Leading Metrics Demystified
How To Optimize Your Content Daily For Bankable Long-Term ROI
“Know your audience” is the Golden Rule of Marketing. And thankfully, we have the data to answer all pertinent questions about our audience. We know when, where, and how to reach them across any number of channels, and plenty of technologies to make content distribution seamless.
But in the midst of the explosion of digital channels, marketers are still struggling with one important question: what content does my audience actually care about?
If you feel pressure to keep up with the Joneses’ with your content marketing, then this is the question that keeps you up at night. And for good reason.
We analyzed 24 months-worth of marketing content from a sample of 8,800 B2B and B2C brands and found that nearly half of all professionally marketed blog posts (43%) get 10 or fewer interactions. Even more distressing, one out of four blog posts (23%) get zero interactions.
And it’s not just blog content that’s failing. Significant quantities of brand-generated content posted on Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn get piddling engagement. Take a look at the breakdown of content by number of interactions in the summary chart below:
There’s no longer any excuse for marketers to keep churning out ineffective content. More data means more visibility into which content is working (and which isn’t). Here we’ll explain how marketers can leverage leading metrics to predict and improve content marketing ROI.
What Are Leading Metrics?
Marketers have a plethora of metrics and KPIs at their disposal, from clicks and conversions to sales pipeline contribution. Leading metrics is an umbrella term for the metrics that measure initial audience engagement with your content.
For blog content, for example, leading metrics include:
- Pageviews
- Unique Pageviews
- Time on Page
- Bounce Rate
- Social Shares
- Press Mentions and Inbound Links
- Blog Comments
In the quick-fire world of social media, each platform has its own particular terminology for its leading metrics. Some examples of leading metrics include:
- Likes, Shares, Comments, and Page Likes (Facebook)
- Favorites, Retweets, Mentions, and Followers (Twitter)
- Video Views, Comments, and Subscribers (YouTube)
- Likes, Comments, and Followers (Instagram)
- Notes (Tumblr)
- Likes, Comments, and Followers (LinkedIn)
- +1s, Shares, and Followers (Google+)
For email marketers, leading metrics might include:
- Open Rates
- Click-Thru Rates
- Unsubscribe Rates
What do all of these metrics have in common? They show you what your audience actually cares about. People vote with their clicks, swipes, double-taps, likes, and shares online. Leading metrics offer a way for marketers to identify the content types and topics that matter to their audience.
The Link Between Leading Metrics And ROI
For marketers, ROI metrics are where the rubber hits the road. ROI metrics — like the volume of leads and qualified opportunities — attribute revenue or a proxy for revenue to a marketing source.
The problem is, marketers cannot reliably predict and optimize ROI metrics without understanding the content and distribution tactics that deliver results. That’s where leading metrics come in.
Leading metrics serve as a litmus test for your content marketing. By tracking and optimizing them daily, you can accurately predict which content will resonate with your customers. That translates into greater ROI in the long term.
Many marketers, however, aren’t connecting the dots between leading metrics and ROI metrics. In fact, many marketers are failing to engage their audiences with content at all.
Leveraging leading metrics means looking at engagement as you go — not waiting weeks or months to pull up and see what sticks. At TrackMaven, we’ve seen the most effective marketers iterate their way to success. If you’re waiting until the end of the month or end of the quarter to figure out which content worked and which didn’t, you’re already behind.
For more on how leading metrics can help your content cut through the noise, get your copy of our report, The Content Marketing Paradox.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
