How to Set Benchmarks for Your Content Marketing
Content is measured badly because it is measured by traffic, which is easy to see and weakly connected to revenue. A better method assigns each piece a job, chooses a few numbers that show whether the job is being done, and reviews them on a schedule that matches how slowly content actually works.
Start from the job, not the metric
Every piece of content should have been written to do one thing: get found for a question, shorten a sales conversation, or bring past customers back. The benchmark depends on which. A pricing page's job is to produce better-qualified calls; measuring it by page views misses the point. Building a content strategy covers assigning the job before writing.
Three numbers per piece
Found
Is the piece being discovered? Search impressions and clicks for its target question, plus visits from social and email. If a piece was written to be found and is not, the problem is usually the title and headings or the competition; see on-page techniques.
Read
Do people stay? Time on page relative to length, scroll depth if you have it, and the bounce back to search results. A piece that is found and abandoned is answering the wrong question or answering it badly.
Led somewhere
Did the reader do the next thing: click to the service page, call the tracked number, submit the form, or, for sales-support content, did the piece get used in a conversation that closed? This is the number that connects content to revenue and it is the one most businesses never set up. The lead generation hub covers tracking the source of enquiries.
Set the initial benchmark from your own baseline
Industry averages are nearly useless for a twelve-person business; your own numbers from the last quarter are the benchmark. Record found, read and led for each existing piece. New pieces are judged against the median of what you already have, and the goal each quarter is to move the median.
Match review intervals to how content works
A new page takes two to four months to settle in search. Judging it at three weeks is meaningless. Review quarterly, and make decisions annually with four quarters of data. The exception is sales-support content, where you can ask the sales conversations within a month whether the piece helped.
The revise, merge, retire rule
- Revise if the piece is found and read but has aged or does not lead anywhere: update facts, add the next step, add proof.
- Merge if two pieces compete for the same question; combine the best of both at the stronger URL and redirect the other.
- Retire if a piece has not been found or read in a year and does not support sales; redirect its address to the nearest relevant page.
Applying this rule is what keeps a content archive an asset rather than a liability; the pros and cons of content marketing discusses what happens when it is not applied.
A simple quarterly review
- List every piece with its job and its three numbers.
- Mark each revise, merge, retire or keep.
- Pick the two pieces with the highest potential and improve them first.
- Only then decide what new piece to write, from the question list.
Two hours a quarter. It is the difference between a content programme that compounds and one that produces a growing pile of pages nobody reads.
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