This topic often sparks confusion, especially when trying to define good KPIs for content marketing. The main challenge stems from two factors: the allure of vanity metrics and, more importantly, the lack of context. To illustrate, consider this analogy: if someone asks you for a good direction to drive, you wouldn’t just say “north” but would ask about their starting point and destination. Similarly, KPIs depend on understanding your organization’s goals. For example, views or engagement may be interesting but not always relevant depending on your objectives.

To define a KPI, it’s important to clarify what it isn’t: a metric (like views), a goal, a job performance review, or a result. KPIs measure progress toward goals, but they are not the goals themselves.

KPIs, Defined

According to kpi.org, KPIs are “key quantifiable indicators of progress toward an intended result.” This highlights that KPIs need an origin (current state), a destination (desired state), and a way to measure progress. KPIs can be strategic or tactical. Strategic KPIs evaluate the overall plan and its impact, like website traffic, which depends on external factors. Tactical KPIs focus on controllable efforts, like the number of blog posts published, to ensure the plan has a chance to succeed.

Strategic KPIs vs Tactical KPIs

KPIs can be divided into two categories: strategic and tactical. Strategy is difficult to replicate, while tactics are more easily copied. This difference is key when assessing KPIs.

The difference between strategy and tactics could be a deep discussion on its own. Strategy is often seen as a way of navigating uncertainty. In the tactical realm, proven best practices are applied. Strategy, on the other hand, involves figuring out how to assemble and adapt those tactics in new, often innovative ways to address challenges.

Strategic KPIs 

Strategic KPIs are about assessing the overall plan. Are we on the right track with our strategy? Are we choosing the right tactics? And most importantly, are we achieving the intended results? These KPIs typically reflect leadership, as they’re the ones setting the direction. Strategic KPIs often depend on external factors, as you’re measuring how well the team anticipates and manages outcomes. For example, website traffic could be a strategic KPI because it’s a result of your planning, but it’s influenced by outside factors. If your strategy is strong, the traffic should follow.

Tactical KPIs

Tactical KPIs, on the other hand, focus on the steps that give your plan the best chance of success. These are entirely within your control and are often used to measure effort and activity. For instance, the number of blog posts published might be a tactical KPI, as it’s something you can directly influence without external input.

Use a Strategy Template to Address Business Problems and Identify KPIs

Check out this template that was crafted to guide you in creating a comprehensive content marketing plan, with a step-by-step approach that is designed to help you define both strategic and tactical KPIs.

This strategy template follows a clear, step-by-step process to tackle business challenges effectively. Here’s how it works:

1. Define the Problem: Begin by identifying the business problem you need to address. This is the foundation of your strategy. 
2. Develop the Strategy: Once you’ve defined the problem, outline your approach to solving it. This is your overarching strategy for addressing the issue. 
3. Define Tactics: To make the strategy more actionable, break it down into specific tactics. These are the concrete steps you will take to implement your strategy. 
4. Campaigns and Tactical Hypotheses: Each tactic corresponds to a campaign. Each campaign should have a tactical hypothesis—essentially a prediction of how that particular action will contribute to the overall strategy. 
5. Modeling: Before jumping into execution, conduct some basic modeling (often skipped by many organizations). This is essentially back-of-the-napkin math to assess whether the strategy is worth pursuing and if it will yield a return. 
6. Project Plan: Lay out a detailed project plan with specific steps to execute the campaign. This ensures you have a clear roadmap to follow. 
7. Campaign Parameters: Define the minimum requirements for a successful campaign, such as the amount of content to create or the target number of leads or traffic. Also, set clear benchmarks for success and failure. Use a framework of “success, fail, tune, bail”: 
   • Success: What will success look like? 
   • Fail: What defines failure? 
   • Tune: What needs adjustment if the results are somewhere in the middle? 
   • Bail: If things are going poorly and are likely to cause significant harm (e.g., negatively impacting the site), stop the campaign immediately. 
8. Selecting KPIs: Once you’ve defined the strategy, tactics, and campaign parameters, it’s easier to determine which KPIs (both strategic and tactical) will measure success. 

By following this structured approach, you can create a clear and actionable plan for tackling business problems, ensuring both strategy and execution are aligned to drive results.

Examples of Applying Strategy and Tactics to Business Problems

To make this more tangible, let’s walk through a couple of real-world examples. The first example focuses on the business problem of organic traffic decline.

Example 1: Organic Traffic Decline

Imagine a hypothetical website that initially had one million visitors per month and was generating around 5,000 leads monthly. Over time, traffic dropped to 500,000 visitors per month, and leads also dropped by 50%. The business problem is clear: how do we rebuild traffic to one million visitors per month to restore the lost leads?

Strategy: The solution seems simple—build traffic back up to a million visitors, which should, in turn, help recover those leads. This is a quantifiable problem with a clear, data-driven hypothesis since both traffic and leads declined in tandem.

Tactics: To achieve this, you would implement several tactics to boost organic search traffic:

• Building backlinks 
• Conducting an SEO audit 
• Fixing website hygiene issues 
• Refreshing existing content 
• Creating new content to recapture lost traffic 

Modeling the Refresh Tactic: Let’s focus on the content refresh tactic as an example of how to model the campaign. The tactical hypothesis here is that refreshing old content will slow the decline in traffic to those pages. This helps to prevent the situation from worsening while working to regain lost traffic.

Project Plan for Refreshing Content:

• Add and update content on existing URLs 
• Implement SEO best practices on those pages 
• Revise the publication date and republish the updates 

The expected outcome is that over time:

• Within days: Improved rankings for long-tail keywords 
• Within weeks: Better rankings for primary keywords and synonyms 
• Longer term: A stop in the traffic decline, or even a reversal of that trend 

Campaign Parameters:

• Execute 20 refreshes to ensure a sufficient sample size. 
• Success will be defined as noticeable recovery or stabilization of traffic on refreshed pages compared to a control group. 
• Failure occurs if there’s no noticeable improvement, and traffic decline continues at the same rate as for untouched URLs. 
• “Tune” would be used when results are positive but not significant enough to justify further investment, allowing for adjustments to the strategy. 
• “Bail” applies if refreshing content causes traffic to drop dramatically on every page you touch, signaling the tactic isn’t worth pursuing. 

Tactical KPIs: To give the plan a chance to succeed, you would track KPIs such as:

• Best practice execution: Are SEO best practices being followed? For example, checking Yoast scores or ensuring proper keyword optimization. 
• Content refresh frequency: Are you executing the planned number of content refreshes (e.g., 10 per month)? This would be a tactical KPI critical to the success of the strategy. 

Strategic KPIs: These are the KPIs outside your control but still critical for evaluating the strategy. For example, tracking:

• Improved rankings for long-tail keywords 
• Improved rankings for primary keywords 
• Indications of traffic recovery 

Picking the Right KPIs: These strategic KPIs will be leading indicators of recovery, both in traffic and leads.

 

 

Example 2: Viral Brand Awareness

Let’s now look at a different business challenge: viral brand awareness. This presents a unique set of tactics, separate from traffic recovery. In this case, you have a strong offering and a great value proposition, but you’re working in a highly technical space, which makes it difficult for people to quickly understand how your product can help them. The goal is to generate rapid brand awareness and establish credibility, so potential customers are more inclined to invest the time needed to learn about your offering. Essentially, you want to make a big impact—creating buzz and a “halo effect” around your brand—so that people recognize your expertise and trust you enough to learn about your product.

The business challenge here is to generate buzz and awareness quickly. One possible goal might be to achieve a quarter of a million views within the first half of the year, which is ambitious but necessary to gain visibility in a competitive space.

To achieve this, you might deploy tactics aimed at virality, which is always a high-risk, high-reward approach. This could involve creating thought-leadership content and distributing it via aggregator channels like Hacker News or Reddit, which can generate significant traffic if successful. You’d also promote this content through semi-owned channels like your social media accounts, maximizing its reach.

Tactical Hypothesis: The idea is that getting to the top of aggregator sites like Reddit or Hacker News could drive at least 50,000 visitors, and it would also help establish credibility with those visitors. Based on personal experience as an influencer blogger in the engineering world, this is a reasonable expectation—some content could even exceed 100,000 views.

However, this is still a risky strategy, so you need to make some aggressive assumptions. For instance, you might assume that you’ll go viral 5% of the time, which is optimistic.

Project Plan:

• Create thought-leadership content with product marketing cues designed to position your brand at the forefront. 
• The content should not just be a rant or generic blog post—it must create a strong brand connection, so when it goes viral, your brand stays top of mind. 
• Submit the content to aggregators like Hacker News or Reddit, or find someone with credibility within those communities to submit on your behalf. 
• Early-stage “astroturfing” might be necessary, such as getting initial upvotes from people within your organization or community to give the content momentum. 

Campaign Parameters:

• Aim to create 20 articles to ensure a sufficient sample size. 
• Success will be measured by whether at least one article hits the top of an aggregator platform and generates 50,000 views, confirming that the concept works. 
• Failure occurs if none of the articles reach the top spots or if the viral traffic doesn’t lead to significant engagement (e.g., fewer than 20,000 visitors). 
• If some articles perform moderately well (in the 20,000-50,000 range), the strategy should be refined and optimized for more efficient execution. 

Tactical KPIs: To track progress, focus on these key performance indicators:

• Are you producing the 20 articles as planned? 
• Are the articles being submitted to aggregator platforms, not just left on your site? 
• Is the content effectively incorporating product marketing and brand positioning? 

Strategic KPIs: These KPIs will focus on outcomes once the content is posted on aggregators:

• Are people upvoting your articles? This will indicate that the content resonates with the audience. 
• How are the comments looking? Ideally, you want positive sentiment and engagement—if the comments are mostly negative, that’s a sign the campaign isn’t delivering the right message. 
• Referral traffic per article: You need to confirm that traffic is actually coming from these platforms to your site. 

Picking the Right KPIs: By combining tactical and strategic KPIs, you can assess both the execution of the campaign and whether the hypothesis is proving to be successful. When setting strategic KPIs, ensure they are based on the actual outcomes you’re seeing—traffic, engagement, and brand awareness.

Adjusting Your KPIs as You Go

It’s important to stay flexible with your KPIs. As you execute your content marketing strategy and gather data, you might discover that some KPIs aren’t providing the insights you need, or that new challenges are emerging. For example, you might realize that the bottleneck in your content process isn’t the number of articles produced but rather the time it takes for proofreading or review.

In this case, you could adjust your tactical KPIs to account for these new obstacles—like tracking the turnaround time for proofreading to ensure smooth content publication.

Best Practices for Setting and Tracking KPIs

To make sure your KPIs are effective, keep these best practices in mind:

• Make them SMART: The SMART framework stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This helps you create KPIs that are clear and actionable. 
• Be sure they’re measurable: You need to track progress, so KPIs should always be quantifiable. 
• Ensure accountability: Everyone involved in the process should be clear about the KPIs and their role in achieving them. The people tasked with achieving KPIs should be empowered to influence the results. 
• Review and refine regularly: KPIs should evolve as you collect more data and gain insights. Revisit them periodically and adjust as necessary. 

Anti-Patterns to Avoid

While defining and tracking KPIs is critical, there are some common pitfalls to avoid:

• Tracking vanity metrics: These are metrics that look good on paper but don’t contribute to meaningful business outcomes. 
• Not aligning KPIs with business goals: If your KPIs are not directly tied to your organization’s objectives, you’re wasting time tracking the wrong things. 
• Assigning KPIs to people without empowering them: If you’re holding someone accountable for results they can’t influence directly, it’s unfair and ineffective. 
• Measuring things that don’t matter: Don’t waste time on KPIs that aren’t tied to success or failure. Stick to what matters most. 

Final Thoughts

Establishing the right KPIs for your content marketing strategy is key to ensuring your efforts align with business objectives and drive measurable results. By defining both strategic and tactical KPIs, aligning them with your goals, and tracking them effectively, you’ll be able to steer your content marketing campaigns toward success.

Remember to be flexible with your KPIs and adjust them as you gather more data, and always ensure that your metrics are tied directly to business outcomes. With these best practices in mind, you’ll be well on your way to setting actionable and valuable KPIs for your content marketing strategy.

 

Our CEO, Erik, hosted a webinar on this topic, and we used its transcript with ChatGPT to create this blog post.