Developing internal and external metrics
That content marketing needs to be measured is easy to say. Figuring out which metrics are going to be of use is a whole different challenge.
Technology has made it possible to measure a string of metrics that were impossible in the past such as email ‘open rate’, ‘click-through-rate’, ‘time on page’ and more. Marketing teams tend to obsess about these things because they are measurable - yet there’s one big problem: most CEOs don’t care about them.
What they do care about when it comes to marketing is genuine business outcomes. In other words, they’ll ask: ‘What is it that you are doing as a marketer, with all your customer insight, to help grow our business?’
As Steve Jobs said, sometimes the hardest but most important thing to do is keep things simple.
“That’s been one of my mantras,” said Jobs. “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Counting the wrong things will send you in all sorts of directions other than the right one.
So what are the right metrics? If you plan to open up a discussion on which content marketing metrics really count for something, it’s worth testing your own perceptions of what is and isn’t valuable to your team and the wider business.
Doug Kessler, creative director at B2B marketing agency Velocity Partners says he often answers the question of which marketing metric matters the most with the answer: “Revenue is the mother of all metrics…”
Recently, though he's corrected himself. “Revenue is not the end goal of all marketing,” Kessler writes. “Revenue is itself a leading indicator of the most important metric in business. The most important metric in business is profit.”
If you take a moment to think about what this really means for marketing as a core business function, the question of data becomes much less of a numbers game and much more of a strategic one. Data has to do more for marketing than it might first appear.
While the remit of the marketing department is to focus on the data that will establish - and challenge - pre-existing ideas, it’s also about finding a way to inform, excite and activate non-marketing colleagues, and build an understanding of marketing’s real value.
In truth, there are hundreds of things that you can measure - but too much data has often been the problem for marketers.
Realistically, however, this ‘profit-focused’ content marketing nirvana will only be reached once marketing teams learn to separate the metrics that matter within their team, from those that matter outside the walls of their department.
It might well be that in focusing on more strategic business outcomes as content marketing metrics - something the rest of the business can really understand, get behind and support - a system of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ metrics is developed.
Internal metrics are shared only among the marketing team and used as regular indicators of audience engagement on which to drive valuable iteration. These metrics, such as read times, allow marketers to optimize and personalize as campaigns progress to deliver the best content possible.
External metrics are those that are reported back to departments and teams outside of marketing. They might typically take longer to materialize as metrics that are genuinely fit to report but ultimately they carry more weight in the context of strategic business objectives such as the bottom line.
Both types of metrics are important - but not, it should be noted, interchangeable or to be compared against one another.
The rule of thumb, and forgive the tautology, is ‘use what is useful’. If a metric tells you something about how to improve your content performance for the audience then adopt it as an ‘internal’ metric.
If it clearly demonstrates, without any questions or qualifications required, the value of marketing to your organization’s strategic goal, then it’s an external metric.
