What are the best practices for setting content performance goals?

Yes, too many content performance metrics are chosen and targeted based on what your company did last year, not because it's useful or a good idea. Awareness content needs awareness metrics. Consideration content should use conversion metrics. And so on.

Tieing your content purpose and performance to the business's relevant KPIs is paramount. Engagement is great but the question you should ask is how does it dovetail into the larger picture for success.

In deciding upon a primary purpose for a piece of content, think about the main reason why you want to communicate this content to prospects or customers. Next, come up with the potential audience for the content. Then, consider why your audience would want to read, view, or listen to this particular piece of content.

Most people make the mistake of putting out content because they have to. Never put a piece of content online without a clearly defined reason. Apart from being a yardstick to measure or score your content campaign, having a purpose for your content will help fine tune your content messaging style and voice.

When thinking about purpose, it's helpful to consider whether this content is more for the top of the funnel or the bottom. Adjust the topic, style, and distribution strategy accordingly.

Audience engagement should always be at the top of your list for content metrics. How many people reply directly to your emails? What percentage of your social posts get organic comments and re-shares? Do people organically post about your webinar content? These are sometimes more manual metrics, but they're much stronger indicators that your content is connecting on an individual level with members of your audience. And after all, that kind of resonance is what great content marketing is all about.

In order to figure out how well your content is engaging, you need to first understand what your purpose behind your marketing strategy is in relation to your business goals. Here are some things to consider: revenue brand awareness loyality and retention commitment and engagement and finally leads

What do you want to achieve with your content? Is it to Build a community? Drive traffic to your website? Generate leads? Retain existing clients and build loyalty? Either of these will determine what metrics to target. Community-focused content will target the engagements. Lead-generating content will monitor the click-through rate. Client-retention content will focus on getting the share button clicked. It all boils down to having a purpose for your content.

Think about what helps you show a full view of performance. Quantitative metrics only paint half the picture. Include some qualitative metrics and anecdotal feedback to paint the full picture of success.

While views can offer surface-level insights, it's crucial not to get fixated on vanity metrics; instead, we need to focus on meaningful engagement and conversion indicators that truly reflect the impact and value of our content.

Measuring your performance against benchmarks from your historical data helps you create an accurate view. With the benefit of retrospectives and improved strategy, so you should start to see marked improvement on your average performance.

You don't have to look outward for benchmarks. Many times your own data will reveal the average, and what's above or below it.

Content benchmarking consists of studying the content strategies of your competitors to get a better idea, the main opportunities, threats, and the practices. It helps you to identify your digital competitors. While crafting your content benchmark, data and information you can extract to analyse include: Main keywords your competitors rank for Keywords you and your competitors have in common Keywords that are relevant to you but not your competitors, and vice versa Content type that attracts the most traffic for your competitors Content type that generates the most backlinks and shares for your competitors How your competitors integrate their content strategy with their digital media relations and social media.

Think about the 'inputs' rather than the 'outputs.' Inputs = how often you post and other factors in your control. Outputs = engagement. Focus on consistency with the inputs and the outputs will follow.

Understanding your 'WHY' is pivotal, as it forms the foundation for choosing the right metrics to gauge the success of your post. For instance, if you're running a competition, key measures may include comments and shares. Therefore, the process begins with identifying your purpose, and the subsequent metrics are defined accordingly.

for setting smart goal: Determine the purpose of content marketing for your organization. Choose the appropriate performance metrics. set goal with some templates Track your progress toward your content marketing goals.

Is there a LinkedIn collaborative article that doesn't include a section about SMART? I'm not sure I've found one here yet.

I suggest diving deep into your analytics once per month. Any more often than that and you risk over-analyzing. Any less and you can lose sight of what's happening.

Individual metrics are easy to game or improve through black-hat methods. That's why you have to look at all the numbers together, not just fixate on a few.

One thing to always keep in mind as a content marketer is to understand content is always evolving, although the fundamentals that carry your brand’s message stay consistent and uniform, it innovates and evolves, because your audience and market evolves. In brief: To build relevant content you must evolve with your audience and market needs.

Improving certain metrics can be useful for a year or two. After that, you can reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of real-world utility from further gains in the numbers. Remind yourself of this if you've been focused on raising certain metrics for a while.