I was on the growth team before we had the funding to hire a marketing VP and build a proper marketing function.
Historically, SEO has been a massive driver of VEED’s traffic. With the areas of focus set by the growth team, our content KPIs had to help VEED get more traffic and backlinks.
My blocker was we had too heavy of a focus on this. As a result, the way we looked at content was quite black and white which really frustrated me.
Does it drive traffic or help build links?
No? Then it’s not as important as the themes that do.
As a by-product of this, my KPIs didn’t paint an accurate picture of the not so black and white bits of content.
To be clear, I do firmly believe SEO is important. It’s not that I thought we needed to reject it but rather that we could expand to cover topics that might not have high search volume but that we know solves a problem our customers care for and pay for.
While I learned a lot about SEO during these initial years, there came a point where I felt stuck because I couldn’t get my POV across in the right “language” no matter how much I reframed things.
So until we got funded, hired a VP of marketing, and got a data analyst on the team, I reported on:
- Traffic
- Backlinks
- Bounce Rate
- Average SERP position
Enter: The Marketing Team
Here's what happened once we got funding and the marketing team was “born”.
Joining marketing and building the department
When Leila, my marketing VP and new boss, joined VEED I felt like finally my POV was understood (even though I still lacked the data dashboard to validate it with numbers).
Although at this point we had a data team, they were spread quite thin across multiple company needs. We needed someone to support us with data for our team.
So we hired a data analyst who helped not just me but others on the team get the analytics we needed to better explain the results of our work. We made several other hires and moved marketers out of other teams and into ours during this time such as:
- CRM lead
- Content marketing manager
- Copywriter
- Brand marketer
- Senior social media manager
- B2B marketer
These hires have not only helped form the marketing function but also helped our content “grow up” more in terms of the channels we can use for distribution and new native content.
Questions that led me to develop new KPIs
According to Google Analytics, our blog’s overall conversion rate for paid signups was .03%. Blogs historically don’t have high conversion rates.
But this was really bad.
It didn’t make sense to me how content wasn’t driving people to sign up and I had no way of seeing if at least it got people to click through to try our product.
So I wondered…
- SEO has brought us lots of traffic but what’s happening after people read?
- How can content help get more people to engage with the editor whether it’s a free or paid user?
- With a larger team to help with the repurposing and distribution of content, how can we diversify our traffic sources outside of SEO?
- How can VEED improve customer education and potentially improve retention as a result of the content we create and better distribute?
What the new KPIs are
While I do track signups to see the impact of content on revenue, I believe content should not be primarily accountable for how well the experience goes once inside the product.
That’s too far out of our realm of influence and more of a problem for product, design, and engineering to take the lead on solving.
What I can more directly influence is how engaging our content is and how I define engagement.
Here’s an overview of everything I measure and what it means.
📦 Content-to-Product Open Rate
The % of readership who immediately opens our tool to edit a video after reading
🏠 Visits to Clicks
A content engagement rate metric showing how many people who landed on a post clicked internal links/CTAs on the content
💰 Sign Ups
How many people are immediately creating a free or paid VEED account after reading?
The new KPIs are more centered around product and content engagement.
Overall we want to know if content is helping people get into our product or not. However we also need to recognize not every post is measured equally.
More top-of-funnel topics are more likely to be deemed successful in terms of metrics like traffic, emails captured, or the overall engagement rate (visits to clicks) with the internal links on the page.
We just got our data dashboard this Q3 so there’s still so much to learn (although we have already learned loads in the short time we’ve had the dashboard).
For example, here’s something I uncovered when trying to explain the importance of content we took solely an SEO approach on vs the content we took a more holistic approach on:
- Content to Product: 34% of readers use VEED immediately after reading compared to 6% for SEO content topics
- Visits to Clicks: 4X more on-page engagement than SEO content topics
- Signups: 6,066% higher conversion rate for paid signups than SEO content topics
It turns out our conversion rate is not .03% and instead ~2%. The numbers are likely much higher because there are some things we can't (yet) track as elegantly as we'd like.
For example, content to product is likely much higher considering the nature of the content journey, all the marketing touch points, and time while going from labeling your challenge and making a purchasing decision.
But right now we can only measure what happens immediately after reading which for now works well for us.
Everybody wants content, but not everybody knows why they want it or how exactly it contributes to a business.
But what happens when the people signing your paychecks don’t understand what all this content is accomplishing?
Your job is to prove the value of content and then figure out how to explain it so people get it (and hopefully invest more into your team).
Your boss, your boss’ boss, and so on don’t care what you feel would be “really valuable” if you did A, B, and C or how working on X, Y, and Z could “blow up”.
When you’re talking shop with your boss and the other higher-ups—especially when it comes to things that require a big upfront investment—you need to be ultra-specific about what ‘valuable’ means in both qualitative and quantitative terms that can tie back into how the metrics they care about would be affected.
Therefore, aligning your KPIs to these metrics (or leading metrics that affect these metrics) is key to helping you make your case.