Marketing has long been faced with the challenge of measuring their effectiveness. Especially with content. How do you consistently prove value to your organization and your leaders? Are your campaigns even working? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are most effective? How, and with what, do you measure these KPIs?
As a content marketer, I understand the ebbs and flows that come with our responsibilities. We want to create content that’s innovative, that engages our customers, that does something besides sit in content repositories. We create these robust reports about our content pieces and distribution efforts, filled with data points and percentages, but the funny part is, we’re not really proving our content’s value.
That’s why I’ve broken down the top 10 KPIs every healthcare marketer needs in 2018:
Website Visits
Tracking the amount of website visits you receive may seem like Marketing 101, but this KPI will help you calculate other important metrics further down the buyer’s journey. Your website is often the first impression made on a prospective customer—and it must resonate with them from the homepage.
Your content not only needs to be search engine friendly, but also crafted to entice your buyers to move down the funnel. By understanding your website visitors and how they engage with your site, you’ll be able to strategize for future website updates and calls-to-action.
Email Opens
Like website visits, email opens may seem elementary, but this KPI is important down the line. Email opens tells you that your customers are interested enough in your subject line—something about it caught their eye. By understanding where their journey started, or rather attributed to, you can follow their journey and create personalized experiences for them.
It’s also a smart idea to utilize A/B testing for your email campaigns. If your email opens are low, or not where you’d like them to be, try mixing it up. The two emails could have a different subject line, header, images, send time, etc. By measuring email opens for each campaign, you’ll understand what worked best to engage with your buyers and can further refine your strategy.
Link Clicks
Now we’re getting into the meat of marketing KPIs. Most, if not all, engagement starts with a link click. Whether that’s on your website, in an email, a social media post, or a paid advertisement—link clicks tell you that your buyers are more interested than your average Joe visiting your website and opening your emails. They tell you that whatever your offer was—content, an event, a webinar—a brief description was enough for them to learn more about it.
While link clicks are important, it’s what your prospect does after the link click that will really help you understand their journey.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
The holy grail of marketing metrics, MQLs are one of the most popular KPIs to measure. Why? Because it means that a prospective customer followed through on your call-to-action, completed a form to receive content or an event registration, and will now become a part of your nurture campaigns. By completing this form, your leads are telling you that they’re not only interested, but want to further engage and learn more about your organization’s offerings.
And now that you understand what types of offerings they’re most interested in, you’ll be able to tailor the sales and marketing experience for each of them. This will help push leads further down the funnel, and potentially (but hopefully), lead to them becoming a customer.
Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
The relationship between sales and marketing may be strained at times, but by sharing the Sales Accepted Leads KPI, the two teams will be able to become more aligned. A SAL is simply a MQL that’s been passed over to sales and is accepted as someone sales wants to further engage with.
Sales often claims they don’t receive much value from marketing. On the other hand, marketing believes sales doesn’t follow up on important MQLs in a timely manner, if at all. The SAL metric will allow for both teams to get on the same page. Marketing can prove their value, and sales can implement their cadence with strong, prospective leads.
Content Creation Time and Usage
To measure your content’s effectiveness, you first need to know how long it takes to create your content pieces. It’s important to remember that content types differ—white papers, infographics, webinars—and the time to create each will differ as well. This length of time, or investment, will eventually help you understand the return on said investment.
It’s also important to measure the usage of your content, especially by sales. Are they utilizing content during their sales interactions? Are they sending content to prospects? Or is your content sitting there going unused? These KPIs will be crucial in helping you measure your content’s value.
Engagement Rates
Similar to measuring content usage, measuring engagement with each piece of content by your prospective customers will also be crucial in proving your content’s value. Whittling it down to the second your prospects spend on each page, and each section on a page, will help you determine what content is resonating most with them.
You should also measure how often a prospective customer opens a piece of content. Perhaps they can’t read an entire white paper in one sitting—start comparing opens vs. engagement rates to extract better insights and target your prospects more appropriately.
Conversion Rates
Calculating conversion rates might be my favorite KPI on this list. And for one good reason: It helps me better understand the buyer’s journey at every touchpoint, and at every level of engagement. I want to be able to prove that my messaging and nurture campaigns are resonating with each prospect at all times, regardless of where they are in the funnel.
The best, and most simple, conversion rates to measure at each touchpoint are as follows:
- Website visit/email open to link click
- Link click to form submission
- Lead to MQL
- MQL to SAL
- SAL to opportunity
- Opportunity to closed deal
Sales Revenue
Now that your conversion rates have been calculated, it’ll be easier to prove content’s impact on your organization’s bottom line. However, only 7% of healthcare marketers are utilizing sales revenue as a KPI. This goes back to the need for sales and marketing alignment, and having shared metrics between the two teams will reduce any gaps.
You’re already calculating conversion rates, but pay close attention to the MQL-SAL-Opportunity-Closed Deal conversions. It’s important to know how long it takes for a lead to become a customer as this will help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and your sales cycle. It will also help you prove that your content did indeed make an impact in the sales cycle, and ultimately, sales revenue.
Content Return on Investment (ROI)
If the healthcare and life sciences industry is spending $50 million per year on content creation, how many marketers confidently know the ROI of said content? Furthermore, how many can they say their content was a direct influence on a sale, or on an organization’s revenue as a whole?
By utilizing the content creation time and usage, conversion rates, and sales revenue KPIs, you’ll be able to measure the ROI of your content. You’ll also understand how long it takes for a lead to become a customer, paired with the associated cost and sales revenue per lead.
While KPIs are always evolving, the above 10 are a good start for measuring your effectiveness and proving your value in 2018. Marketing, sales, and your leaders will be further aligned—while viewing marketing and its content as an asset to an organization’s well-being and growth capabilities.
