A lot goes into creating a content marketing strategy, but the reason so many companies never see success with theirs isn’t because of the work involved.
It’s actually because they pick the wrong target right from the beginning.
3 Reasons Engagement Is Your Content Marketing Strategy’s Most Important KPI
While you can aim for a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) with your content marketing strategy, the most important one, by far, is engagement.
1. Even Profits Can Be Misleading
Let’s start with the obvious argument against treating engagement as the most important KPI for your content marketing strategy. In short, shouldn’t it be profits? What could be more important than whether or not your strategy actually leads to a profitable result?
This line of thinking is flawed for two main reasons.
First, better engagement will always lead to greater profits. After all, it’s engagement that drives leads through your conversion funnel, eventually turning them into clients.
Similarly, engagement can be used to keep preexisting clients or even convince them to increase their investment with your company.
Second, profitability can be misleading.
For example, say a certain topic-type has become popular this year and actually won you a fair number of clients. The rest of your funnel doesn’t show any signs of engagement, though. Even the clients you converted didn’t prove they were engaged. They literally contacted you after reading just one blog post.
While this content did produce a profit, it might not next year when the popularity of the topic is gone. You now need to either rebuild your funnel or go out and find another “shiny-object” topic to quickly replace the old one and secure profits.
If you had focused on engagement the entire time, you’d never have run into this problem with your content marketing, but you would have still seen steadily-growing profits.
2. Creating and Executing a Content Marketing Strategy Is Expensive
Measuring the ROI of your content marketing strategy can be a challenge at first, but it’s also necessary to ensure your budget is being well-spent.
It’s also essential to keep in mind that strategies generally don’t pay off until after the first year. In many industries, it can easily take 18 months before a positive ROI is realized.
Of course, once it is, content marketing can produce amazing ROIs, and raise brand awareness, and position you as a notable authority within your industry.
Still, at the beginning, there’s no doubt about it: content marketing can cost a lot, both in terms of time and money.
But as we just covered, if your strategy doesn’t produce engagement, it’s never going to produce – or, at least, maintain – the positive ROI you’re after, much less a truly impressive one.
There’s no escaping the initial investment required for successful content marketing. However, as long as you prioritize engagement, that sacrifice will be well worth it.
3. Engaging Content Is What Turns Your Company into an Authority
Finally, as we touched on above, content marketing can turn you into a recognized authority. That’s a massive advantage to have over your competition. Once it’s clear that you know everything your market wants to better understand, you’ll be able to leverage this popularity into other profitable avenues.
You might even receive offers for speaking engagements. Imagine what that would do for your business if you began speaking at conferences in front of audiences that include your customers and leads.
Even if it just means other companies ask you to guest post on their websites, your brand awareness would benefit greatly.
If nothing else, when people recognize your name, they’re more likely to listen to you, which is always important to content marketing.
With all that being said, the only way you’ll become an authority is if your strategy puts engagement first. Fail to engage people and they’ll fail to see you as an authority.
This is one more reason why profits shouldn’t be your main goal. Improving profits won’t necessarily position you as an authority in your field. Engaging content will.
How to Aim Your Content Marketing Strategy at Engagement
Despite how important this aspect of your content marketing strategy is, don’t overthink it.
In order to be engaging, your content just has to focus on what your customers want to know about and be reasonably well-written (you don’t need to be Hemingway). Monitor what your leads engage with most and you’ll know where to double your efforts.
Then, if you’d like to turn that engagement into conversions as quickly as possible, we can help.
At Hushly, our platform can even give you an immediate ROI on your content. To see exactly how, contact us today for a free demo.
