Archives: Content

Last week was a big week — my company acquired one of our competitors, the team successfully hit a milestone that was critical to the business and general moral, and I’m excitedly preparing for the Inbound conference next week.

In the time between work and life, I had the opportunity to hear, read, and see some really interesting content and within it, there seemed to be a theme — change. If you’re dealing with change in your career or in your life, check out the resources below.

If you didn’t catch my last post, I discussed the Six Areas of Performance to monitor when measuring your content marketing performance. For those who missed it, here they are:

1. Conversions
2. Site Engagement
3. Shareability
4. Retention
5. Traffic Sources
6. Visits

Conversion tracking is the first area of performance I want to discuss. In my opinion, it is best to start by measuring metrics related to your main objective, and in marketing, conversions are the main objective.

I am admittedly a HUGE Janet Jackson fan. When interviewing for my first job, the potential employer asked, “What job would you have if you could have any job?” I answered, “Back up dancer for Janet Jackson.” I think they hired me with the hope that I would endlessly entertain them with random fits of dancing. Their hopes were satisfied.

While I’m not sure how much Ms. Jackson cares about content marketing, she does inspire the question, “what have you done for me lately?” This is a question you should constantly demand of your content marketing efforts. Answering that question requires setting expectations, monitoring performance, and refining efforts to get closer to achieving goals. Like many marketers, I monitor performance by referring to the areas I think are most important and looking at the key performance indicators (KPIs) within those areas to find out what is working and what could use more attention.