Getting Started with Marketing Metrics and Content

What are the important marketing metrics for success?

The metrics that will best serve your needs will vary depending upon the purpose of your marketing campaign. For example, if you are running a campaign with a strong social media emphasis in an effort to drive brand awareness, you will focus more on metrics related to traffic, engagement, social shares and new followers that are attracted to your social platforms. On the other hand, if your campaign is going to be focused on the bottom line - revenue - then you will be paying more attention to conversions, the cost per conversion and the cost per lead.

What are the most important marketing metrics?

When you decide to run a new campaign, your team meeting should begin by determining your end objectives. You should not be creating a marketing strategy that is based around putting out content just because that is what everyone else is doing. Instead, your content should focus on performing a specific goal. You should be able to answer the following questions:

  • What do we want to accomplish with this specific campaign?
  • How will we determine success?
  • What buyer personas will this campaign be targeting?
  • What types of content/topics/keywords will best work with this campaign and this target audience?
  • What distribution platforms will help me best reach this target persona?

How can you measure the effectiveness?

  1. Develop your marketing campaign based upon the listed questions above. Keep your efforts tightly aligned with the data so that you can be confident that your marketing efforts are producing the material that this target audience is most interested in reading.
  2. Use your predefined metrics to see how well your campaign is reaching your selected goals.
  3. Revisit the areas where the campaign fell short and examine your marketing metrics. Look closely at each stage of the campaign for the weak step in the chain. For example, if your goal was to increase brand awareness through social shares and building your social communities, you might ask yourself:
    1. Did my audience read this article?
    2. If they did, did they share it?
    3. If they did, how many new people engaged with the article?

Use the answers to these questions to see where you need to make modifications. If your initial audience did not read the article, then you either selected a poor topic, did not engage them with the headline or you targeted the wrong audience. If they read it completely, but did not share it, it must not have appealed to their desire to share.

Using marketing metrics can help you run effective marketing campaigns that are not based on gut feelings, but rather consumer reactions and desires. The better you understand what the customer wants to see, the timelier your content will be and the easier it will be to draw in new customers.

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