Proving the effectiveness of content marketing can seem daunting. But if you can't prove your worth with c-suite, why do they continue to invest in you and content marketing?
To prove your worth with c-suite, you need an easy, repeatable method to measure the performance of your content marketing campaigns, and how they align with business goals. and what you need to do next.
To prove your worth with c-suite, you need an easy, repeatable method to measure the performance of your #contentmarketing campaigns. Click to Tweet
It's time to have a content dashboard.
Dashboards have been around for a long time. The goal of the dashboard is simple: convey the most relevant information about something in one easy-to-understand place.
A content dashboard is no different. But how do you create a dashboard that demonstrates the ROI of your content marketing efforts your without getting lost in a sea of data? And how do you take the next step of creating your own content dashboard, so you know what you should create next?
Let's start with the content dashboard for your c-suite (I'll show you a free sample there), then we'll dive into creating actionable content dashboards for the next team. display your content.
Create a content dashboard for your c-suite.
What is your business goal?
The first thing you need to do when creating a content marketing dashboard for your c-suite is to understand what your business goals are for your content marketing program. These goals must be directly tied to content marketing goals your.
If your business goal is to increase leads by 10% YoY and content marketing needs to drive half that number, then your content marketing goal should be to increase leads by 5% By year.
If your business goal is to reduce calls to customer support by 25%, and it is 100% dependent on achieving through the new online FAQ your content team is creating , then your content marketing goal is to reduce customer support calls by 25%.
Which content metrics matter?
You show what you measure.
What metrics will show the success or failure of your content marketing goals? In the first example above, success or failure would be judged by the total number of leads over time. In the second example, you need to get a report on the total number of calls to the customer support team over time.
the most important indicators. You don't want to throw in the indexes just to have them. Yes, it's great that website traffic has increased, but that doesn't mean anything if it's not part of your overall goal of content marketing. It creates clutter and detracts from the content dashboard.
Some metrics may be easier than others. Leads, incoming traffic, ecommerce revenue, etc can come from Google Analytics. Other metrics, such as call volume, may need to come from another source. Make sure you know how you get your metrics and how often you need them (are you reporting monthly, quarterly, or annually?) Remember, you only get the metrics that matter most.
How are those metrics converted into money?
When you measure ROI, you're comparing money coming in with money going out. So you need to understand how much money each of your goals is to make or save for the company.
In the example above, you can calculate the average value of leads you receive (total revenue from previous leads / total number of previous leads = sales / customers) potential). If you can take it a step further and get long-term customer value through leads, that's even better!
For call centers, you will be able to calculate the cost savings per month by reducing the number of calls by 25%. Who's that must have that data, otherwise why is it a business goal?
You must also record the amount of money spent to achieve that goal. This is where you can get the money you spent on resources like promotions, salaries, etc. Even a rough estimate will give you useful data.
Gather your data.
Now you put everything together. Choose a business goal/content marketing goal and metrics for measuring it. It's your first data point in the dashboard.
If you can get down to dollars and cents per metric, add that data point (this will give you a true ROI figure).
Go over each key goal of your content marketing strategy and each one taken into account in the content dashboard. Then show the difference in how that metric performed compared to the previous period and how it performed relative to your overall goal.
This is your c-suite dashboard. It shows them, in very real numbers, how their investment in content marketing is doing. .
Download c-suite content dashboard template here
That's great for them, How about you?
Create a content dashboard for your own team.
Proving that your content marketing efforts are working through the content dashboard is incredibly important, but the magic doesn't stop there.
Generating great results that generate a positive ROI is much of the battle. Content marketers need all the help they can get to create great content that resonates with their audience and stays on track.
Proactive content dashboards can help content marketers understand what's working, what's not, and where new opportunities might be hiding in plain sight. But the data that powers these dashboards is different from the data that powers the c-suite dashboards.
C-suite just wanted to see what happened. As a content marketer, you also want to see what happens next.
The ministry wants to see what happened. As a content marketer, you also want to see what happens next. Click To Tweet
5 key elements of dashboard proactive content
A proactive content marketing dashboard is more complicated than a c-suite dashboard because it needs to not only show where you've been, but where you should go next. That will involve new ways to look at data and possibly drill down into the data for more details.
A #content proactive marketing dashboard should not only show where you've been, but where you should be next. Click to Tweet
1. The first key ingredient to determining what to do next is analyzing what is driving current success. If leads are an important metric, you need to know what content and channels are driving those leads, so you don't take your feet off the gas of what's working.
2. You need to see where things can change. What content is growing rapidly in both arrivals and conversions that is contributing to your success? This content may be ripe for more promotion, adding fuel to the fire.
3. See what content is dropping. Understand why that content is down, and whether you should try to save it, or should you just let it drop and move on. If a top converting page suddenly loses traffic, you definitely want to fix it. If a piece of content you promoted via email last week suddenly gets fewer email visitors, it's clearly not something to worry about.
4. Check for pieces of content that include an underutilized topic. Sometimes we come across a topic that everyone loves, but for one reason or another, we don't write about it again. Look for high-performing content that is different from what you normally write. You may discover some great topics you never knew about that will be of great value to your audience (and you.)
5. Finally, look at your competitive space. This can be a bit more difficult to do and goes beyond the usual metrics you get from Google Analytics or other web analytics platforms. SEO tools like Moz allows you to set up campaigns and track how well your competitors are performing for a set of keywords that you are also targeting. If a competitor suddenly ranks for a keyword, you want to know it. And you want to see what they did to make that happen (so you can do it even better).
the keys of the content dashboard showing you what to do next should include:
- Content that is currently driving your goals
- What pieces of content are gaining the most traffic? Why?
- Which piece of content is losing the most traffic? Why?
- Find underutilized topics that can be content opportunities.
- What's right for my contest? How can I turn their success into my success?
There are already content marketing dashboards out there that help you with this data. Ceralytics provides a dashboard and smart content to help you dig deep into what's working, why it's working, and what you should do next. It also divides web pages into topics, making it easy to see which topics are driving the most traffic and conversions on your site.
Klipfolio also gets off to a great start on the content dashboard, which can be customized with a lot of the previously discussed data. This data comes almost exclusively from Google Analytics, but offers more flexibility than the Google Analytics Dashboard.
Google Analytics gives you the ability to create custom data dashboards, so you can pick and choose the data that makes the most sense for your content campaigns. This is a Google Analytics template you can use to get started. Update your goals and duplicate the goals section for as many goals as you want to track.
Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn't have all the answers, but this is at least a start – and it's free!
There is no one size fits all dashboards.
Your perfect dashboard will need to be customized to your individual business goals, and it may never be perfect. But with the tools above, it will be something very useful to prove your worth to your c-suite and drive better results for your content team.
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