A Strategic System that Produces Powerful Content Marketing Campaigns

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the fun parts of content marketing. Being creative, writing articles, and seeing a post go live are all exciting and enjoyable parts of the job.

So, a lot of us jump right in, quickly publishing and sharing without taking much time to think about what we are doing and why. We are just excited to get our work out in the world.

And this is a problem.

Because effective content marketing that drives pre-planned business goals is strategic — not just fueled by initial excitement.

Let’s look at a system that will help you incorporate the fun parts of content marketing with a thoughtful plan to track your results.

Why smart content marketing is goal-driven

Goals differentiate strategic, results-driven content marketing from random, haphazard publishing.

When you approach content marketing without goals, your content marketing strategy is based on guesses. It’s difficult to see if your content produces value for your business.

And key performance indicators (KPIs) turn that guessing game into a strategic plan.

Goals and KPIs help you see where you are going, how you will get there, and if you took the right route to the finish line.

At the beginning of a campaign, they help you create a plan and decide:

• What type of content to create
• How much content to create
• How to promote the content
• Where to promote the content
• How long to wait for results

And at the end of a campaign, they help you reflect on your work and:

• Measure your success in concrete numbers
• Determine your ROI
• Identify what’s working and what’s not working
• Plan future campaigns

Goals and KPIs bookend a powerful campaign because they direct your content strategy at the beginning and rate effectiveness at the end.

Set your content marketing goals

When you begin a content marketing campaign, focus your efforts on one or two primary goals (even if you find that your campaign also produces results for other goals).

Those primary goals may be to:

• Increase traffic
• Get more leads
• Grow an email list
• Improve search engine rankings
• Build a social media presence
• Demonstrate authority in your niche
• Engage and entertain your audience
• Educate your audience about products or services
• Increase brand awareness

Once you decide on your primary goals, match them with measurable KPIs that will allow you to see the results of your work.

Each of KPIs in the list below will help you measure content marketing campaign results, but select the KPIs that best match the goals for your campaign.

Conversion

Conversion indicates how many users took an action that you wanted them to take on your website or landing page.

For example, if you offer a free ebook when someone registers for your site, the number of users who signed up for your email list to download the ebook help calculate your conversion rate.

Measure this when goals are to get more leads, grow an email list, and educate your audience about products and services.

Try this:

Track conversions in your digital sales and marketing platform, set goals in Google Analytics, or use your preferred analytics tool.

Email list subscribers

Email list subscribers are the number of people who have signed up for your email list.

Pay attention to this KPI when your goal is to grow an email list and get more leads.

Try this:

Measure and track your number of new email list subscribers through your email marketing software.

Number of leads

Number of leads represents the total number of times potential customers and clients have connected with you. This may include users who join a list or use your contact form.

Measure this when goals are to get more leads and educate your audience about products and services.

Try this:

Depending on your specific lead goal, you can measure and track your leads using your digital marketing and sales platform, email marketing software, or Google Analytics.

Number of new customers and sales

Number of new customers and sales is the total number of new business transactions that occurred.

This is an important KPI for your business’s bottom line.

Try this:

Track your customer growth in the database where you monitor transactions.

Rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs)

SERPs show the placement of your website in organic search. This is an important metric for your site’s main keywords or branded terms.

Measure this when goals are to improve rankings on SERPs and increase traffic.

Try this:

Use Google’s Search Console to find the keywords your site ranks for and the positions they have in SERPs.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic is the amount of traffic sent to a website from organic search. Users are sent to your website after they find it on a SERP. This may correspond to how high a site ranks in organic search.

Measure this when goals are to improve rankings in SERPs, increase traffic, and increase brand awareness.

Try this:

Measure and track organic traffic in Google Analytics.

Referral traffic

Referral traffic is the amount of traffic sent to a website from other websites. Users are sent to your site after they click on a link to it from another website.

Use this KPI when goals are to increase traffic and increase brand awareness.

Try this:

Measure and track referral traffic in Google Analytics.

Press mentions

Press mentions are the number of times that other publishers mention your business or brand. They increase your reach and visibility because other publishers expose their audiences to your brand.

Use this KPI when goals are to demonstrate authority in your niche and increase brand awareness.

Try this:

Set a Google Alert for websites that mention your business. You can also use Google’s Search Console, BuzzSumo, or Moz’s Open Site Explorer to find the sites that link back to your site.

Social shares

Social shares represent the number of times that a piece of your content was shared on social media.

Measure this KPI when goals are to increase brand awareness, increase traffic, and build a social media presence.

Try this:

Use a social share plugin or counter to see the number of shares for a URL.

Page views

Page views are the number of pages on a website that are viewed over a measured period of time. This number indicates if there is an increase or drop in usage for a website.

Use this KPI when goals are to increase traffic, improve rankings on SERPs, and increase brand awareness.

Try this:

Measure and track page views in Google Analytics.

Unique visits

Unique visits are the number of users that visit a website over a measured period of time. The metric counts a user as “one,” even if they visit the website multiple times.

Use this KPI when goals are to increase traffic and increase brand awareness.

Try this:

Measure and track unique visits in Google Analytics.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave a website shortly after accessing it. When a bounce rate is high, it indicates that users aren’t finding what they want or they are not engaged with the content.

Measure this when your goals are to educate your audience about products or services, demonstrate authority in your niche, and increase brand awareness.

Try this:

Measure and track bounce rate in Google Analytics.

Inbound links

Inbound links are the number of times that other websites link back to your website.

While the total number of inbound links is important, you should also factor in the authority of the site linking back to you. Sites with higher authority that link to you are more valuable than links from lesser-known websites.

Use this KPI when goals are to increase traffic, improve rankings on SERPs, and demonstrate authority in your niche.

Try this:

Use Google’s Search Console, BuzzSumo, or Moz’s Open Site Explorer to view your site’s backlink profile.

Social traffic

Social traffic is the amount of traffic sent to a website from social media platforms. Users are sent to your site after clicking on a link from sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

Measure this when goals are to increase your social media presence, increase traffic, and increase brand awareness.

Try this:

Measure and track social traffic in Google Analytics.

Number of social media followers

Number of social media followers are the number of users who follow a business on social media platforms where you publish updates.

Track this metric to see if your content is engaging, attracting new audiences, and building your authority.

Try this:

Measure this metric through each social media platform you use.

How long should you track and measure goals?

The time frames for measuring your KPIs will depend on your campaign type.

• For long-term campaigns like growing your email list subscribers, measure KPIs for as long as you use content marketing. Set benchmarks for measuring and reviewing these goals weekly or monthly.
• For multi-content campaigns like a blog post series, measure KPIs a few days after each you publish each piece of content. Then, review KPIs once a week for a few weeks after the campaign ends.
• For a one-time campaign like a guest blog post, first measure KPIs a week after the content has been published. Then, regularly review the metrics over the next two to three months.

Typically, you can stop tracking campaign-specific KPIs when the metrics plateau or stop growing. But you may want to schedule a bi-annual or annual review of all campaigns in case your content picks up momentum and continues to provide powerful results.

Your turn

When you start your next content marketing project, remember the importance of setting and tracking your goals before you create content.

For help setting goals, check out this free Content Marketing KPI Spreadsheet that outlines goals and specific metrics you should track for each of your campaigns.

How do you measure the results of your content marketing campaigns? Share in the comments below.

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How Journalist and Bestselling Author of ‘The Revenge of Analog’ David Sax Writes: Part One

The business and culture journalist and bestselling author of the recent book The Revenge of Analog, David Sax, dropped by the show to talk about the writing life, the importance of real things in a digital world, and the revenge of paper.

David is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, and other publications.

The author’s first book, Save the Deli, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and won the James Beard Award for Writing and Literature.

His latest, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter “… looks at the resurgence of analog goods and ideas, during a time when we assumed digital would conquer all.” It was longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and author of The Inevitable, said of the book, “The better digital gets, the more important analog becomes … Sax’s reporting is eye-opening and mind-changing.”

If you’re a fan of The Writer Files, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews.

In Part One of this file David Sax and I discuss:

• Writing at the intersections of business and culture
• Why your best ideas come to you in the shower
• The importance of impeccable research for great nonfiction
• A road map for cranking out 3,000–4,000 words a day
• How printing and editing your work on paper can improve your writing

Listen to this Episode Now

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Get Ready Now for a Creative and Productive 2017

To get where you want to go professionally, you’ll need to create excellent content — and create enough of it to make an impact.

We want to support your efforts in doing exactly that in the coming year … so we have a new community project for you. Each month, we’ll propose a pair of “prompts” — one aimed at improving your content quality, and the other aimed at improving your content productivity.

We’ll sharpen our skills by having fun, enjoying the process, and putting the time in … all in the spirit of creative play.

In this 19-minute episode, I talk about:

• Why the key to creative productivity rarely lies in “resolutions” (and where to find it instead)
• Two creative prompts for December … to fit in when you can
• The habit prompt I’m playing with this month … and how it will help your year to come
• Some thoughts on working with habits during the craziness of December holidays

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How to Invite Your Creative Angel and Devilish Editor to Help You Write

Type, type, type. Backspace, backspace, backspace. Type more, delete, rewrite.

Sound familiar?

Writing and trying to edit as you go gets you nowhere. It’s two steps forward and one step back. It makes your writing process excruciatingly slow.

Stick around because it gets worse.

When you try to write and edit at the same time, you’re setting up two sides of your brain in a duel. Rather than getting these two sides to support one another, you’re putting them into a competition that neither wins.

As author Susan Reynolds says in Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer:

“Your editing brain is not the same as your writing brain, which is why you kindly ask the editor to step outside while your more imaginative and spontaneous brain is writing the first draft.”

Here’s the reality:

Writing uses one part of your brain. Editing uses another.

Once you understand this and accept it, you can work with it. And it all starts when you think about those two sides of your brain in terms of two characters I’d like to introduce you to:

Your Creative Angel and your Devilish Editor.

Meet your Creative Angel

Your Creative Angel is that part of your brain that encourages you. It tells you, “You’ve got this.” It supports you through the writing process.

Your Creative Angel helps you think of new angles for your writing. It pushes you gently toward finding the sparkliest word, the most precise phrase, and those intriguing arguments you use in your writing.

Your Creative Angel is creative, so its focus is on production. Your Creative Angel delivers the words onto the page.

Need help getting your Creative Angel to work for you? Read these:

7 Fun and Easy Warm Ups to Start Your Writing Day

How to Write Conversationally: 7 Tips to Engage and Delight Your Audience

Want to Sharpen Your Writing Skills? Try This Fun Challenge

Your Creative Angel helps you go from a blank page to a page full of words that are ready to be edited.

And in the next step, your Devilish Editor takes those words and ruthlessly deletes, changes, and polishes what remains until it’s an engaging package of information.

Read on to learn how the devil it happens.

Meet your Devilish Editor

The Devilish Editor has a vital role to play. Its job is every bit as important as the Creative Angel’s job.

The only problem is that the Devilish Editor really cannot be in the same room as the Creative Angel. More on that later.

In a perfect world, your Devilish Editor comes around after your Creative Angel has written its last word and has been whisked off to a safe location to rest, relax, and eat bonbons while waiting for your next creative project.

Your Devilish Editor doesn’t just edit, proof, and polish your words. It represents the skeptical voice that stands in for your readers.

Imagine it standing on your shoulder saying, “Prove it to me!” and “Oh, really? Says who?” and “Go ahead … make me click.”

Your Devilish Editor does his or her finest work when there’s not a whiff of your Creative Angel hovering around your writing.

This means letting your writing sit for a while unattended so all that creative fairy dust clears off it and there’s no “magic” left. Just words.

Those unadorned words are the raw materials your Devilish Editor works with.

Need help getting your Devilish Editor to work for you? Read these:

3 Editing and Proofreading Lessons to Help You Elevate the Quality of Your Content

4 Delightful Editing Tips to Make Your Words Dazzle and Dance

Explore the Content Editor Cosmos to Produce Out-of-This-World Writing [Infographic]

Give your Devilish Editor the support it needs by taking a break from writing before you refine your words. And then cut, rewrite, and proofread until it shines.

How to invite your Creative Angel and your Devilish Editor to your keyboard

First off, let’s answer an obvious question. Must you choose to be one of these and hire the other?

In other words, if you’re a writer, do you need to hire an editor? And if editing is your strength, does that mean you’re just not cut out to write?

Nothing of the sort.

Both of these sides of the writing process can coexist peacefully at your keyboard. But there are a few ground rules you’ll want to keep in mind so their relationship with each other — and with you — works well.

Think about the writing process as having an Act I and an Act II.

In Act I, invite your Creative Angel in to help. And remember what the Creative Angel whispers in your ear:

“Write forward, not backward.”

Don’t look back at the words you’ve written. Forget about the delete key. Just get the ideas in your head into written form. Leave the editing to later.

Cooperate with your Creative Angel and write.

In Act II, invite your Devilish Editor to sit at your keyboard. And remember what the Devilish Editor always says:

“Fresh eyes see all mitsakes.”

(That’s a joke!)

Give your Devilish Editor the optimal working environment by getting into critical, careful proofreading mode. Read carefully. This is not another writing day: it’s a day to polish and get your writing ready to be shared.

This article was inspired by you

This article was inspired by numerous conversations I’ve had with our readers that go something like this:

“I have started and stopped the same article for three days.”

“I wrote and rewrote this email to you before I would let myself send it.”

“I try to write but I never seem to get past the first paragraph.”

These are all statements made by writers who have a Creative Angel on one shoulder and a Devilish Editor on the other. Both are talking at once. It’s no wonder nothing gets written!

Step back and give each part of your brain the space to do its job. You’ll soon find out that the Creative Angel and the Devilish Editor are your best allies — just don’t invite them to your keyboard at the same time, OK?

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Lessons on Business and Life from the ‘Zen Master of Marketing’

This week’s guest is a visionary strategist for the digital age. She helps brands reach the next level by leveraging digital opportunities to drive meaningful results. She is Shama Hyder (aka the “Zen Master of Marketing”), and she is a Digital Entrepreneur.

In this episode, Shama walks you through her journey as a digital entrepreneur that started back in school:

• Why she strives to have a student mindset (no matter what)
• The importance of the freedom to make contributions without boundaries and limits
• The lessons she took from her parents (that you can implement too)
• How she finds humbling moments every day and is always learning something new

And more.

Plus, Shama answers my rapid-fire questions at the end and reveals why it’s best to close out your browser windows while working.

Listen to this Episode Now

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Is It Okay to Alternate Between Monologues and Interviews?

We’re back! In this week’s episode, we explain why we didn’t publish a new episode last week and what you can learn from our mistake. Then we discuss a listener question that leads to an important epiphany from Jonny.

The question we tackle is whether or not it’s okay to alternate between monologues and interviews in the same podcast feed. We provide some reasons why this is a good idea, as well as some reasons why it’s not a good idea.

Then, most importantly, we provide three questions you should answer to determine if it’s a good idea for you, your show, and your audience. Because ultimately, that’s all that matters, and the context of your show will decide whether or not it’s the right choice for you.

Listen, learn, enjoy …

Listen to this Episode Now

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Why Passion Matters More Than Skill When Launching a Membership Site

Charity Preston — a teacher turned teacherprenuer — shares her incredible journey to creating an online membership network for teachers.

Imagine you have a sick child at home that demands 100 percent of your time and attention. And these demands require you to give up your professional career.

What would you do?

Today’s guest faced that exact situation — a classroom teacher at the pinnacle of her career that resigned in the middle of the academic year to care for her child.

But she was not content to give up her passion for helping others. So she made the leap from teacher to online teacherprenuer — with no technical training or online marketing expertise, armed only with a passion to help others.

In this 24-minute episode, Jessica Frick and I interview Charity Preston and discuss her journey from academic to online entrepreneur, including:

• The personal event in 2010 that changed her life
• Her haphazard online attempts that turned into a huge lead magnet
• How she created multiple income streams in a cyclical sales environment
• And the next frontier that she is exploring in community-driven membership sites

Listen to this Episode Now

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