Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs as they’re commonly referred to, help you to understand how your content is performing. And, more importantly, if you’re achieving everything you set out to achieve.

So, how do we identify these goals and what questions should we be asking to help determine what success looks like? In this post, I’ll talk you through how to define KPIs for your content marketing campaign and which metrics are the best ones to measure.

But first, let’s define what your goals are.

What are your campaign goals?

Content marketing helps to educate, persuade and entertain your customers during every stage of the Buyer’s Journey. But what are your specific goals for your current campaign? Below are a few suggestions to get you inspired and focus your efforts.

• Lead generation

• Lead nurturing

• Increase brand awareness

• Grow sales revenue by a certain margin

• Increase customer retention

• Increase customer loyalty

• Boost newsletter sign ups

• Increase your social following

• Raise awareness around an event

You may find that your campaign leans towards a few of these goals - great! Make sure you identify which are your primary, secondary and tertiary goals and shift your efforts accordingly.  An example of this might be:

“My primary goal is to increase lead generation on our site, but my secondary aim is to raise awareness around an event I’m hosting that will help us to secure leads.”

Now that we’ve identified our goals, which metrics are relevant?

Which KPIs should you focus on?

This super handy chart, taken from Content Marketing Strategies for Dummies, is a good place to start:

At the moment, these metrics are too vague.  To truly measure success we need to set some SMART goals. It’s only by setting SMART goals that we’ll know if our content campaign has really hit the mark.

How to set SMART goals for your content marketing campaign

SMART stands for:

S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Attainable
R - Relevant
T - Time-Based

Here’s a concrete example of a SMART goal for a content marketing campaign:

Overarching Goal:  "I want to increase sign ups to our school newsletter."

Specific: "I want to increase sign ups to the school newsletter during our busiest time of year; September."

Measurable: "I will ensure MailChimp tracking code is enabled on our site and run a test of it before I start promoting. I want to increase our sign ups by 25%."

Attainable: "I will use a trusted email marketing provider that offers customer support, in case I get stuck. I will promote the newsletter through our social media channels and provide an incentive for people signing up."

Relevant: "The school newsletter is a good way to communicate to parents and governors the events of the school, without having to deal with them individually. It will save everyone time if people are encouraged to look to the newsletter first for information."

Time-based: "I will complete this for September, as this is when we get the most queries from new parents."

And that’s it! These are the first steps to you making measurable, realistic goals. By setting yourself these aims to work towards, you’ll be able to laser-focus your attention and not get side-tracked focusing on irrelevant data. And be sure to share your hard work.

If you’re working on behalf of someone else, make sure they sign off your SMART goals and everyone is working towards the same goal. If you’re doing it for your own company, share it with relevant colleagues - it’ll give you plenty of opportunity to boast about your hard work.

=====