A long game approach should be taken in your firm’s content marketing strategy.  So it’s important to check in on your private equity content performance and utilize the insights you get from analytics tools.  We’ll tell you about the tools and how to use them to maintain a strong content engine.

• Be clear about what you are actually measuring for, which means identifying KPIs (key performance indicators). We have suggestions on which ones later in this section.
• It takes time to build up traffic as a result of your efforts, but not as long as you might think. By the end of your first quarter of putting content out consistently, you should be able to start measuring and seeing results of its impact.
• Over even more time, you will see what is working and where you need to recalibrate. That’s part of the long game perspective. Execute. Measure. Adapt.
• If some of your efforts are not driving the results you want, the data will tell you – it’s up to you to listen to it. That’s why the methods we highlight in this section are going to be so useful.

Identify & Measure the Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Success can only be measured, tracked and analyzed when everyone agrees – not only to the goals of content production and promotion, but to the Key Performance Indicators nested in output of statistical data.

Here are three KPIs that will likely make sense for your firm:

• Organic Traffic & Active User Base
• Other Traffic Sources – Social or Otherwise
• Rising Above the Competition

We are going to give you advice on the best way to measure for these three, with a big focus on Organic Traffic (since that is about to become your bread and butter moving forward).

Ways to Measure Organic Traffic

After you’re a bit into the process of publishing content to your blog, the first measurement you’ll be looking at is growth in your Organic Traffic. Right off the bat, there are some causes of the growth that are reasonable to assume:

• More people are finding your site through search engines. This is pretty much how anyone finds anything these days, so this makes sense.
• Your SEO-optimized blog posts are contributing to your site getting discovered and their pages will be some of the most viewed on your site.
• The percentage of visitors coming to you from other channels like Direct (meaning typing in your website URL and going straight to your site) will go down. This is absolutely not a bad thing and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

To keep an eye on the ongoing changes in your organic traffic as you publish more and more, here are three reports you can set up for Google Analytics to automatically send on the first of each month:

• Audience Overview — This “big picture” report will provide key measurements to help you start to see trends in your audience as they emerge over time.
• All Traffic — This is how you find out where your traffic is originating from and whether it’s through a search engine, direct, or elsewhere.
• Page Views — You obviously want to know which pages are getting views, how much time visitors are spending on them, along with other key data points, right? This report lets you do all of this and more.

As you look at traffic, don’t freak out if a couple of things are red – whether it’s the total number of sessions being down or bounce rate ticking up. If you’re seeing an increase in the number of users, new users, and pages overall, those are all positive indicators of progress.

Here’s a dashboard report of what the numbers on a well-performing site can look like:

Year to Year Comparison

At the end of a year’s worth of content publishing, a “year to date” comparison will allow you to see how this machine of yours is taking shape and having a larger impact. If you’re sticking with your strategy, you are going to see growth in areas like your total number of users and sessions.

You should also be taking a look quarter by quarter to make incremental benchmarking a measurement that guides and directs your strategy.

Keyword Positions & Rankings

Keyword positioning is critical to your Organic Search ranking. It’s also important as an indicator of growth – meaning that you’re becoming more and more competitive over time.

This chart echoes the type of growth that the right keyword strategy for your firm has the potential to help you achieve, year to year:

Why does keyword ranking matter, you ask? Because it’s helping you become more discoverable by Organic Search.

Don’t forget that it’s Google’s job (along with other search engines) to promote the best content based on a user’s search. So if that’s the case, and there are topics that you want your firm to be discovered for, then you will optimize your content around those keywords. Likewise, you will find out what specific keywords you want to target based on data captured by one of the SEO tools available that we were previously mentioning.

SEMRush is the tool, in our opinion, to equip you for your keyword endeavors. You can look at competitors and where they’re ranking, discover opportunities and create a list of keywords that are aligned with your content. As your content diversifies, and as you use keywords strategically, you’ll have more and more keywords that will rank and searchers will have an easier time finding you on Google and the like.

All throughout this time, pay close attention to all of the terms in the top 10. That means when a term is searched, your website will be on the first page of hits! That’s pretty much like hitting a grand slam, and you want to do it as often as possible. Well done keyword research and optimization has the potential to get you some very significant growth.

On one hand, this is something you should have some familiarity with – but you likely won’t be spending much time on it in practice if you go deep with it. A marketing partner – or even someone you contract with for writing – will be much more equipped for this effort.

Besides Organic, Where is Your Traffic Coming From?

As I mentioned earlier, the idea is that most of your traffic will be coming through Organic Search – but you also want to keep an eye on how your distribution from social channels and emails is going.

Don’t worry – there’s a report for that! (Isn’t there always?)

An Acquisitions report from Google Analytics will show you all of your various traffic sources. But in a larger sense, it tells you where your distribution and promotion efforts are paying off from month to month and where they may be dwindling, increasing or staying the same. From here you may want to focus more on certain channels or simply maintain your current process.

Just like any report in Google Analytics, you can measure this based on any frame of time – as well as year over year. Here’s a Google Analytics visual for examining your
acquisitions:

Measuring Social Channels

Since you will be posting to LinkedIn and Twitter, you will be able to look at insights in the apps themselves – or better yet, to the publishing tool you are using which should also be capturing data.

Especially if you are a marketer reading this document right now, you likely know that quality engagement with your content is what you’re looking for. Likes or reactions, as you may know, are not going to tell you as much about your content’s value and how to adapt it compared to these:

Linkedin

• Impressions – Although this doesn’t tell you about engagement with your content, it indicates how much your content is getting seen and is a good indicator of the best time for you to be posting.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Find out how many users are actually digging into your whole post and not just reading the caption.
• Follower Demographics – This is a unique metric to the world of LinkedIn, and one that you’d be wise to look at. Being able to tell which industries are engaging with your content will help you to continue to either provide for them or switch your efforts to better engage with your desired industries.

Twitter

• Link Clicks – When you include your post in a tweet, is it getting clicks? What kind of click volume is it getting? This will help shed light on these questions.
• Top Tweets – Look at your top tweets to see what content is performing the best in the Twittersphere. Not every tweet will be a blog post reference, but you can factor in the results of what’s performing well when considering adaptations to your content.
• Follower Gain/Loss – We don’t want to overstress this one, because the quality of your followers is key, not necessarily the number. However, as you post more and more quality content that is getting engagement from your ideal followers, you’ll be aiming to reach even more of your desired audience.

Email

• CTR, or Click-Through Rate – Not only can you find out how many users are taking the time to go beyond your email copy, but if you are using marketing automation you can also see who is looking at what. This will help to qualify your audience and leads, and with a marketing automation platform that includes lead scoring, those clicks will add points to your lead’s scores. The CTR measurement can also give you insight for formatting and what topics are most valued to your lists.
• Conversion Rate – Every email you send should have a Call to Action, or maybe multiple (but don’t overdo it. You don’t want to come off as pushy). Following every email send, you should be looking at the performance of those CTAs and whether you’re getting the conversions you desire. For instance, if the intent of your CTA is to have conversations about the content, is anyone on your list following up with you to ask questions and discuss other ways you can help them?
• Forwards – You are sending emails to a well-qualified list of leads, and those folks are connected to others you’d like to share your expert insights with. Looking at forwards will give you a sense of the compelling and valuable nature of your content.
• Bounce Rate – This is a metric that really matters and needs to be maintained so that the deliverability of your emails continues to perform well. The two types of bounces, hard and soft, have different implications. Soft bounces are relatively harmless, they are based on a temporary issue in a recipient’s account.  A hard bounce indicates an account that is permanently out of service so make sure to delete those emails from your list.  When hard bounces start to add up they can trigger your emails as spam, so be sure to take an active approach if you see them coming through.

There are plenty of other metrics you can look to within these three channels, but these will help you gain a good start without overwhelming you as you begin to measure them.

Competitive Comparison

At least once a year, stack yourself up against your competitor in terms of your content strategy game.

We brought up SEMRush a little while ago, and of course it’s not the only tool for doing keyword research – we’ll suggest a few more in this section. However, the best keyword tools give you a good look at your competitors, and SEMRush is well-equipped on that front.

From a big picture standpoint, you can go into your personal dashboard and see a chart that positions you with your closest competitors in terms of where you’re ranking. This is valuable data that will give you insight beyond what you may already know about your competitors based on different metrics.

Here’s an example of what that view looks like:SEMRush captures data from your competitors through which you can see the keywords they’re ranking for. As you observe this, you’ll notice where there may be opportunities for you to better position yourself through keyword optimization in your content moving forward. You will also have a specific sense of what you should and even shouldn’t be competing for.

Content Audit

Since you should know your top (at least three) competitors by now, we expect that you are keeping an eye on their content. Here are some specifics that you can be looking at.

• How often are they publishing? This affects their search success, especially on certain long tail keywords*, ones which you may be targeting or competing for.
  *Long tail keywords are phrases that aren’t as intuitive (requiring research) but offer great value because of their use by individuals closer to a point of doing business or taking another significant action with your firm.
• What content is being published? This can help clue you into the types of content that are resonating particularly well with their target audience, which can give you insight into what you should be focusing on more with yours. If they’re publishing a ton of video content, for example, that may be something you want to consider.
• How well is their content doing? Nobody is perfect – but by seeing what types of mistakes other people may be making with their content publishing and larger strategy, you can avoid making them yourself in the future.

By paying close attention to these factors, you can get a much better understanding of exactly what type of content is doing well with your target audience. That’ll give you a chance to double down on what’s working and get rid of what isn’t as soon as possible.

Wrapping it Up, For Now

You have made it to the end of the Ultimate Guide for Private Equity Content Strategy.  If this is the first post of the series that you’ve encountered there’s so much more to check out and use to up your firm’s content marketing efforts.  You can start at the top, here.

If you’ve made it through each piece, congrats!  We believe in even greater success for you as you use your content machine as the high yield growth tool for your firm that it’s intended to be.