The problem a lot of content teams face is an inability to track the efficacy of content against conversion. Most performance metrics talk about traffic, dwell time, click-throughs, etc. but no of this is cold hard cash. Which is what business care about the most.
When it comes to devising a content strategy and getting budget to produce sexy videos (not like that), infogifs, podcasts, etc. it’s difficult to justify spending when you can’t prove it’s ROI in sales. Although companies chase search rankings and traffic. It doesn’t build a compelling enough reason to spend money.
However, I’m changing that. I’ve put together some robust KPIs all content teams can use to prove their worth.
- Conversion – this is the biggy. If you can only do one, do this. You can add a pixel to content so you can track what a person does once they’ve landed on the page.
- Fallow sell – this is normally used in CRM where it’s easy to suppress 10% of the base from getting any marketing and seeing how they behave. Online, you can do this with AB testing. Produce a very basic, formally written, plain page and show it to 10% of the traffic that hit that page. Make sure you get enough volume on that page.
- Customer propensity modelling – a science that blows my mind, but your data science peeps can build a model of who visits your site and you can adapt your content to match them.
- Lead capture – adding a component onto a webpage that captures customer data for marketing to follow up with. Make sure this can be fulfilled in the back-end and meets data legalities.
- tNPS – the same as NPS but pop-ups during a particular interaction, in this case, landing on a page. You can ask people about feedback, advocacy and cross/upsell opportunities and anything else you may want to know.
There’s also the standard measures (which may look better because the numbers are higher), so I recommend compiling a monthly report with traffic, click-throughs, SEO rankings and dwell-time. It helps increase the importance and awareness of how hard the content is working.
Go forth, copywriters. Sharpen your swords and prove your worth!
