A Simple Guide to KPIs for Measuring Content Marketing

Content Marketing can be formally defined as "the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

OK.

But what makes online content marketing special (and different from the interruptive ads that we all knew growing up and watching TV)?

How is content marketing different from Old World marketing?

The central idea behind content marketing? 

Content marketing messages will often NOT be about the features of the product being sold. 

Instead content marketing is often a funny or awe-inspiring STORY.

For example, a short film that people might share via social media. 



Online, people share things, but they don't spread ads - they spread stories. 

In successful content marketing, a brand message can ride along as an interesting or useful story spreads online.

In the evolving world of filmmaking, a content marketer is often a motion picture storyteller, working for a brand or product. The thrill and challenge of being a content marketer is making messages that people will actually pay attention to and share in the increasingly crowded media landscape.

And Key Performance Indicators (or KPI) are the methods of performance measurement that really matter to a brand or business.

For example, to measure the success of a content marketing campaign, a business could evaluate many factors. But which factors are really crucial to the success of the organization? And which metrics will accurately reflect the success of this one content marketing campaign (it's possible that certain metrics can tell you how the overall business is doing, but those metrics may be measuring the impact of other factors - and not the success of this one content marketing campaign)?

KPIs will differ for organizations and campaigns.

Some typical business KPIs include an increase (or decrease?) in net revenue over a given time period - or an increase in customer loyalty (as measured by repeat visits or a survey).

But for content marketing, don't businesses want to know how many customers actually acted based on the campaign?

On April 02, 2016 Barry Feldman published "A Simple Guide to KPIs for Measuring Content Marketing" on the Social Media Today website. His insights are invaluable for content marketers.

It's important for filmmakers to understand what KPIs are as we won't get more jobs as online storytellers for brands if our efforts don't have measurable results.