Q: What are the minimum non-vanity metrics every organization adopting inbound marketing should track?
A: It’s no secret: marketers have struggled to measure the metrics that matter for a very long time. Fortunately, the internet and advancements in technology have made marketing far more measurable than ever before. Consequently, marketers have become much more accountable for the success they drive. If you are a marketer today, your business and career depend on you tracking the right metrics.
But here’s the problem: most marketers take a channel-centric approach to metrics (assessing email, social, or all channels combined) instead of a content-centric approach (what content topics attract and convert the most and best customers for your brand).
Let me explain.
What’s the difference between channel-centric and content-centric marketing metrics?
Modern marketers have realized that it’s not the channel that dictates the success of their marketing. Bad content promoted through your best performing channel will still perform poorly. In contrast, truly remarkable content creates buzz, engagement, education and sales regardless of the channel it’s promoted on.
If we’re being totally honest, for most marketers working on a channel-centric basis, most of their content sits somewhere in the middle of “pretty bad” and “truly remarkable” when it comes to performance (i.e. the traffic and leads it generates). That’s because very few marketers are taking a truly content-centric approach and analyzing the right metrics to tell them what their prospective customers want from them when it comes to content.
Once you crack that million-dollar question, you should see an uplift in the traffic and leads generated by all the channels you use to promote your content because you’re giving your audience what they really want.
No doubt your next question is “But how do I figure out what they want and measure it?”
Here’s how:
1. Conduct a content audit of your existing digital assets
Think of this step as an auditing process with the aim of figuring out what content topics are already performing well for your business. But why should you bother doing this?
Each of your content topics will have different visit, lead and customer conversion rates. Tracking these rates from a content perspective, rather than a channel perspective, helps you understand what topics are important to people that become customers, so you can move forward with a content creation strategy that has a real impact on your business.
Before you can measure the right metrics, you need to group each of your blog posts, web pages online tools and ebooks (basically all of your existing content assets) by their topic.
For example, at HubSpot we provide a free (and paid) all-in-one marketing and sales growth platform. We know that one group of people who make good customers for us are digital marketers searching the internet for things such as email marketing, social media marketing and marketing analytics. So, we create content around all of these topics. Any…