PUBLISHED ON
Late last year we explored top KPIs and visualizations for your Email Marketing dashboard and eCommerce dashboard. This year we are looking forward to jumping back into our series on optimized dashboards by role, and will kick it off with some recommendations for the most effective Content Marketing dashboard.
Before even beginning to think about putting together your Content Marketing dashboard, you must have clarity on the purpose of your Content Marketing efforts. After all, the most effective way to improve performance is to measure it compared to your goal. Some common objectives of content teams are:
Let’s discuss these in a little bit more detail.
Not only can content be used to create brand awareness, but it can also be used to improve brand perception or increase favorability. By creating valuable, informative and relevant content your team may not only be able to achieve greater awareness but also to establish credibility with target audiences and position yourselves favorably compared to your competitors. Thought leadership or influence marketing has become a common strategy within certain industries and niches where demonstrating expertise from the beginning of the relationship increases perceived value and trust.
Market Development can be another important objective directly related to brand awareness. Organizations selling revolutionary services, ideas and products, or ones that are costly to implement, difficult to understand or require the input of multiple stakeholders can benefit from producing and sharing content aimed at market development. By educating prospects, your team may be able to increase demand for a new market or help influence customer perspectives.
Many content marketers are tasked with driving traffic to a company’s website or specific landing page in order to attract new potential customers or generate new sales leads. In order to effectively do so they should engage target segments.
Revenue is a major goal for almost every organization and is the driving force behind many other objectives. Does your content directly lead to conversions? Does it help to nurture consumers and move them closer to conversion? Or does its impact on awareness indirectly improve conversion rates? Measuring the impact of Content Marketing on conversions, while tricky, can provide you with invaluable insight.
Content can play a key role in improving customer experience and driving engagement. Improving understanding, and informing customers of the good or service you are providing, and sharing valuable and helpful content can not only enable you to improve customer experience, engagement and improve retention rates, but it can also help you to drive repeat business and increase upsells.
Now we’ve run through some potential goals, let’s take a look at some key KPIs and visualizations that can help us understand how well we are achieving our Content Marketing objectives.
Understanding how your content is performing at an operational level assists teams in better focus their content towards their target audiences. Comparing pieces, formats or campaigns can help you to understand what sort of content is performing best, and what you should continue producing and promoting. Below are some common metrics that we recommend for your Content Marketing Dashboard:
While your Executives may definitely need an understanding of how their investment in content is paying off, they will most certainly not require the level of operational detail that a Content Manager would like to see on their dashboard.
So, what are the top KPIs we recommend for your Executive’s dashboard?
While a Content Manager will be very interested in understanding how their content is performing compared to their competitors, and which pieces are gaining the most attention, your Executives may be more concerned with your share of Audience. Or more specifically, how this Share of Audience is related to Market Share. If you have been able to demonstrate a correlation between visits (or audience) and revenue, an increase in Share of Audience may also mean increased Market Share for your organization.
Sentiment can have a huge impact on revenue as it impacts purchase intent. Additionally, understanding Preference for your brand compared to your competitors can help you to more accurately forecast revenue and impact on performance.
How long do leads generated from Content Marketing take to convert to customers? What is the average cost to gain these leads? Or their eventual Average Customer Value? Additionally, how influential are these leads in generating further demand through influence or referrals?
Your CMO or VP Marketing will most likely want to know the answer to all of the questions above. Therefore, Conversion Rate, Average time to Convert, Cost Per Lead (CPL), and Average Customer Value (ACV) will all be key metrics on an Executive’s Content Marketing dashboard.
Not only can Content Marketing help organizations to generate and convert leads, but it can also play a role in keeping customers. Presenting KPIs such as Revenue from Upsell generated by Content Marketing, and Impact of Content Marketing on Retention Rate can help you to justify your work. Presenting the Engagement Rate of existing customers can also help you to predict retention and prevent churn, but also to effectively find opportunities for upsell.
Visualizations can bring life to a Content Marketing dashboard and also allow you to very quickly and effectively compare the success of different campaigns, content types, or themes. They can also be invaluable in allowing you to compare your own performance to your competitors.
Let’s explore some examples that we have on our own Content Marketing Dashboard:
Comparing your performance across campaigns can help you to very quickly understand when your campaigns are underperforming or not optimized. You may elect to use A/B testing in an attempt to improve these, or simply stop these inefficient campaigns. On the other hand, understanding which campaigns are most successful, and why can help you to continually improve your campaigns and gain better outcomes.
Comparing your performance to your competitors provides valuable insight on both the success of your campaigns, and what type of content is most successful. Understanding why you are outperforming (or not) your competitors can help you to improve your Content Marketing and better reach your objectives.
Stacked column charts can be very useful in allowing you to demonstrate the success of different content types by segment. For example, if Buyer Persona 1 purchases frequently at low Average Order Values, Buyer Persona 2 purchases infrequently at Average Order Values and Buyer Persona 3 purchases frequently at high Average Order Values and makes up 75% of your revenue, you should spend most time producing content that leads to the highest possible conversion rate of this segment.
A Content Marketing Conversion Funnel is a great way to show how your well your Content is encouraging conversion. Seeing poor Reach? Focusing more on promotions and creating strategies to ensure that your content is arriving where your target audience is will help you to increase conversions. Seeing great Reach but few Conversions? Analyze what is causing so many leads to fall out of the conversion funnel and find ways to optimize conversions.
Do you have these KPIs and visualizations on your Content Marketing Dashboard? What other metrics help you to monitor and improve your performance?
VP of Business Development for Sweetspot. Responsible for strategic brand development, marketing and business development. BA/BComm graduate from the University of Melbourne. My passion lies in finding creative solutions and encouraging collaboration.
Not Another Dashboard.
Add a comment