It’s really common to see content managers struggle when it comes to setting KPIs–Key Performance Indicators. But this process doesn’t have to be so hard.

In this article, I’ll talk about the main things you should consider when setting KPIs for your content team. Keep reading if you’re looking for ways to increase productivity in your project and deliver bottom-of-the-line results to the business!

What is a good, realistic monthly goal for a content producer?

As a content producer, your individual objective key-result (OKR) should be directly connected to the company’s main goals. For example, if the business must achieve 100 new customers to grow every month and your conversion rate from marketing qualified leads to customers is 10%, you know you need at least 1,000 MQLs to get to that point.

For a content producer, the more realistic KPI to track is organic traffic. Back to our example, considering that from every 10 readers one leaves their email to subscribe or download an ebook, you know that you’d need at least 10,000 unique views per month to get those 100 customers.

Disclaimer: this is a zero-gravity example and you’ll notice not every lead is an MQL. You’ll soon need to add more layers to the process, including steps on your content journey to cross content interest and lead maturity (willingness to purchase), as well as additional questions on landing pages.

Having stated that, if you’re part of a marketing team, it’s likely that the crew has to share the final goal and help each other to achieve every metric, but you can divide and conquer the funnel, setting a team member as the owner of each step:

• Top of the funnel (traffic and channels) — content related to the needs of your target audience;
• Middle (leads and MQLs) — info about your solution and expertise;
• Bottom (SQLs and opportunities) — case studies, competition comparatives.

The main questions to set this number are:

1. What is the company’s forecast for the next month/quarter/year?
2. What are our conversion rates for every step of the funnel?
3. Is the final number realistic or are you at the beginning of your strategy? In that case, it’d be best to grow to that unique viewers goal-number month by month.

With the team aligned on these questions, it’s time to define the proper content strategy, which involves technical resources, budget, and time allocation. It also requires knowledge about your customers, ongoing A/B tests, and analytical research.

Of course, the person responsible for the top of the funnel results impacts the middle (she/he will create materials for all stages), and of course someone who creates strategies to bring more mid-funnel leads will impact top-funnel as well — it’s teamwork. But having these “owners” will help you to motivate each one towards the final goal.

Track your content performance, campaign results, and conversion rates. Then you can repurpose and relaunch the most successful ones, replicate the best models and increase your numbers making use of the content you already have, wisely. More than that, you can gather your team again, discuss what went wrong and what worked well, adjust needs and expectations, and set up the stacks for the next cycle.

Distribute and promote your assets

Content is essential to this movement, but content alone won’t bring all the traffic on day one — you’ll need it to be distributed in the right channels — such as blog, social media, email, and so on.

Content distribution has its own tricks, shortcuts, and tools, and you need to take the time to experiment and test in order to develop a good strategy that ensures ROI on your work.

What content types my team should be delivering?

Besides that, there is a range of content types a content manager can rely on, according to the preferences of your audience, the objectives of each piece of content, and the resources available in-house.

An example of that is a framework called Content Marketing Matrix, which helps to define the content types the company should invest in for each campaign based on your goals.

To use this framework, you should think about what you want your customers to achieve from the content you’re producing: should it be entertaining, inspiring, educational or convincing? Then, you plan what types of content your team need to create in order to get there, such as videos, ebooks, articles, infographics, webinars, among others.

Also, whenever possible, your content should be complementary, referring to the others and adding more value to your visitor. That’s why it’s important to have professionals on top of the company’s content weaponry and strategy. Analytical capacity, strategic thinking, and operational resilience are some of the requirements for up-to-date Content Managers.

Let us know if this article was helpful to you in the comments!

Content Manager’s Guide: How to set your team’s KPIs was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Content is the beginning of marketing. And it’s been some time since marketers started considering content management as the backbone of their strategies. After all, content is fuel for most demand-generating actions — from inbound to outbound, on organic or paid channels, online or offline. But what about sales teams, have they been using content as an ally?

According to a SiriusDecisions survey, the answer is no. Two out of three content pieces created end up not being used by companies. This is a sign for help as a result from:

• Lack of planning, which can be solved by a good content mapping accompanying every step of the marketing funnel and
• Lack of involvement of the commercial team in the content strategy, which demands alignment between marketing and sales teams.

Team alignment is known as smarketing — a beneficial practice for both marketing and sales with a direct impact on the company’s results in the volume of customers and revenue. According to a report released by DemandGen, 95% of customers choose a vendor who has presented them with the right content throughout the buying process. With the right content, a salesperson can offer the benefits of their product or service and thereby help the buyer make the best decision.

So how can you help your sales force do a good job? By simply offering content that helps them nurture leads and close more deals. It’s really that simple. That is, participate in sales meetings whenever possible, listen to the objections brought by the leads and create content that anticipates these possible obstacles.

There are many companies that get fantastic results when creating content on a recurring basis and yours can not be left out. But let’s move on, I promised content hacks and that’s what I’ll deliver now!

CONTENT HACKS

# 1: Create content along with the future customer

I learned this from the marketing team of Involves, the company behind Agile Promoter, leading technology software for trade marketing in Latin America. Their customers included L’Oréal, Motorola, CVC, and many others. In their case, inviting executives to online interviews proved to be a great way of bringing new businesses to the sales pipeline. In addition, it helped them to warm up negotiations that were delaying the sales cycle. The content created is often a video with tips and information on the challenges of trade marketing, super useful for other executives working in the same industry.

Why do future clients participate? For them it is an opportunity to expose their knowledge to a broader audience, to reach a network of professionals they wouldn’t otherwise, and to add more achievements to their resumé, all in one action.

These interviews are done in two ways: they’re scheduled in advance and released to a professional base that wants to follow them live or recorded and edited for promotion afterward. In both cases, they are available on Involves’ news website. This page is prepared as an online club that execs can sign to and receive premium content (becoming leads on the marketing funnel).

How about following Involves’ steps? Whether you provide operations, sales, HR, or financial solutions, it is very likely that your future client is someone with deep knowledge about their industry. Certainly, other executives in the same field would love to hear what that person has to say!

# 2: Create a content hub and position yourself as a reference

Involves is also a success story by having created the first content hub of their industry. The Trade Club shares articles, rich materials such as exclusive e-books, and videos with its members.

For Content Hack # 1 interviews are bottom of the funnel content. They’re used as sales collaterals and lead to both new deals and more closings. Content Hack #2 is about top and middle of the funnel, provided at the news website to:

1. Attract qualified audience — top of the funnel;
2. Turn visitors into leads — people who sign up to the club’s newsletter and
3. Engage the ones who have already signed up.

The website also helps to generate continuous leads from the club’s members’ network. Once they sign up they’re encouraged to share materials on LinkedIn to download new rich content.

# 3: Share your achievements with leads on the pipeline

This hack I learned from Worthix, a company that provides consumer intelligence surveys based on artificial intelligence. Every time they close a new deal with a large brand, Worthix sends newsletters created by the marketing team to leads that are still on the pipeline “Selling for companies is about building relationships. Content helps me in this process. By sending these newsletters, I create a sense of urgency in leads from the same industry,” reveals Worthix CEO Guilherme Cerqueira.

I’ve seen other sales teams do a similar process that has also proved to work very well. When a new product feature is launched, account executives share the news with leads. Most of the time they’re marketing managers who were waiting for that specific function to deploy the software with their teams. Some other times they can be the ones who have stopped responding in the middle of the deal for some reason — and the news creates a new hook to pick up the conversation.

I hope these content hacks help you to speed up enterprise sales using content!

Content Hacks for Enterprise Sales was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Action plans include emergency reviews of investment, preparation for a decline in core revenue streams and hand brakes implemented in multiple spending lines. What action plans should also include swiftly is a Growth Methodology approach. This is more than an offense play. It’s a cultural change capable of transforming and preparing companies for the post-crisis world. A world the ones that go for growth now will envision and create themselves.

What it means to Go For Growth

In the process of slowing the spread of Coronavirus, many industries are put at risk, with travel, transportation, event, and mining predicted to take the highest hits. Not to mention small businesses whose average hold 27 cash buffer days in reserve. It’s clear this crisis will change the world permanently and the impact already feels very real.

But this storm will pass. And it’s proven by many companies and projects that emerged in the midst of past crises that this now is not the time to hear and believe dismay above ingenuity. Business and projects that started and thrived during uncertain times include:

• IBM, which was founded in 1896 as the Tabulating Machine Company during a prolonged economic slump. Later in 1924 Thomas Watson took over the company and renamed it the International Business Machines.
• Tollhouse Cookies, created by Ruth Wakefield in 1933 as the country started to recover from the Great Depression, and eventually sold to Nestlé.
• Microsoft, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 during a stagflation period in the US.
• iPod, the product responsible for Apple’s comeback was launched in 2001, right after the burst of the dot-com bubble.
• Dropbox, which introduced its new technology for cloud storage in the middle of a global financial crisis in 2008 and quickly expanded with a viral loop program.

Going for growth means establishing a process for experimentation to identify opportunities to move the business towards its envisioned trajectory, which can include finding revenue opportunities and optimizing for customer experience and loyalty in these uncertain times. Going for growth means:

1. Having a data-driven approach to finding opportunities hidden within your own product, business, and market.
2. Starting small, with one meeting and a couple of experiments, but ultimately creating broad cultural change for the organization.
3. Breaking silos. It means establishing a process that involves the majority of the team. Growth ideas coming from the product, customer support, sales or the finance teams can be equally disruptive. And C-Level involvement is key in prioritizing growth.
4. Being fast. Optimizing for a number of experiments that can be run in days or within a week or two is essential to find new revenue streams, channels, products and ways to grow right now.
5. Learning, above all else. Every experiment either successful or not should bring the light of data where before only a question existed. Also, as you learn quickly by testing and experimenting, you avoid wasting resources in projects that are not yet proven.

How to Go For Growth Right Now

Many companies are being pushed by the current adversities to innovate with their product, channels, and operations. I’ve recently heard of a mid-size startup that was about to downsize. Instead, the founders invited the team to create a new product that could quickly help their community and generate enough revenue to maintain as many jobs as possible. In one week they came up with an MVP for a delivery alternative that promises to benefit local restaurants and small businesses impacted by the social distancing measures.

Another interesting idea came from a beauty service app that saw a high cancellation risk within the first few days of the COVID-19 outbreak news. The team quickly planned and started running an experiment on selling discounted coupons customers can redeem in up to one year. The hypothesis is that it won’t only prevent cancelations, but it will actually bring referrals and more revenue.

If your company is already going for growth, make sure to share your story here on our Community using the #Covid-19 hashtag (less than 2min to post). I will update this article including the names of companies going for growth and the examples of experiments they want to share.

If you’re not yet going for growth, here are 100+ ideas your team can use to get inspired and kick-off your first growth meeting. Make sure to follow the step by step of the Growth Methodology.

1. Set a goal and invite the team to share ideas

What do you want to accomplish? It can go from increasing customer acquisition to decreasing churn or adding revenue. The ideas suggested for testing should be aligned with the same objective. Ideally, this is done prior to the growth meeting.

2. Prioritize the ideas

This can be done during the growth meeting when the team will pitch their ideas. You can prioritize them according to the goal itself, how impactful they seem, how much effort it will take to test and how confident the team is that this experiment will actually bring results.

3. Test

Put the experiments in practice. Ideally, this will take as little resources and time as possible to collect enough data that can be analyzed to come up with a conclusion: will the idea work or not?

4. Analyze

As the results come you can decide to roll out the idea or not. Even an experiment that doesn’t work is a good one. At least you collected important data and avoided spending in a line or project that would be proven a waste of time after months — as companies that don’t have an established growth process often do.

After analyzing the idea, you roll out successful experiments company-wise and go back to step 1, to new experiments.

#GoForGrowth examples

Our community sums more than 90 examples of growth experiments and helpful resources. Check here a few of these examples:

We are providing free access to our Mobile Forms Software (Check), to help businesses ensure that employees adhere to health and safety standards. This can also be applied towards work from home best practices, operational guidelines, company procedures and more. Our tool is great for retraining opportunities, especially in light of the current health crisis. — Kat Hirsch, from Intouch Insight.

[We are] discussing with major countries around the world to handle their PR on how they’ve handled the Corona Virus pandemic. — Richart Ruddie, from Public Defenders.

[We are] developing a knowledge bank of contemporary perspectives through a non-commercial community-development enterprise, thus connecting people through conversations to build a mutually beneficial network. — Sushrut Munje, from Frankaffe.

As hourly workers are losing their jobs, we’d like to offer them the chance to build an income with an online business. (…) We’re offering anyone who’s just started on Twitter access to our growth tool for just $1 /month while we help them build an audience. — Yannick Veys, from Hypefury.

To do our part during the COVID-19 Crisis, we (GrowthHit) are offering our best selling book 📚 on hashtag#digitalmarketing for FREE. Just use code: LETSGROW20 — Jim Huffman, from GrowthHit.

We have shifted our government marketplace to focus on COVID-19 supplies, services, and tools. — Paola Santana, from MICRO.

Is your growth team helping the business adapt to health requirements, find new revenue streams, keep or create jobs, and even soar once this storm goes away? Share your tests/experiments/projects here using the hashtag #Covid-19.

If this is the first time you’re reading about Going for Growth or the Growth Methodology, the State of Growth study is a good resource to learn more about the practices of the best performing growth teams in the world.

I hope you’re taking care of yourself, prioritizing the health of your team members, family, and community. Stay connected to your team, customers, the people you love… and go for growth!

Go For Growth: how can businesses take action to navigate crisis was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader.

In a world where the tenure of a CMO at enterprise companies averages about 18 months, rewiring operating models for growth is one of the secret weapons of a pioneering marketer. And I believe it starts from within.

Marketing and GrowthHacking used to be about lone wolves, creative hackers, the ones seeking viral results and making a lot of noise. Now the fastest-growing companies show us how their approach is much more process-oriented and their marketing is built by engineers who prioritize team collaboration, integrations and intelligence. Marketing, Product and Growth teams are larger and more complex than ever before, with in-house and remote members, multiple agencies and more channels to cover and excel in every year. Motivation becomes a key-driver for success.

The more prepared leaders are, the more results a team can achieve. To develop and train our team leaders at GrowthHackers (also previously at Contentools), I’ve developed a concise leadership guide visiting each of the most contagious behaviors of great leaders, one by one.

Hearing about the existence of this guide, a few founders and marketers started to request access to this material, to the point I thought it could be interesting to share it publicly. After all, helping teams become more productive is part of our mission — and who better to improve teams than their leaders?

What makes you a leader

• You’re a leader when people look up to you.
• You’re a leader if you’re responsible for not only your own performance, but for that of others too.
• You’re a leader once your actions don’t simply reflect on yourself, but on a group of people as well.

At GrowthHackers, we have more leaders than teams. Part of our leaders are called team leaders and earn the responsibility of responding for a group of people, a set of OKRs, KPIs and deliverables before the whole team (not just before the board or the CEO). Here we understand development as a journey, a never-ending ride. Being a leader too is a work in progress, always evolving, never ending.

And what exactly should we be developing then? Since the world changes based on our actions and not based on our opinions, we should start with our behavior.

According to researchers from Harvard Business School, the most contagious behaviors from top leaders are:

1. Developing oneself and others
2. Technical skills
3. Strategy skills
4. Consideration and cooperation
5. Integrity and honesty
6. Global perspective
7. Decisiveness
8. Result focus

If you’re interested in developing yourself and your team in each one of these areas, download the full guide here.

The GrowthHackers leadership guide was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.