Everyone needs something to strive for to keep them on track. Getting clear on important KPIs to support your business goals is essential in moving towards data-driven content marketing. After reading this post, download our ebook to get an overview of measurable metrics with actionable tips.
57% —that’s how far the average B2B buyer is through the purchase decision cycle before engaging a team member in sales. With nearly 60% of your customers engaging first with your content, then with your team, there’s still only 88% of B2B marketers that consider themselves to use content marketing as part of their business strategy.
As a result, content marketing efforts aren’t a strategic business function, which means less budget and resources are given to marketing teams to engage prospective buyers. This lack of resources means that most content efforts end up being experimental with a “just get it done” mentality, leaving thousands of dollars of untapped potential on the table.
Here are four key ways to make your content efforts data-driven:
Showcase the potential of content on your business’s bottom line by identifying the right metrics to measure content initiatives against.
If you know where you’re headed, you’ll know what to track to stay focused.
To be a data-driven content team, look beyond just measuring how much content you’re creating and answer why you’re creating content in the first place. Data-driven content teams think how content makes a difference long-term and beyond just the project to how that content impacts other functions of the business.
A new webinar, for example, will get the business 100 new leads in the short-term, boost brand awareness, and increase web traffic. Long-term, the same webinar contributed to the bottom-line of closing $100,000 new sales in the quarter. Each webinar created, marketed, and executed captures more leads, builds brand trust, which all feed a marketing funnel.
All these efforts work in various ways to help with conversion to revenue. So how do you get started proving that connection and showing ROI? Think backward.
Working backward from strategic business goals ensures you’re not creating content for the sake of it, but you’re focused on the right content to deliver on the bottom line every time. Ask yourself what each campaign created is hoping to get you.
If your goal is to land $100,000 in new sales, think to the prerequisites needed to make a sale:
- Figure out which exact metric you need to increase. Do you have enough leads to convert to opportunities, or do you need to focus on lead generation? Based on previous quarters' conversion rates, you may need to focus on lead generation, or perhaps you have buckets of leads and need to focus on conversion nurturing).
- Identify a benchmark you’re working at to improve. Look to last quarter’s conversion numbers to predict what specific areas you can focus on increasing.
- Create a strategic plan that highlights what content activities will improve each metric. Some content activities such as webinars, newsletter signup optimizations, events, or content downloads will work to capture leads, while email marketing will nurture and aim to convert leads to opportunities.
In the list above, it’s clear what content activities are tied to increasing revenue of the bottom line. While the direct impact of blog X compared to blog Y might be difficult to prove, a documented strategic plan clearly highlights what metrics matter, what content is contributing to metrics and provides a quantifiable foundation for benchmarking.
Being a data-driven comes to always ensure the following two questions get answered:
- What metrics does our business deem important?
- What content mediums are most likely to help us deliver on that metric?
If you’re unsure, always default to asking, does the metric you’re using to identify success help you make decisions? Do you know what you need to do to execute and make it happen? If you don’t, you’re probably not linking content output to the right metric.
Lean on the goldmine of data that is already right in front of you: Analyze what content lead to conversions in the past to map out future content campaigns.
One of the benefits of data-driven content marketing is that there’s always opportunities to iterate and optimize on what’s currently being done. If the business goal is to generate $100,000 in new revenue, and you know that to hit the marketing to sales conversion % you’re going to need 1,000 more new leads, look at past campaigns that have delivered the most leads.
Look at what worked within that campaign and see if there’s potential re-purposing opportunity. Analyze where along the campaign mishaps happened, such as spikes in unsubscribes, and take note of how your new campaign will course correct for those mistakes.
Being data-driven means you’re continuously analyzing past metrics to iterate on your strategy in future decisions.
A/B test to continuously create comparative data.
A/B testing is one strategy to ensure that you’re always aiming at optimizing the impact of content on your business. Whether the focus is on capturing new leads or, converting an existing database of leads into new opportunities, A/B testing can be used to make small improvements that drive low-cost data-inspired ROI.
There are ways to refine your content. Opportunities include tweaking landing pages, to writing new call-to-actions, refining email nurture messages, and buying ads to drive leads to sales conversions. Additionally, you can implement A/B testing to identify what’s working and what’s not and take the time to audit content to uncover insights into how you can improve.
Don’t become complacent or okay with average.
A/B testing ensures you’re continuously working on driving, even more, ROI time and time again. Even if your current conversion rates are making an impact on your bottom line, becoming complacent with benchmarks can mean that your business is losing out on thousands of dollars of untapped opportunities.
Experiment with timing you send emails with critical CTAs and ensure you have a control version.
A survey of over 6 million emails done by Hubspot revealed 80% fewer emails are sent over the weekend. As a result, they’re 10% more likely to be opened.* Always A/B test to optimize the potential of your messages, but be sure to use a control version to test improvements. A “control” version is the original email you did or would have sent before coming up with a second version. Having the original to benchmark changes against ensures you have one copy that you’re always checking against.
Having a version to check against also ensures that slight changes you’re making aren’t confounding variables. Things occurring that are out of your control (i.e. email server blocks, away messages, etc.) Also, without a baseline to measure against, it becomes difficult to see the actual ROI of any small tweak versus other changes.
Conversion rates are only meaningful if they’re accomplishing the right goal for your business.
Benchmarks, best practices, and goals to track ROI are only meaningful if they’re the right metrics and ROI that your business finds valuable. The best piece of advice is that you have to do what’s in your business’s better interest.
Don’t just do what’s new and innovative because it’s a hot trend.
What’s the business goal, how can content contribute in moving that forward, and how will do you know your content is contributing to that goal?
A good way to manage ideation and pulse check if the content initiatives you’re executing on is continuously making a difference is to have bi-weekly status meetings as a team. Keep it simple by using the start, stop, keep method. Define what you should keep doing, what you should stop doing, and what you need to start doing.
Remember, being data-driven means that you’re taking specific business goals and identifying opportunities where content can make a positive impact against the bottom-line.
Looking for more information on how to improve the impact of your content and become a data-driven marketing team? Download our ebook, The Keys to the Kingdom: Making Your Marketing Team More Data-Centric.
This article originally appeared in Marketing.AI, was written by Kendra Moroz from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.