The Ultimate Guide to Crafting Killer Content Marketing

[Featuring: 9 Steps to a Successful Content Strategy, 29 Must-Track KPIs, 3 Free Templates, and 118 AI-Powered Tools for Content Marketing Optimization]

Before LinkedIn recognized me as a Top Content Development Voice , I was a journalist, content strategist and content creator for about 20 years. Artificial intelligence was around that whole time too, not that you'd know it from all the recent mainstream buzz.

Throughout the years, in various roles, I've used AI to automate email delivery, organize and visualize data , publish social media posts, and more. Nowadays, apps like Notion aid in content strategy, allowing users to generate ideas (and more), while Adobe Firefly lets you create extraordinary (and otherworldly) images with simple language prompts and generative fill .

In fact, less than two months into the release of ChatGPT from OpenAI :

• Publishers were replacing journalists — and publicly apologizing for all the mistakes
• Students were getting caught using AI to write term papers
• Job seekers were using AI to complete job applications
• Mental health apps were replacing certified professionals with responses formulated by AI

Which all sounded more than a little scary to me. So, I did some research.

As it turns out, AI expert Gary Marcus doesn’t think ChatGPT (or any of its competitors) is really that smart. Nor does Vox co-founder Ezra Klein , who introduced his January 2023 New York Times conversation with Marcus with the following:?

ChatGPT and systems like it, what they’re going to do right now is they’re going to drive the cost of producing text and images and code and, soon enough, video and audio to basically zero. It’s all going to look and sound and read very, very convincing. That is what these systems are learning how to do. They are learning how to be convincing. They are learning how to sound and seem human. But they have no actual idea what they are saying or doing. It is bullshit. And I don’t mean bullshit as slang. I mean it in the classic philosophical definition by Harry Frankfurt. It is content that has no real relationship to the truth.

From numerous tests with ChatGPT, Ian Bogost , meanwhile, found that ChatGPT does have knowledge and can express it — but “does not have the ability to truly comprehend the meaning” of what we feed it or what it spits out. “When pressed,” the author and game designer continued, the AI chatbot will almost always admit it's “just making things up.”?

Which brings me to this report on developing and implementing a killer 360-degree omnichannel content marketing strategy. AI should not replace you, but if you don't know what you're doing, it might.

How to Develop, Implement, Iterate and Optimize a Game-Changing Content Marketing Strategy

We’re all sick of traditional ads. We’ve been inundated for years on TV, on the radio, on billboards, in newspapers and magazines and, more recently, on websites, google searches and social media. Consumers spoke up en masse, without even knowing it. Simply, they stopped clicking — and, when they did click, they opted out before signing up or completing an order. Consumers got smarter, which left a gaping hole for advertisers and marketers, online and off.?

Nevertheless, the more level headed, sophisticated and strategic professionals didn’t dig in their heels; they coalesced on couches with big white boards and tossed out ideas. Then they started testing, and what they discovered is that — while misleading advertorials, rightfully, deter potential customers — clearly marked, value-add digital content that consumers want builds trust and loyalty. And, with that, the paradigm shifted.

According to Marketing Insider Group :?

The number one reason that content marketing is important is that your customers appreciate it. Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, drives six times higher conversion rates, and has the potential for a 7.8-fold boost in web traffic. The reality is, content marketing has fostered the customer-centric reality we’re now operating in. From well-researched white papers to podcast series listeners can’t live without, content is changing the relationship between the brand and consumer.

And there’s more :

• 90% of consumers find custom content useful
• 60% of consumers seek out a product after reading about it
• Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing

So What is Content Marketing??

What differentiates content marketing from traditional marketing and advertising is that the digital content you create tells your brand story indirectly. Instead of touting the benefits of your product or service, you focus on your user personas and their pain points, needs, goals and core values — and demonstrate (typically, subtly) how your product or service can provide the solutions they seek. By appealing to consumers’ emotions, and demonstrating empathy, transparency, consistency and authenticity across all your digital content, you can develop customer relationships that provide value for years.

How Do You Do That?

Don’t expect to appeal to potential or existing customers with ad hoc blog posts, or without a plan for your content creation. This plan is your content marketing strategy, which includes:

• The content you’ll create
• The formats and mediums you’ll use
• The review and approval processes you’ll follow
• The audience for which you’ll be creating your content
• The cadence at which your content will be created, published and promoted
• The tools you’ll use to create, publish and promote your content

Developing Your Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you’re like the other 97% of marketers who consider content marketing integral to their overall marketing strategy, it’s time to identify what makes a content marketing strategy work. If you follow these tips, steps and best practices, you can expect to outperform the 34% of marketers who still don’t have a content marketing strategy at all.

9 Steps to Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month. But blogging is one of many tactics you should incorporate into a content marketing strategy. To create your content marketing strategy, you have to think beyond the blog. Way beyond. Even if that means starting from scratch.

Step 1: Develop Your Brand Story

If you haven’t created a brand story already, you’re late. Figure out what your story is, and how to tell it.?Start by asking:

• Why and how were we created?
• What are our core values?
• What is our value proposition?
• What value do we provide consumers beyond our product/service offerings?
• What makes us special or unique?
• What is our brand personality and voice?
• What is our brand aesthetic or style?

Step 2: Define Your Audience(s)

• Use your zero-, first- and third-party data to learn as much as you can about your brand ambassadors, existing and past customers, subscribers, leads, website users and social media followers
• Use any feedback your marketing, sales and CX pros may have logged to identify gaps and opportunities
• Use surveys, focus groups and on-site interactive elements learn more about what customers, prospects and the general public think of your brand, your products/services, and your content and messaging
• Develop user personas, including personal background, professional background, user environment, preferred content types, preferred devices, preferred communication methods, attitudes, interests, motivations, needs, goals and pain points, buying motivation(s), and buying scenarios
• Map out the customer journey, identifying all the different paths a social media user might take toward making a purchase; the thoughts, feelings and actions of your prospects and customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle; and how you’ve been using social media to recruit, retain, upsell and/or partner with customers
• Use a customer data platform (CDP) and/or digital experience platform (DXP) to organize and manage all your customers and prospects, segment audiences based on your user personas, and improve the empathy and personalization exhibited in all the experiences you provide

Step 3: Establish Your Content Marketing Goals

To ensure clear direction for your content marketing strategy:

• Define goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based (SMART)
• Start with your overall business goals, proceed to your long-term strategic marketing goals, and conclude with your platform-, device- and campaign-specific goals
• Identify the digital marketing, sales and customer success KPIs against which you’ll measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy and campaigns
• Outline your expectations for each of the five stages of the customer journey

Reach (stage 1)

Before a consumer has any personal connection to your brand, they may:?

• Identify a problem, pain point or need that can be addressed by a product or service you provide
• Discover your brand, product or service through social media, digital ads or search

During this first stage, the consumer is comparing products and brands, conducting research and reading customer reviews. This is your opportunity to reach them with your content. And if the consumer requests more information (or, obviously, makes a purchase), you’ve been successful.

Acquisition (stage 2)

Once the consumer visits your website or sends you an email or social media direct message, they’ve entered the acquisition stage. As the name suggests, this is your opportunity to acquire a new customer. But first you must convert the user to a lead.?

If the prospect reaches out by email or social media message, you’ll need to:?

• Respond with answers to their questions and solutions to their problems
• Inquire about their needs and pain points so you can further personalize their experiences
• Offer the products or services that would best serve them
• Educate them on the uses of your products and services

If the prospect has made it to your website, they should be able to easily access interactive, personalized, value-add experiences and content that can help them better understand and relate to your brand — and, ideally, make an informed purchase decision.?

Of course, to convert website users to leads, you’ll need to offer incentives for signups and/or ‘gate’ some of your most valuable content.?

Conversion (stage 3)

Every customer makes purchase decisions on their own time. For some, no nurturing is necessary at all. For most, a drip campaign of value-add content and subtle sales messaging is required . No matter how long it takes, or what tactics are deployed, once the lead has made a purchase they have been converted into a customer. The buyer’s journey ends here, at the bottom of the funnel, but the customer lifecycle is really just beginning.

Retention (stage 4)

Once you’ve converted a lead into a purchase, you have the opportunity to begin developing loyalty, in the hopes of creating a high-value customer, brand ambassador and/or influencer. Of course, you also have the opportunity to turn them off completely. In other words: this stage represents a balancing act between continually engaging the customer and being perceived as pushy.?

The number-one way to retain customers is to focus on the customer, and not the sale. When customers feel heard, respected and appreciated, they’re more likely to remain loyal to your brand.

Loyalty (stage 5)

You can't create brand loyalty out of nowhere; it must be nurtured and instilled throughout the customer lifecycle. If you’ve provided consistent, authentic, interactive, personalized and empathic experiences from initial awareness through retention, you have the opportunity to exponentially amplify your reach — and boost your ROI — by empowering brand loyalists to promote you via social media, forums, online reviews and word of mouth.

Step 4: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

To understand what your competitors are doing well or poorly online, and identify successful tactics you can incorporate into your content marketing strategy:

• Use your SEO tool, apps like Glassdoor and LinkedIn , and the various social media platforms to identify your key competitors
• Search your competitors’ names and account handles to determine what they’re sharing and how their audience and the public are responding (social listening)
• Focus on your top five competitors, and audit the content, experiences and messaging delivered by each brand as well as the customers, followers and influencers who develop content on the brand's behalf
• Benchmark your social and SERP (search engine results page) performance against the competition
• Perform a SWOT analysis, determining your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats across brand, product/service, marketing, sales and customer support
• Identify gaps in your existing content marketing strategy
• Strategize methods for addressing any gaps, weaknesses, threats or opportunities

Step 5: Audit Your Existing (and Past) Accounts, Content and Campaigns

Once you’ve clarified who you’re targeting and what you hope to achieve with your content marketing, look back at what you’ve already created — and how it performed — to identify trends and determine what can and should be repurposed.?

• Which types of content have and have not worked?
• Which types of campaigns have and have not worked?
• Which distribution methods have and have not worked?
• Is our content up to date??
• Is our content optimized for search?
• Is our content evergreen? (Will our content last forever?)?
• Does our content meet the requirements for the intended stage of the customer lifecycle?
• Does our content have a clear target audience?
• Does our content include an appropriate CTA?

To track your audit, create a spreadsheet with the following columns:

• Page/Post title
• User persona
• Lifecycle stage
• Content type
• Platform or distribution method
• Copy or meta description
• Hashtag or keyword
• URL
• CTA
• Gated/Ungated
• Date references
• Media used
• Performance (scroll for the most important content marketing KPIs)
• Keep/Kill/Refresh?
• Notes and suggestions

Then, perform a Keep, Kill, Refresh on your accounts, content and campaigns, as follows:

Accounts

• Delete your account from any platform that is no longer appropriate for your brand, but be sure to leave with a note to your followers about where you can be found (Kill)
• Optimize your account and profile on every platform on which you intend to remain (Refresh)

Content

• Delete any off-brand, inaccurate, stale or erroneous content (Kill)
• Properly name, file and store any content that can be reused as is (Keep)
• Optimize any content that could provide added value if updated and enhanced (Refresh)

Campaigns

• Replicate any campaigns that performed particularly well (Keep)
• Optimize any campaigns that could perform even better with behaviorally informed edits and enhancements (Refresh)
• Archive any past campaigns that underperformed (Kill)

?? FREE TEMPLATE DOWNLOAD: THE WEBSITE AUDIT >>>

Step 6: Outline Your Content Development and Distribution Responsibilities, Processes and Procedures

Before you begin planning and then creating custom content, you need to secure buy-in from all parties on how your content will be produced and disseminated. Specifically:

• Who are our content strategists?
• Who are our content creators?
• Who are our partner content creators, including social media influencers, other brands and customers who provide user-generated content?
• Who are our content reviewers?
• Who are our campaign managers?
• Who are our data and performance analysts?
• How are our content themes and subjects determined?
• What types of content are being created? And what unique step(s) does each type require?
• At what cadence is our content released?
• How are our content deadlines determined?
• Where, when and how is our content promoted?
• What type of project management style are we adopting?
• What project management software and/or other martech will we leverage for our content strategy, planning, scheduling, implementation, testing, analysis, reporting and optimization?

Step 7: Get Inspiration

Before moving onto content planning and creation, get inspired. Scour the internet and use proven user-centered design thinking techniques — like moodboards, mockups, storyboards and wireframes — to collect and brainstorm off the concepts, designs, media uses and storytelling techniques of the most effective marketers and influencers across the web.?

Step 8: Develop Your Editorial Plan and Content Calendar

Finally, you can flesh out your content marketing ideas.

Start by outlining your core competencies, or the subject areas about which you have the most expertise — these will form your content hubs, for which you’ll create what’s called pillar content. Your content hubs can be created as sections of your website, or as long-form (blog) reads, with the pillar content providing a high-level overview of the subject, while linking out to more granular, funnel stage-specific content.

Then:?

• Interview internal stakeholders on trends, topics and techniques they think most appeal to your audiences
• Look back at your content audit and identify the topics with the best performance
• Ask your high-value customers and brand ambassadors what inspired them to visit your site, request a demo, make a purchase or promote your brand
• Ask your past followers and customers what it is about your brand, products/services, values or social media presence that inspired them to unfollow you or stop spending
• Spy on your competitors — what concepts or content types do you see that you haven’t touched on or tried?

Next, sign into your SEO tool to confirm your current SERP rankings and build your target 10 SEO keywords list, striving to include:

• Short-tail keywords
• Long-tail keywords
• Short-term keywords
• Long-term keywords
• Product-defining keywords
• Customer-defining keywords
• Intent-targeting keywords

For each of your target keywords, develop a list of “easier” (lower keyword competition score) sub-keywords, using Excel or Google Sheets.

?? FREE TEMPLATE DOWNLOAD: THE SEO KEYWORDS TARGET 10 LIST >>>

With all this data, you can identify gaps and opportunities related to your user personas, lifecycle stages, content types and keywords — with the goal of covering them all, as well as interconnecting related pieces of content to direct users through the customer lifecycle and toward your desired actions.

Build out a spreadsheet organized by topic, with columns for:

• User persona
• Lifecycle stage
• Content type
• Primary keyword
• Secondary keyword
• Title
• Headers
• CTA
• Gated/Ungated

Use the project management software you selected earlier to build out a master calendar, as well as the timeline for each campaign, project and assignment, assigning all roles from development to approval and from distribution to monitoring, analysis, iteration and optimization.

Step 9: Test, Monitor, Analyze, Report, Iterate, and Optimize

The truth is: You can always split-test something else. And you can always optimize further. But before you get started, be sure you’re set up to measure performance against the most critical KPIs.

Measuring Your Content Marketing Performance with the Right Metrics

Digital marketing KPIs are measurable values that marketing teams use to track campaign performance against pre-defined objectives. While specific campaigns can prioritize specific digital marketing metrics, like tracking click-through rates of a lead generation ad or the conversion rate of a squeeze page, the marketing KPIs listed here should be used for all campaigns (as well as to measure the overall effectiveness of the marketing team).

Likewise, CX metrics track the effectiveness of your customer experience strategy, tactics, processes, procedures, and support agents. Although specific campaigns may require an enhanced focus on particular customer service KPIs, the following should be used for all campaigns (and your overall CX team reviews).

29 Must-Measure KPIs for Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

Reach (Social Media + SEO + Digital Ads)

1. Reach. Reach is determined by the number of accounts that see your content.?Monitor your average reach and the reach of each campaign and post, as well as what percentage of your content reaches followers versus non-followers.
2. Impressions. Impressions represent the number of times your content is seen. Look out for high impression numbers, as it may suggest a uniquely high level of stickiness to the particular post or campaign.
3. Engagement rate. The engagement rate is the level of interaction with your account, campaign or content, compared to your reach, followers or audience size.?To measure your engagement rate by reach (ERR) for a single post, divide your total number of engagements per post by your reach per post, and multiply by 100.?To measure your average engagement rate across all posts within a campaign (or any series of posts, for that matter), add up all the ERRs from the posts you want to average and divide by the total number of posts.?To measure the rate at which your followers engage with a single post, divide the total number of engagements by your total number of followers and multiply by 100. To measure your average engagement rate amongst your followers, add up the rates for all the posts and divide by the total number of posts.?To measure your engagement rate by impressions for paid content, divide your total engagements on a post by total impressions and multiply by 100.?To measure your average engagement rate by impressions, add up all the rates for all your paid content and divide by the total number of posts.?To measure your daily engagement rate, divide your total engagements in a day by your total number of followers and multiply by 100.?To measure your average daily engagement rate for longer-term analysis, add up all your daily rates and divide by the total number of days.
4. Amplification rate. The amplification rate is the degree to which your followers share your content.?To calculate your amplification rate for a specific post, divide the post’s total number of shares by your total number of followers and multiply by 100.?To obtain your average amplification rate, add up all your amplification rates and divide by the total number of posts.
5. Virality rate. The virality rate is the degree to which your content is shared exponentially, expressed via impressions.?To determine your virality rate for a single post, divide the post’s total number of shares by its impressions and multiply by 100.?As with the previous KPIs, to calculate your average virality rate, add up all your virality rates and divide by the total number of posts.?
6. Audience growth rate. Audience growth rate is the speed at which you’re increasing your follower counts.?To calculate your audience growth rate, track your net new followers over a predetermined time period, divide that number by your total audience and multiply by 100. To benchmark your progress, do the same thing for your key competitors.
7. Social share of voice (SSoV). Your SSoV is the percentage of people talking about your brand compared to all other brands within your industry or niche.?To calculate your SSoV on a particular social media platform, add up every mention of your brand, do the same for your competitors, add all sets of mentions to obtain the total, and then divide your brand mentions by the industry total and multiply by 100.?To compare your SSoV to that of a specific competitor, perform the same calculation for their total number of mentions.?To measure your SSoV across social media, add up every mention of your brand on all platforms, do the same for your competitors, and complete the same equation.
8. Social sentiment. Social sentiment refers to the feelings and attitudes behind the conversations that accounts are having about your brand on social media.?Customer sentiment analysis refers to the examination of customer sentiment as expressed by customers (or users) across platforms and devices throughout the customer journey; this can include data collected via voice-of-the-customer programs, self-service portals, customer surveys, customer reviews and even social media posts, blog post comments or email replies.?The customer sentiment score refers to the value applied to customer sentiment, expressed numerically in a range typically between 0 and 5, 0 and 10 or 0 and 100.?To measure your social sentiment, or follower sentiment, you could develop your own manual scoring system; or, you could invest in AI.?Social media sentiment analysis tools employ machine learning to generate sentiment scores from algorithms that, for social media, scan follower interactions, tracking phrases, words and behaviors with pre-assigned values, and then integrate measurements to gauge whether customers have positive, negative or neutral views; they also provide actionable insights based on when, where and why sentiments develop.

Acquisition + Conversion (Lead Generation + Conversion)

1. Web traffic sources. The website traffic source metric measures which sources are driving visitors to your website, as well as how visitors from each source are behaving (e.g., goal completions or bounce rate). The four primary traffic sources are:?direct traffic, from visitors who type your URL directly into their browser to visit your site; referral traffic, from visitors who arrive at your site from a third-party source, such as another website or social media platform; search traffic, from visitors who arrive at your site from searching for your brand or a specific search term or keyword; and campaign traffic, from visitors who arrive at your site as a result of a dedicated campaign, with pre-established tracking parameters. This information can be used to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns and overall brand awareness, engagement, lead generation and keyword strategies.
2. Click-through rate (CTR). Perhaps the most important KPI for analyzing how well your keyword strategy relates to your actual offerings, your CTR measures the percentage of searches that produce clicks to your website. While your keyword rankings determine whether your website or web page will appear on a SERP, your CTR demonstrates how effective your meta title, meta description and other website SEO elements are in producing new site visitors.
3. Returning visitors. Particularly important for demonstrating the value of your content marketing strategy, the returning visitor metric tracks what happens when a user returns to your site multiple times. In addition to tracking total number of return visits, this metric can provide valuable information on pages per session, average session duration and bounce rate, three sub-metrics that can tell you whether your content is delivering what you promise — and what consumers and customers expect.
4. Goal completion rate (GCR). The goal completion rate measures the percentage of website visitors who take a particular action to complete a predefined goal, like signing up for a free trial or downloading a whitepaper. Used often for A/B testing and user-centric website redesigns, your GCR can be used to determine the effectiveness of your lead generation campaigns, as well as your efforts to design for the best UX .
5. New leads generated. When it comes to leads, there are a variety of essential metrics, including total number of leads, leads per source, and cost per lead. New leads generated refers to the amount of new leads added to your CDP or CRM during a given time period or as the result of a specific campaign. This information can be used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign or your overall marketing efforts, and is of utmost importance because leads are what the sales team uses to convert website visitors from interested consumers to paying customers.
6. Lead conversion rate. The lead conversion rate, or website traffic/lead ratio, tells you the percentage of website visitors who convert to leads as a result of your on-site lead generation mechanisms (such as a demo request, a content download or a newsletter signup form). This metric is important because it provides details on the overall quality of your website traffic, as well as which sources are producing the most leads.
7. Lead-to-sale conversion rate. Also known as sales conversion rate and lead-to-customer conversion rate, the lead-to-sales conversion rate refers to the percentage of your leads that convert (e.g., as a result of your email drip campaign or sales conversations) to customers. To determine your sales conversion rate, divide the number of leads converted by the total lead volume and then multiply it by 100%.

Retention + Loyalty (Customer Experience)

1. Churn rate and MRR (monthly recurring revenue) churn. The churn rate is the rate at which your customers stop subscribing or shopping with your brand over a specific time period. Low churn rate, obviously, reveals customer satisfaction; high churn rates mean there’s something wrong with the product or service, your marketing of that product or service, or the amount of effort required to subscribe to or purchase that product or service. To calculate your churn rate: set your analysis period (e.g., a month, a quarter, six months, or a year); subtract the number of customers you had at the beginning of the time period from the number you had at the end; and divide this figure by the number of customers you had at the beginning. For instance, if you had 100 customers on day one and 75 on day 30, your churn rate is -25% ((75/100) x 100 = -.25 = -25%). Your MRR churn, meanwhile, tells you the amount of monthly recurring revenue gained or lost as a result of your customer churn.
2. Customer effort score (CES). As it sounds, CES measures the amount of effort your customers have to expend to execute specific actions, like completing an online form, finding a product or resolving a technical issue. To determine your average customer effort score, you’ll again need to create a survey; this time it should ask customers to rate the level of effort required to complete an activity or series of activities. The results will tell you whether you really designed for UX, and what you should change to improve the user experience.?
3. Customer sentiment. While many organizations strive to ascertain customer sentiment using traditional CX KPIs, customer sentiment encompasses more than a customer’s level of satisfaction or likelihood of promoting the brand; customer sentiment is complicated, qualitative and ephemeral — measuring how the customer feels about you.?Customer sentiment analysis refers to the examination of customer sentiment as expressed by customers (or users) across platforms and devices throughout the customer journey; this can include data collected via voice-of-the-customer programs, self-service portals, customer surveys, customer reviews and even social media posts, blog post comments or email replies. Customer sentiment score refers to the value applied to customer sentiment, expressed numerically in a range typically between 0 and 5, 0 and 10 or 0 and 100. To measure customer sentiment at your company, you could develop your own manual scoring system; or, you could invest in AI.?These AI-powered tools employ machine learning to generate sentiment scores from algorithms that scan customer interactions, tracking phrases, words and behaviors with pre-assigned values, and then integrating measurements to gauge whether customers have positive, negative or neutral views; they also provide actionable insights based on when, where and why customer sentiments develop.
4. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). The CSAT demonstrates each customer’s level of satisfaction; analyzed in totality, your customer satisfaction scores can tell you whether you’re truly offering customer-centric experiences — and, if not, what needs to be changed. Usually measured on a five-point scale, from very dissatisfied to very satisfied, you can use the CSAT to gather feedback during any stage of the customer lifecycle. All you have to do is establish criteria for your scoring, establish the metric that equates to a positive score, and include customer survey forms in your digital marketing and CX communications. Then, to determine your organization-level percentage score, multiply your pre-established positive score by 100. For instance, if you have 50 positive scores from a total of 100, your CSAT is 50% ((50/100) x 100 = 50%).
5. Customer health score. The customer health score is used to determine whether or not a customer will remain loyal over time. In contrast to most other customer experience metrics, the customer health score requires strategic legwork and is developed from a collection of the other CX KPIs most important to your unique business. Among the most commonly included metrics are:?product/service usage period; product type (free/paid, license level, etc.); number of interactions with the support team; money spent with your brand; social media posts about your brand; referrals to your brand; and willingness to answer customer experience surveys. Based on the metrics that make the most sense for you, develop a grading system for your customers; then, for easier segmentation and personalization, divide them into four categories: high-value; healthy; unhealthy; and at-risk.
6. Net promoter score (NPS). Often coupled with CSAT, NPS measures the likelihood a customer will recommend you to others — and, ideally, become an influencer for your brand. To determine your NPS, develop a survey with a single question or multiple questions geared toward promoting and sharing, on a scale from 0 to 10, from “not likely at all” to “very likely.” Customers who provide (average) scores between 0 and 6 are considered detractors; passive customers typically score between 7 and 8; and your promoters will give you a 9 or 10. Then, to calculate your NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. And for more detailed, nuanced, qualitative feedback, ask an open-ended question, as well. All of this information can be automatically added to your customer profiles in your CDP or DXP.
7. Customer lifetime value (CLV). The CLV is a forecasting of the net profit an organization can expect to earn from a customer over the entire period of their relationship. When measured and ranked by customer, the CLV can help you segment — and better personalize the experiences for — your highest-value customers. When combined and contrasted with total expenditures, you can determine the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing, sales and CX efforts. To determine your average CLV: calculate your average purchase value; multiply your average purchase value by how often a purchase is made; and then multiply this figure by your average customer lifespan. For example, if your average purchase is $100, made twice a year for 3 years, your CLV is $600 ($100 x 3 x 2 = $600). To use this measurement to improve your marketing to high-value customers, create a list of the customers with a CLV exceeding your average.?

Bonus (Expenses + Revenue)

1. Cost per click (CPC). Your CPC is the amount you pay per click on a paid ad.?To calculate CPC, divide the total cost by the total number of clicks and multiply by 100.
2. Cost per lead. As with anything in business, marketing needs to be measured in terms of ROI; when measured alongside cost per acquisition (or customer acquisition cost), customer lifetime value and return on marketing investment, the cost per lead metric can provide valuable information on the cost-effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
3. Cost per acquisition. Like the cost per lead metric, which indicates how much you spend to generate a new lead, cost per acquisition, or customer acquisition cost, measures the cost of converting that lead into a customer.?
4. Customer retention cost. Investing in new customers is between 500% and 2500% more expensive than retaining existing ones. Of course, retaining customers costs money too. And to ensure your marketing and CX strategies are producing positive ROI, you need to measure the cost of your customer retention efforts. To calculate your customer retention cost, or CRC, add all of the expenses incurred in keeping (and obtaining!) customers and divide that figure by the number of customers in your database. If your CRC is higher than your MRR, or monthly recurring revenue, it’s time to make some changes.
5. Earned growth rate. NPS was invented by Fred Reichheld , who introduced “the one number you need to grow” in Harvard Business Review in 2003. “Since then, NPS has spread rapidly around the world” and is now used by two thirds of the Fortune 1000. Unfortunately, this has proved problematic, with “self-reported scores and misinterpretations of the NPS framework… sow[ing] confusion and diminish[ing] its credibility.” So, Reichheld and team developed a new “complementary metric that drew on accounting results, not on surveys ," to quantify actual customer value. Earned growth rate, the researchers realized, would be “far more resistant to gaming, coaching, pleading, and the response biases that plague the results of non-anonymized surveys.” It would also “reinforce the effectiveness” of the original KPI, NPS, by providing “clear, data-driven” connections across and among customer success, repeat and expanded purchases, word-of-mouth recommendations, positive company culture and business results. Earned growth comprises two elements: NRR, or net revenue retention; and ENC, or earned new customers. Earned growth rate measures revenue growth generated by returning customers and their referrals, while the earned growth ratio measures the ratio of earned growth to total growth. To determine your earned growth rate, begin by calculating your NRR as follows: organize your revenue by customer; tally current year revenues from existing customers (who were also customers the year before); divide this amount by the previous year’s total revenues; and express this figure as a percentage. Next, to “ascertain why new customers have come on board,” isolate the percentage of new customers earned through referrals (your ENC) from new customers gained via other methods. (Since “few firms” could quantify their ENC, Reichheld and team “pioneered a solution,” simply by adding a “relatively painless step” to the customer onboarding process: asking them the “primary reason” they gave you their business.) Finally, sort your customers into two categories, “earned” (e.g., from a referral) and “bought” (e.g., a Super Bowl ad or sponsored social media post); use a set of expected customer responses, along with an open-ended “other” response, to gather additional information to help you fine-tune the categories and options over time; and determine your earned growth rate by adding your NRR and ENC together?and then subtracting 100%. (Of course, if you want to compare your results to those of your competitors, you’ll need them to follow the same earned growth rate framework.)
6. Return on marketing investment. As it sounds, your return on investment from marketing is a measure of how much revenue you’ve generated from a specific campaign — during a specific time period, or overall. To determine your marketing ROI, subtract your marketing costs by your sales growth, multiply by 100, and divide by your marketing investment.
7. Monthly recurring revenue and expansion MRR. Also a sales metric and ideal for SaaS and subscription-based businesses, your MRR tells you how much your customers are spending with you each and every month. Expansion MRR identifies how much your customers are spending outside of recurring subscriptions or payments. To measure your total monthly recurring revenue, multiply your number of monthly customers by their average monthly spend; for expansion MRR, add all additional revenue and multiply that figure by your total number of customers.

Other Content Marketing and SEO Best Practices

Before you move on to creating that killer custom content, ensure you’ve checked off the following:

• Add structured data
• Register on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools; submit XML sitemaps
• Sign up for Google Analytics; track site speed and performance
• Identify your target (and associated) keywords, and incorporate them in the most relevant parts of your site, avoiding keyword stuffing
• Create short URLs, with primary keyword
• Add alt text to images
• Add outbound links to authoritative sites and inbound links to related parts of your site
• Noindex, Nofollow pages you don’t want crawled
• Continually audit and keep/kill/refresh based on accuracy, timeliness, performance, etc.
• Continually monitor for and fix crawl errors and broken links
• Build backlinks by guest posting and appearing on/in podcasts, online publications, etc.

• Use a Content Brief to pitch, organize and track each and every content marketing project

?? FREE TEMPLATE DOWNLOAD: THE CONTENT BRIEF >>>

Other Web Writing/Blogging Best Practices

It’s not enough to simply develop your website according to content marketing and SEO best practices; each and every piece of web content you create needs to be optimally structured as well. Take this newsletter edition as an example. Include:

• Title, in 56 characters or less, with primary keyword (in this case, “content marketing”) and a popular phrase (e.g., "Guide to," “How to,” “Why,” “The Top”)
• Meta description, in 156 characters or less, with primary keyword, teasing the content
• Keyword in first paragraph
• Headlines (H1, H2s, H3s, and H4s) with keywords, and lists — list headlines accrue 80% more pageviews than content with other headline types
• Keywords throughout the content
• Frequent lists within the content — posts containing frequent lists generate 70% more traffic
• Images, relevant to the content themes, with alt text, including keywords if possible — posts that include images generate two to four times more traffic, 30% more shares, and 25% more backlinks
• Internal links to related content
• Outbound links to other high-authority, non-competing sites
• Call to action (CTA)
• Short URL, with keyword
• Long read — long-form content generates 400% more traffic, 77% more backlinks and 56% more social shares

Now What? 118 AI-Powered Tools to Help You Streamline and Enhance Your Content Marketing

Audio Recording + Editing

1. Adobe Podcast
2. CyberLink AudioDirector 365
3. Descript
4. Krisp
5. Podcastle

Content Generation (use with caution)

1. Byword
2. Copy.ai
3. Jasper.ai DACH
4. Notion AI
5. Writer

Bonus: Grammarly | CoSchedule

Content Repurposing

1. Munch
2. PodIntelligence
3. vidyo.ai
4. VoicePen AI
5. Wondercraft

Customer Data Management (CDPs)

1. Bloomreach
2. Blueshift
3. Ortto
4. Tealium AudienceStream CDP
5. Segment

Customer Relationship Management (CRMs)

1. ActiveCampaign CRM
2. Apptivo CRM
3. HubSpot CRM
4. Klaviyo
5. Salesforce

Data Visualization

1. Looker
2. Microsoft Power BI
3. Qlik Sense
4. Tableau
5. Zoho Analytics

Digital Advertising

1. Adobe Advertising Cloud
2. AdRoll, a division of NextRoll
3. Google Ads
4. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
5. Taboola

Digital Transformation (DXPs)

1. Acquia Digital Experience Platform
2. Adobe Experience Cloud
3. Optimizely Digital Experience Platform
4. Progress Sitefinity
5. Sitecore Experience Platform

Email Marketing

1. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
2. EmailOctopus
3. GetResponse
4. MailerLite
5. Omnisend

Graphic + Motion Design

1. Adobe Animate
2. Adobe Illustrator
3. Adobe InDesign
4. Adobe Photoshop
5. Adobe Substance

Image Generation

1. Adobe Firefly
2. Canva
3. Craiyon??
4. DALL-E 2 by OpenAI
5. Dream by WOMBO.ai

Influencer Marketing

1. GRIN
2. Creator.co
3. Upfluence
4. #paid
5. Klear

On-Site Data Collection

Eye-tracking tools, such as:

1. Eyegaze Inc.
2. Eyeware
3. IRISBOND
4. Mirametrix Inc.
5. Tobii

Split-testing tools, such as:

1. HubSpot 's A/B Testing Kit
2. Omniconvert
3. Optimizely
4. Unbounce
5. Zoho PageSense

Survey tools, such as:

1. AskNicely
2. Qualaroo
3. SurveyMonkey
4. Typeform
5. Zoho Survey

User feedback tools, such as:

1. Hotjar
2. Marker.io
3. Maze
4. Userbrain
5. UXtweak

Project Management

1. Asana
2. Atlassian Jira
3. monday.com
4. Trello by Atlassian
5. Wrike

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Ahrefs
2. BrightEdge
3. Moz
4. Semrush
5. Similarweb

Bonus: Google Search Console | Google Trends | Pinterest Trends | SEO Spider by Screaming Frog

Sentiment Analysis + Social Listening

1. Brand24
2. Lexalytics, an InMoment Company
3. Meltwater
4. Qualtrics Connect
5. Talkwalker

Social Media Marketing

1. Agorapulse
2. Content Studio
3. Hootsuite
4. SocialPilot
5. Sprout Social, Inc.

Video Generation + Video Editing

1. Adobe Premiere Pro
2. invideo
3. Lumen5
4. Synthesia
5. Vimeo Video Editor (formerly Magistro)

Web Dev + Maintenance (Content Management Systems (CMSs))

1. Drupal
2. Hubspot CMS Hub
3. Joomla!
4. Squarespace
5. WordPress

Bonus: Shopify | WooCommerce

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