Content marketing and social media are powerful ways to reach and engage your audience online. But how do you measure the effectiveness of your efforts and optimize your strategy? In this article, you'll learn about the best metrics to inform your content marketing and social media strategy, and how to use them to improve your results.
Metrics are quantitative indicators that track and measure various aspects of your content marketing and social media performance, such as traffic, conversions, reach, engagement, and so on. KPIs, or key performance indicators, are specific metrics that align with your business goals and objectives, and help you evaluate your progress and success. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might use metrics like impressions, followers, and mentions as your KPIs.
While both metrics and KPIs hold significant value in marketing, let's pause on KPIs for a moment. "Key" is Crucial: We often hear the term KPI, but it's essential to emphasize the "Key" in "Key Performance Indicator." Why? Because KPIs guide your strategy. Just like metrics, there could be thousands of KPIs available. However, KPIs have a unique characteristic—they compel us to make decisions. This requires us to narrow our focus to only a handful of highly relevant KPIs. After all, one of the ultimate aims of any strategy is to meet or exceed KPIs. Viewing KPIs as "strategy drivers" elucidates why it's crucial to have a select few that are clear, bold, and well-aligned with your organisational goals.
There are many types of metrics that you can use to inform your content marketing and social media strategy, but they can be broadly categorized into four groups: consumption, retention, action, and outcome. Consumption metrics tell you how many people are consuming your content, such as views, downloads, and time spent. Retention metrics tell you how many people are coming back to your content, such as return visitors, bounce rate, and loyalty. Action metrics tell you how many people are interacting with your content, such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks. Outcome metrics tell you how many people are taking the desired action after consuming your content, such as leads, sales, and revenue.
A lot would depend on what is the overarching goal of the particular social platform. For example, if the goal is to create a community then I would focus largely on how much engagement is between the community members on the brand's platform rather than between the brand and the members on the platform.
Let's be honest: we can have hundreds of thousands of metrics and with enough creativity we can have as many categories as we like. I prefer a pragmatic approach and divide them into two groups: 1?? KPI-Linked Metrics: They are intrinsically tied to our KPIs. For instance, they may capture micro-actions—like adding a product to a shopping cart in e-commerce—that collectively contribute to a KPI, such as sales 2?? Execution-Enhancing Metrics: These are crucial for fine-tuning our marketing efforts. Take Click-Through Rate (CTR) on an ad banner, for example. It can guide us in optimising an advertising campaign. The focus here isn't on limiting numbers like with KPIs. However, it's still crucial to consider the most pertinent metrics only.
To choose the best metrics to inform your content marketing and social media strategy, you need to follow some best practices. First, you need to define your goals and objectives clearly and realistically, and align them with your target audience and buyer journey. Second, you need to select the metrics that are relevant and meaningful for your goals and objectives, and avoid vanity metrics that don't reflect your impact or value. Third, you need to set benchmarks and targets for your metrics, and compare them with your competitors and industry standards. Fourth, you need to monitor and analyze your metrics regularly and consistently, and use tools and dashboards to visualize and report your data.
I agree with the starting point of this section and I'd like to add a few considerations: 1?? The industry-specific relevance is critical. In the pharma sector for example Compliance and regulation often govern what can be measured or advertised 2?? Granularity. Metrics can be broad or specific. Balance is the key 3?? Timing. Metrics can have different implications at different stages. 4?? Context. A metric needs to be understood in relation to other data points. Finally, consider data integrity and verifiability. Ensuring that your metrics are reliable and can be audited is crucial. To sum up, fine-tuning your metrics selection involves a balance of specificity, context, compliance, and timing
Depending on your goals and objectives, you might use different metrics to inform your content marketing and social media strategy. For example, if you are focused on brand awareness, you can measure impressions, reach, followers, mentions, share of voice, and brand sentiment. If you are looking to generate leads, metrics such as conversions, conversion rate, cost per lead, lead quality, and lead source can be useful. Additionally, for customer loyalty you can track retention rate, churn rate, customer lifetime value, net promoter score, and referrals. Finally, if your goal is to increase sales you can look at revenue, sales cycle, average order value, customer acquisition cost, and return on investment.
As said, Strategy, Goals, KPI and Metrics should be closely connected each other. Even if it's clear that prioritisation is key while selecting both KPIs and Metrics, data can be overwhelming. AI can play a key role here, helping us to navigate through this complex and agitated sea of informations. It categorises information, identifies patterns, and uncovers hidden relationships, among other functions. An interesting synergy arises when leveraging LLM with AI; it can help identify which metrics are closely related to our goals and outline strategies to optimise them for achieving our objectives.
Once you have chosen the best metrics to inform your content marketing and social media strategy, you need to use them to improve your results. Testing and optimizing content formats, headlines, keywords, calls to action, and landing pages can boost consumption and action metrics. Segmenting and personalizing your content and messages to your audience segments, personas, and stages can increase retention and outcome metrics. A/B testing, surveys, feedback, and analytics can help identify what works and what doesn't. Experimenting with new channels, platforms, and tactics can also help reach new audiences and expand reach and influence. Data-driven decisions are essential for improving your strategy.
Like many marketers, I'm a fan of Deming's cycle: Plan-Do-Check-Act. However, I advocate for a nuanced approach: Plan-TEST-EXECUTE-Check-Act. ?? Why? I'm preserving the essence of perpetual improvement while breaking down the 'Do' phase into 'Test' and then 'Execute.' Now, this might not seem groundbreaking, but the real transformation occurs when you transition from admiring this framework to ingraining it into your daily operations. ?? Trust me, quantifiable improvements in key metrics often materialise almost immediately The beauty lies in the cumulative effect: consistent application of this enhanced cycle can propel you toward significant achievements. The best part? You won’t have to wait an eternity to witness the initial gains. ??