Being hands-on and accountable for the performance of their B2B company is something every business has to imbibe into the core of their business strategies. It comes down to how strongly a company believes in its success philosophy. And to be accountable and thoroughly alert about the performance of your business, you need to know how effectively your company is reaching its business objectives. This is why you need B2B content marketing KPIs.
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable value that shows how well a company performs over time to reach its key business objectives. Having KPIs in place allows B2B businesses to set up their organizational objectives, formulate strategies, evaluate progress and understand how the business is moving towards achieving its set of goals. It means monitoring improvement while understanding how various elements impact it.
Based on statistics, 95% of the worlds leading marketers are of the opinion that KPIs must be tied to broader business goals, for them to really have an impact.
In a way, KPIs help all the different areas of your business (sales, marketing, service, etc.) to progress and improve strategically.
But, KPIs are a tricky concept to wrap your head around. However, for B2B SaaS marketers, that shouldn’t excuse not having a fundamental understanding of them.
This is your ultimate guide to KPIs along with a handy best B2B content marketing KPIs list.
What Are KPIs? How are they Different from Business Metrics?
A KPI is a value or a measure that communicates the performance of an organization over time in relation to achieving specific business objectives. KPIs can be high-level, focusing on the overall business performance, or low-level, focusing on processes at the individual or departmental level.
Irrespective of the industry, most businesses use KPIs to focus on their business goals. KPIs provide your team with targets and insights that help your business make better decisions with the organization’s objective in mind.
Most of the time KPIs are used as synonymous with metrics. Both these terms, in a way, assess a company’s performance but have quite distinct features that set them apart.
Metrics, unlike KPIs, are your basic business measures that add value to your organization but aren’t as critical as KPIs. Metrics can be about customer acquisition, conversion rates, content marketing ROI, and other such numbers that indicate specific areas of a business’s performance. A KPI can be the most important of these metrics that impact your company’s goals. In a way, all KPIs are metrics, but not every metric can be called a KPI.
KPIs focus on crucial targets and objectives, whereas metrics don’t need a target to exist. They stay relevant to the business outcome and provide a measure of performance concerning the objective in focus.
Why Are KPIs Important?
In B2B content marketing, you need content marketing KPIs to ensure that your team is moving towards the overall business objectives of your company. These are some of the reasons why your business needs KPIs-
- Align your teams: You can ensure all teams are heading in the same direction, whether it be the projects or employee performance you are measuring.
- Helps make adjustments: KPIs provide a clear picture of the causes behind your failures and successes, allowing you to make adjustments accordingly.
- Make your team accountable: Your content marketing KPIs help ensure that each employee provides value while tracking their progress. This way you can help employees measure their impact in edging towards the larger business goals.
- Assess your company’s health: KPIs provide insights into the overall condition of your business by giving data on risk factors that might impact your B2B company.
- Record your performance history: KPI also helps to create a historical record of your company’s performance, providing an objective understanding of the factors behind the progress and functioning of your business.
- Help employees focus: With KPIs in place, you can connect your objective to your company’s culture, making sure the employees recognize your mission and know why they are working towards achieving that.
In B2B SaaS content marketing, KPIs are used primarily to achieve the following content marketing goals-
- Improve conversion of prospects
- Increase business awareness
- Generate leads
- Boost engagement
How to Choose the Best Content Marketing KPIs for your Business
There are many kinds of KPIs and business analytics to monitor, but only some of them will be relevant to your company. They should be customized and developed to aid you in reaching your goals. There are a few things to consider when choosing KPIs.
Define Your Business Goals
Align your KPI with your business objective. For B2B content marketing, the KPI should directly impact and support your business’s overall content marketing performance. It should express the key business objective strategically. And for this, it should clearly define your organizational goals, relevance, attainability and estimated timeframe.
Ensure your KPI is Quantifiable
Choose B2B content marketing KPIs that are easily measurable. It should provide strategic insights into your company’s results and development. KPIs that focus on Marketing Qualified Leads, conversion per activity, and revenue contribution are some crucial and quantifiable KPIs used in content marketing.
Choose KPIs Based on Business Growth Stage
The KPIs you choose to monitor should be relevant and align with the growth stage of your business. Some KPIs can be of higher priority depending on the stage of growth that your business is in.
Keep it Relevant
Tracking tons of KPIs will only overwhelm you and the business. Track only those KPIs that provide actionable insights and are immediately relevant to your business.
Share KPIs with Employees and Stakeholders
Explain to your employees and stakeholders what you are measuring and why you are measuring that. Sharing your KPIs will help communicate the direction of your business while ensuring there is no misalignment in your teams. The feedback from your employees and stakeholders will help in identify any issues and refine your KPIs and objectives.
Review KPIs Consistently
Review both your progress against the KPI as well as your content marketing KPIs effectiveness. If you are not moving towards any noticeable improvement in your content marketing performance, maybe the goals of your KPI need to be modified.
Different Types of KPIs to Measure Performance for B2B Businesses
Understanding all the major types of KPIs is essential to get a complete handle on your B2B company’s growth and development.
Quantitative KPIs
These are straightforward KPIs that are measured numerically. They are solid figures and numbers. Quantitative indicators can be continuous or discrete. Continuous might include decimal values and indicate data over a range of things like sales growth or client lifetime value. Discrete quantitative indicators are whole numbers that include things like, client complaints, client acquisition figures, etc.
Qualitative KPIs
Qualitative KPIs are the opposite of quantitative KPIs. They do not measure numbers, but intangible factors. They identify the implications and characteristic nature of certain business processes. Two common examples of qualitative KPIs would be client satisfaction surveys and employee satisfaction surveys. Even though the survey may contain a numerical value in places, the objective is to have a descriptive measure based on people’s opinions.
Leading Indicators
To predict outcomes of a change in any specific process or to check for long-term data trends, businesses employ KPIs. They try to identify what might happen when you introduce changes like a new service. This enables you to make predictive decisions based on potential trends that will arise in your industry.
Lagging Indicators
These KPIs provide more of a historical view that shows shortcomings compared to performance over a particular period of time. Lagging KPIs measure the result after an action has happened and reflect the success or failure of that business decision. This helps businesses determine how a decision impacts reaching the desired goal.
Input and Output Indicators
Input KPIs help measure the input or the resources needed for a project or to achieve a business objective. In large projects, they are necessary for tracking resource efficiency. Output KPIs, on the other hand, measure the impact (success or failure) of a business process. They are the most widely used types of KPIs in any industry.
Process Indicators
These KPIs are used to measure the performance of a business activity, recognize needed changes and facilitate those changes. For example, KPIs that are applied for client support tickets provide data to improve response and resolution time, which improves the efficiency of the client support process.
Practical Indicators
These KPIs focus on your company’s existing processes and evaluate their effects on the company. Because of this, some of these practical KPIs will be unique to your business alone.
Directional Indicators
Directional KPIs evaluate particular trends that are within your company. This takes into account the direction of your metrics, whether they are declining or improving etc.
Financial KPIs
Financial KPIs are measurements of your company’s economic stability, viability, growth, etc. These are some of the most commonly used KPIs, for example, gross profit margin, asset ratios, etc.
Best B2B Content Marketing KPIs List to Measure
1. Website Traffic
Getting more clients and prospects to visit their B2B company website is a crucial goal for content marketers. Using a tool like Google Analytics, you can measure the traffic, the number of new visitors, and how they find your website. This will help your company identify issues and resolve them to achieve better site traffic.
2. Marketing Qualified Leads
These are leads who have taken action and suggest their interest in your product/service. Analyzing which MQLs match your company’s typical client profile helps you identify higher quality leads and better the chances of conversion.
3. Conversion Per Activity
This KPI measures the number of conversions per activity (clicking on a CTA, website visit, etc.), which allows you to understand the impact of your landing pages and confirmation pages in guiding prospects to your website.
4. Cost Per Lead
This KPI evaluates the cost of obtaining each lead across different marketing channels. This provides insight into how effective and costly your content marketing campaign is when attracting potential customers.
5. Engagement
A simple and clever way to evaluate the effectiveness of your content to attract clients is to simply quantify clicks. They can indicate brand awareness and engagement, which further, conveys the effects of your marketing campaigns.
6. Revenue Contributed
Finally, evaluate how well your B2B SaaS content marketing efforts are paying off. You need to measure individual marketing campaign ROIs to have the bigger picture of how your content marketing performance is contributing to revenue.
Create Actionable B2B Content Marketing KPIs
Identifying the best B2B content marketing KPIs to focus on for your content marketing efforts is critical. You can do this by reviewing your objectives and evolving them. You need to study your current performance while asking yourself if you are setting achievable goals. Look at your historical performance, and identify your areas of improvement, successes, and failures to achieve clarity.
Another critical step is to set up both short-term and long-term KPI objectives, which allows you to reassess and improve your processes while striving toward your bigger goals. KPIs also require constant accountability, so you should regularly evaluate your progress and performance against your KPI goals.
Reaching your content marketing objectives requires accountable and consistently improving performance from your content. good content marketing results are achieved only by good content marketing. That’s where expert content marketing services are required.
Contensify provides you with exceptional content marketing solutions that can positively contribute to achieving your content marketing KPI goals.
Reach out to Contensify Today!
