Key performance indicators, better known as KPI’s are a way of tracking if your content strategy is working. These indicators are usually made up of SMART goals that will target certain areas within your content strategy to measure how well your audience is engaging with your content. For example, an important KPI to track is subscriber/follower count. People don’t just follow pages for the fun of it, if you have gained a follower on your brand account it is likely due to the content resonating with the viewers. This KPI shows you that the content your brand is putting out is effective at engaging the audience and is meaningful enough for consumers to want more of it on their feed.
Obviously, you want your content to perform well when you are publishing it, but part of content creation is understanding what is working well for you. You may push a ton of different pieces of work out to your platforms with drastically different looks and feels and not all of it will be effective. Part of the reason we use KPIs is to get a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t so that we can produce more effective content. If we produce 2 pieces of work and give them both a one-week period, after that week we can look at the analytics and compare the two. If we find one piece gained us 30 followers and 600 likes but the other piece gained us 15 followers and 1500 likes. We would prefer to post more content that gains us the followers. Followers are a more insightful KPI, and this shows us that our content is working.
The Target audience is also an important part of this equation. If we are a company pushing content about videogames to someone who doesn’t play videogames there is a pretty good chance that our content is going to fail regardless of how good, it is. We need to ensure that our content is directed to our targeted audience. If we are paying a ton of money but sending our ads to the totally wrong audience & demographic, we can rest assured that our KPIs will not show very effective results.
Part of ensuring that our content goes to the right person is using search engine optimizations, also known as SEOs. When someone is searching for videogames on Google, we want to ensure that our brand appears in the searches, preferably at or near the top of the page. The results at the top of the page get the most attention and traffic so we want to have our products in that range. This is where SEOs come into play. We need to use our user personas and figure out what our potential customers are looking for and how they might search for these items. Once we consult our user personas, we can start to add in key words on our website that will rank us higher up on the site. A great example of using SEOs is when you are listing a product for sale on Facebook Marketplace, Marketplace will show results that have words that you searched for in their product description. The better detailed your product description is there higher up you appear in the Marketplace ranking, and the more frequently you appear in peoples searches. This strategy is the exact same process that content producers must go through when designing content strategy for their websites.