You may be incorporating content marketing into your marketing strategy, but are you focusing on the right metrics and goals?

In content marketing, it’s easy to get caught up in the metrics and details: page views, bounce rates, and amount content. In this week’s Labcast, Robert Rose, Chief Strategist for Content Marketing Institute shares his advice for choosing the right metrics and setting the right content marketing goals.

Key Takeaways

* Know your overall goals: Before revamping your content marketing, determine how that change is going to impact your marketing, overall. [4:00]

* Check out Content Institute Marketing’s latest report on Content Collaboration Tools: It evaluates the effectiveness of 13 content marketing solutions. [6:25]

* Satisfaction over Transactions: Examining customer engagement and satisfaction is a key content marketing metric. [13:30]

* Stop reporting all your metrics: Don’t get too caught up in page views and bounce rates. Focus on your overall goals. [17:17]

“In many cases, we’re so focused as marketers on numbers of transactions, that we lost sight of actually closing better, more valuable customers that are more highly engaged.”

Listen Here:

Labcast 112_ Robert Rose Discusses Content Marketing Goals, Execution, and Metrics 1

Transcript:

Kevin: Hello there, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Cain, and today I’m joined by Robert Rose, who’s the Chief Strategist for the Content Marketing Institute. Robert joins me today to talk about a number of things pertaining to content marketing, from establishing good goals, to executing against those goals, in which he’s going to talk to us about a new report from the Content Marketing Institute, and he’s also going to talk to us a little bit about how to measure your goals and measure executing against them.

Hey, Robert. Welcome to Labcast. Thanks for joining me today.

Robert: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Kevin: So, one of the things we wanted to talk about today in this podcast was a little bit about your experience working with companies, both the Content Marketing Institute and otherwise. I know you’ve had a chance to consult with big companies, small companies, helping them with their content strategies. And what I would assume, and correct me if I’m wrong, but, one of the first things that you’d probably be talking about with those companies is, how do you set the right goals for your content strategy and your content marketing program? Where do you want it to go?

And I wondered, what kind of advice do you offer to those companies to make sure they’re getting to the right goals, with enough specificity that they’re actionable, and that actually has some meaning for them?

Robert: Sure, and that’s exactly the right way to think about it. Whether it’s a start-up or a Fortune 50 company, what we have learned over the last couple of years of doing this is that most organizations, we’re not coming in and doing something new. They’ve been doing content marketing, in some form, for a long time. Ostensibly, really, since the beginning of the business. What they have lacked, really, is this idea of a plan for how content marketing can positively affect the business.

So they’ve started, sort of, ad hoc. “We need a social media strategy. We need a Twitter strategy. We have to have a blog. We have to have content and a white paper programmer,” whatever it is,