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It’s easy to get down in the weeds tracking conversions, closed sales, or marketing campaign effectiveness, but the job of improving those metrics often starts at a higher level.
A new report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reveals there’s much that could be done to improve marketing effectiveness at the strategic level. A lack of clear goals and the metrics to track them in the marketing department impedes a business’s ability to gain new customers and grow.
Here are our takeaways from the report on goals and metrics enterprise marketers need to succeed.
Clarity on What Success Looks Like
If you don’t know what success looks like, how will you know when you get there? Every plan needs to specify what success looks like. For enterprise content marketing, that means having clarity on what it is your marketing efforts are trying to achieve.
If you have the ability to measure crucial metrics — tracking conversions and closed sales and cross-analyzing data — you’re ahead of the game. But don’t feel too bad if you don’t — 71% of enterprise marketers surveyed by CMI either aren’t sure or know for a fact their organization doesn’t have clarity on marketing success. Knowing that, it’s imperative your organization join the 29% of organizations that have it right and make a plan to achieve marketing success clarity.
Strategy for How You’ll Achieve Success
If you know what successes your organization is trying to achieve, it’s a lot easier to formulate a strategy on how to get there. Not surprisingly, few marketers surveyed by CMI had a content marketing strategy. Only 35% said they have a documented strategy. The rest didn’t have any strategy, didn’t know their strategy, or only had a loose, unwritten plan.
Clearly, this is another place where your organization can pull ahead of the pack. A documented strategy can be shared, not only within the marketing department, but with sales, customer service, and management.
Planning for Effective Collaboration
If you’re running a content marketing program at an enterprise level, you’re going to need people to talk to each other. What does that interaction look like? Can you measure how often your meetings are and how well they’re helping you reach your content goals?
Hopefully, the answer is yes. Despite the reputation for frequent meetings being a timesuck on productivity, effective collaboration can add to your team’s productivity. About 34% of CMI’s respondents said their teams met daily or weekly to discuss or work on content marketing. Digging deeper, analysts found nine out of 10 found those meeting valuable.
To get the most out of your content marketing plan, don’t just schedule meetings. Consider who needs to be involved in the collaboration, how, and why. Set targets and design and track metrics to make sure your team is getting something out of those meetings, however often you decide to have them.
Tracking for Budget Allocations
How you allocate your marketing budget has an effect on your success, but so does tracking how each of your marketing segments performs. Plan, execute, and then track not only how your budget gets spent, but how effective those marketing spends are.
Wondering where you should spend your budget? According to the CMI report, enterprise marketers are spending about one-quarter of their budgets on content. It’s nearly a 10% increase from last year’s content spending. A further 47% say they intend to increase their content marketing budget allocations in the next year.
When the CMI analyzed team effectiveness, they found the best teams spent more on content, around 36%, while less effective teams skimped on content, allocating around 15%. As many marketers already know, content is expected to remain king for the foreseeable future. Devoting more money to your content budget and analyzing the results could help your team’s effectiveness.
Assessment of Marketing Maturity
Marketing is an iterative process as much as anything, but it’s the goals you set and the metrics you track that can help you get better over time. If you’re facing growing pains or still selling a business case for your department’s content marketing initiative, you’re not alone.
Only 4% of CMI’s respondents assessed their level as sophisticated — meaning that they provide “accurate measurement to the business” and can scale efforts “across the organization.” Everyone else was still dealing with at least a few challenges. The point, however, isn’t where you are, but where you want to be and knowing how to get there.
Goal Setting for Enterprise Content Marketing Plans
Goals for enterprise content marketing often sound simple, but getting the necessary structures in place is anything but. These goals are crucial to your overall success. With the right plan, marketers can create metrics to track their progress, gain support among company decision makers, and pull ahead of the competition.