Content marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) are metrics that give you a sense of how persuasive your marketing materials are at specific moments and also over time. Different content KPIs can illuminate different aspects of your campaign: are you reaching the right audiences? Are there obstacles the audiences are consistently running into that prevent them from converting to sales? How are people behaving when they encounter your content? How do they find you in the first place? What are they searching for? Once KPIs fill in these blanks for you, you’ll have a much better handle on your marketing strategy.

Keeping an eye on the right content marketing KPIs in combination gives you a content performance tracking battery that can guide you as you modify a campaign, launch new ones, and conduct post mortems on past efforts. All of that information can help make your content marketing strategy sharper, clearer and more economical.

But before we get into the KPIs you should be watching in 2022 and beyond, let’s go over some basics, like what content marketing is and why you should be doing it.

What Is Content Marketing?

Before you can measure content KPIs, you have to put out some content! Content marketing is a familiar subject for us here — see this, and this, and this. The term refers to marketing that mimics the kind of content people enjoy consuming during their everyday internet activity, rather than relying on paid ads or other avenues of traditional marketing.

Whereas regular marketing usually involves trying to inject a promotion of your business into other content, or making standalone, overt bids for customer engagement, content marketing aims to entertain, instruct or otherwise provide value to the audience. This offering could come in a wide variety of forms, from reviews by social media influencers, to videos about your company or your team members, to informative articles on a subject related to your business, to an email newsletter, to your own social media posts.

Why Content Marketing Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy

First of all, as we’ve said before, content marketing is no longer optional. Over the years it has started outpunching traditional ads in several respects, and that trend looks likely to continue. That is not to say you should abandon all traditional marketing though — different approaches work better in different contexts. But to cover all your bases, you’ll want to include some content marketing component in your campaigns, and you’ll want to take it as seriously as you do all the others. People respond well to content marketing, and it can sometimes be less costly than other marketing, so why wouldn’t you want your business to take advantage of it?

Through content marketing, you can achieve a number of benefits at once:

  • Building trust with your audience.
  • Establishing your authority or thought leadership in your space.
  • Showing how your company’s priorities align with the audience’s needs and values.
  • Building top-of-funnel awareness of your company.

It really is a valuable tool in any marketer’s arsenal.

Satisfied? Great. Now we can get into the real reason you’re here: the top content marketing KPIs to measure in the new year.

The Top 7 Content Marketing KPIs for 2022

Content KPIs are sort of like clothing styles: they gain and lose popularity for mysterious reasons, and you may form a suspicion that marketers only prefer certain KPIs over others in any given year because they heard some other marketer say it was a good idea. To some small extent this may be true, but there is a foundation of trial and error underneath it all: real-world results have brought a core few content marketing KPIs up to the top of almost everyone’s list, although the exact order might change from one expert to the next.

Here are our top seven KPIs for 2022:

  1. Page Views. The raw material of leads and conversions. This basic content KPI won’t tell you what people are doing once they find your content, but it tells you that the content is at least getting out to the right channels and having an effect on traffic on your website.
  2. Leads. Tracking your leads is crucial if you want to see how the content you’re putting out is doing in terms of moving people to venture into your business funnel. Do this for all the content you put out, and you’ll be able to identify patterns running through successful and unsuccessful pieces.
  3. Time on Page/Scroll Depth. These content KPIs tell you what people are doing when they reach your content. Do they stay on for a while, reading through and scrolling to the bottom? Or do they bail out immediately, which would suggest misalignment with their search intentions and/or content that isn’t engaging?
  4. Backlinks. Backlinks are an essential content marketing KPI. Watching how often users are redirected to your pages from other sites, and which ones, gives you a picture of your authority in your field, and it also ties into your keyword and SEO rankings.
  5. Keyword Ranking. Speaking of keyword rankings, you’ll want to keep track of those too. This content marketing KPI can tell you how you’re doing in the eyes of the algorithm gods compared to your competitors, and also which keywords might be best for your business to target.
  6. Conversions. This is what it’s all about, right? Measure changes in the rate at which you turn leads into sales — in conjunction with the other content marketing KPIs, this one will show you what happens to people as they approach the bottom of the funnel. If your content isn’t ultimately affecting the amount of business you do, you may need to tweak some things in your strategy.
  7. Likes and Shares. Social media is an all-consuming force in the modern digital world, so any content marketing plan you come up with will probably include it somewhere. Watch this content KPI to see whether people are interested in the topics you’re discussing and willing to pass your content along!

Develop a High-Performing Content Marketing Strategy With Us

If you’re ready to make a splash with content marketing in 2022, we can help with every phase, including designing your strategy and measuring its effectiveness. Reach out to us here to take your business to the next level.