent of all B2B marketeers are yet to find about what sort of content works and what does not.
So, clearly there is much scope for improvement. And, that also means that you do have a good chance to increase your ability to track and measure how your content is performing.
Basically, the main issue is nothing but today’s marketer’s inability to get hold of the marketing metrics.
Today, less than half of all B2B marketers have all marketing metrics aligned with their goals for content marketing, however, most of them are just not tracking them correctly.
So, how can you do it right? How can you align your marketing endeavours perfectly with analytics and create a content marketing strategy that works?
First of all, you need to understand what your KPIs are right now. This means nothing but figuring out what are the things that you really need to focus on currently so that you can make the right move for the growth of your business organisation.
A good lot of marketers out there have been tracking marketing metrics in general, but what they fail to do is figuring out which ones are essential, particularly, for their business.
Here, former media and digital advertising analyst and renowned strategic advisor Rebecca Lieb says,
“It makes no difference whatsoever what MY most important content marketing metric is – the real question is: what metric, what key performance indicator is most important to your business? No two marketers’ objectives are exactly alike. What matters is aligning against business goals, not all the abstract things you can measure.”
And, the second thing that you really need to focus on is nothing but utilising the marketing analytics solutions which are right for your business and making those platforms do the job for you.
Here what you should do is, developing a marketing technology stack that can actually help track the entire buyer’s journey.
How to Create Shared Success Measures?
To create shared success measures, you can utilise an architecture that has lately emerged in the last decade. It is known as objectives and key results or OKRs. This is a great process that can effectively help you in getting your hands on the measurements that matter to your business.
The main job of OKRs is to make sure that your entire team is progressing towards a shared destination.
It is a three-step process and here we will be discussing the same.
Step I – Setting Objective
The first thing that you need to do is to creating an actual and shareable objective.
By this, you take yourself a step further as strategic objectives that are well-formulated help you create a mixture of how content can deliver value to your business.
Here, you should structure a time frame that will tell you how long it will take you to make sure you reach a shared destination successfully.
You might create a strategic plan that will take a quarter, a year or may be multiple years to help you finally reach the shared destination. You may also create long-term or short-term goals. Figure out how hierarchy works in those plans and chalk them out accordingly.
Although, whatever plans you have right now, might change with the changing business scenarios or with the evolution of your assumptions. So, being rigid is really not a good thing, here. All you should do is stacking them up accordingly and making the least delay to incorporate those changes in your plan.
So, now as you already have the key to creating a sharable objective, let’s move on step 2.
Step II – Define Success
Find out what will help you understand your success. This ideation will help you understand the key results that you should focus on. And, these results will further help you measure your objectives.
An OKR example will help you understand this better.
Suppose, your strategic objective happens to be driving a 25% hike in net sales for the upcoming year.
Now, the shareable objective for your content marketing team will stand as to creating a 10% of all net sales opportunities for the same year.
Here, it is quite understandable the leads are shareable here, but you will not get to understand how success looks like in these terms.
Now let’s focus on these three key results:
- You have to increase new leads through content marketing by 15 percent
- You have to increase the conversion rates of free trails by 25 percent
- And, you will have to lower your cost-per-thousand advertising rate by 20 percent
Here, through these results, you get a better and clearer shared objective and that defines how it will make a direct impact on your profit over estimated cost.
Now, let’s proceed towards step 3.
Step III – Design your analytics
Studying measurement as a pyramid helps clearing confusions to a great extent.
When you have a clear idea about the necessary analytics reports for your business niche, you can just make use of the measurement pyramid to figure out the metrics that are necessary for you to find out if you have met the key results in your objective and key results or OKRs.
No marketing tool out there can clearly and conclusively indicate if you have already achieved the necessary key results. So, to better understand it yourself, the analytics tool that you use, must evaluate several activities.
The designed measurement pyramid is divided into three tiers.
The top portion of the designed measurement pyramid stands for strategic goals-key results. There are two supporting tiers here which tell you about the analytics you require in order to track to find out if you are progressing towards your goals.
The middle portion stands for key performance indicators or otherwise known as KPIs which help you understand your progress towards goals. To keep track of your progress towards the KPIs, you need to make use of a dashboard that will help you combine several metrics into a single score.
And, lastly the lower tier of the pyramid stands for data and metrics, which is the data that can help you improve your process in order to reach your KPIs.
Now, if we go back to our previously mentioned example regarding OKRs which talks about increasing leads as well as conversions and about lowering costs for advertising.
You can make use of a content collaboration analytics tool, a procurement team budget, digital asset management (DAM) solution, a marketing automation tool, and an SEO analytics tool here.
The analytics tool that helps collaborating content will help you effectively to assess internal content consumption from your peer groups.
The procurement team budget will help them with the fulfilment expenses of content.
The digital asset management solution will help you with the number of the campaigns created with content.
The marketing automation tool will let you know about how many free trial conversions have been made.
And, finally, the SEO analytics tool will tell you about the new leads that you can generate from your organic as well as paid traffic.
The above-mentioned tools are meant to let everyone know about the number of writeups created, costs regarding organic as well as paid traffic, cost of conversions, etc. Through these tools, everyone comes on the same page about these metrics and will get to know if they have helped in making progress towards meeting the pre-set KPIs.
Now, as you have made a progress towards meeting your KPIs, these will tell you if you have been successful in achieve your key results. If you have then congratulations, you have met your objective.
What’s Your Take?
Following these steps, you will be able to measure what is necessary and what impacts your business, rather than beating around the bush.
It all becomes simple and easy when you organise it all with time, effort, and care. And, all of that will pay you back with a great analytics and measurement strategy and take away all your pain of doing the math yourself!
So, when are you getting started?
