Set your Key Performance Indicators, make them SMART KPIs, and align your objectives using our RACE Framework to achieve YOY growth in key metrics for your business

KPIs are a useful way for digital marketers to set expectations and prove that their work is having a positive impact. To outsiders, the success of digital marketing activity can be seen as difficult to measure but this really isn’t the case. In fact, it’s normally easier to measure progress metrics for a digital campaign than an offline one. The aim of this post is to help you set digital marketing KPIs to measure what really matters at the moment, in a way that all parties can agree on. Smart marketing planning is essential for measuring and tracking your progress, and demonstrating value. We’ll cover negotiating KPIs, budgeting, and how to tie your KPIs into the Smart Insights RACE Digital Marketing Framework.

What are digital…

Without setting clear marketing objectives, you’re basically directionless – and working to achieve vanity metrics that don’t necessarily help you achieve your overall business goals

Digital marketing objectives underpin all marketing strategies. After all, how do you know what you're working towards without clear, actionable, and achievable metrics? Setting marketing goals should always be the priority as they will be the basis of your entire strategy. By achieving your digital marketing objectives, you’re also helping reach your overall business goals, whether that’s boosting your overall sales or improving awareness of your brand. Setting marketing objectives is, on one hand, a great way to motivate yourself and your team and work towards achieving better results for your business. On the other hand, objectives and KPI-setting is about much more than just saying “I want to achieve that and that” – it’s how you can develop a plan or strategy that will help support your vision…

The must-know content marketing statistics to benchmark your plans against this year

Content marketing is still very much at the heart of digital marketing, with content continuing to be a vital tactic for bringing in traffic and encouraging conversions. However, content marketing has moved past blogs and now encompasses so much more. The industry is also more competitive than ever, with content being produced on masse, making it harder to ensure yours stands out. [si_blog_banner_cta] In order to be successful at content marketing, you need to ensure that you’re taking into account more technical aspects – such as SEO – but also that you’re effectively battling for consumers’ attention. It is this battle that has led content to change at a rapid pace, with competition leading to increased levels of innovation. This is why you need to stay on top of the latest trends and advances in the content marketing arena. With this in mind,…

Chart of the Week: 76% of marketers say their companies follow a strategic approach to marketing but not all of these have a documented content strategy.

The majority of marketers say that their organization takes a strategic approach to managing their content. According to new research from the Content Marketing Institute, 76% of marketers state that their company follows a strategic approach when it comes to content marketing. Of those who said that this is the case, 97% said that they were involved in the strategic content management used by their company. This covered a number of areas, with 89% being involved in the creation of content and 84% having a say in the organization’s content marketing strategy, including thought leadership, owned media management and distribution channels. Other areas of involvement in business’ strategy included the content…

5 Questions to help set, manage and review your content marketing effectiveness

As we accept that our consumers are learning about, and navigating through, more and more information about our brand, organisation, industries or topic areas as they research online, we're needing to deploy more sophisticated strategies in order we can earn attention, and importantly trust. This is what sits behind the drive of content marketing's rise to the forefront of the digital marketing agenda. Content marketing is starting to mature, too. More and more reports, such as this from the Aberdeen Group, illustrate this, here too.

An easy start-point

Below is a simple matrix of ideas to help you set the KPIs or metrics based on what we've used on different projects. We're not saying "this is the way you must do it" or that you need to use all of these KPIs. Instead, we hope this is a useful framework…

A beginners checklist of content marketing metrics

Content marketing is an excellent tool for generating leads and creating conversions. However, even the most thoughtfully planned out content marketing campaigns are rarely a home run. In order to get the most out of a content marketing campaign, you will have to make adjustments and improvements along the way. In order to determine where you should make these improvements, you'll need to monitor 10 important content marketing metrics I recommend. For other ways of structuring these in a frameworks see this article from Smart Insights on Content Marketing KPIs and this from the Content Marketing Institute on Content Marketing Metrics as part of a strategic approach to content marketing.

1. Bounce Rate

When a visitor clicks into one of your web pages and backs out without taking any further action, you have earned a bounce. A high bounce rate can indicate many things: The content on…