How To Set Marketing Goals In Singapore

Having a great inbound marketing strategy is one thing; setting realistic marketing goals for your business is another.

Think of marketing goals as figuring out what to focus on. Due to the overarching nature of online marketing, you can never run out of things to do when you set out to market your business. For this reason, you’d want to narrow down the list of the things you’ll be doing to what aligns to your desired business results best. What do you wish to achieve after a particular stretch of time?

The first step to achieving success entails setting up clear objectives and goals for your business, with real-world applications. You also want to make sure that you’ve succeeded in pairing this up with an action-oriented marketing strategy.

Make sure the goals you’ve set are well defined and measurable in a way. If anything, that’s how you measure the success rate of the effort both you and your team are pumping into your marketing campaign.

There’s nothing easy about coming up with any of these goals. When you think of it, you have to find a way to align the marketing goals you come up with with the business goals you’ve set for your business in order to bring your team on board and get them to both believe and support your idea. Even more important you need this to figure out what metrics you’ll be using to track the goals.

SMART GOALS

You’ve probably heard about SMART goals, and how it’s important to make sure the goals you set snugly fit the SMART bill – and that is, they must be Specific, Measurable., Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

It’s also important that you walk every member of your team through the marketing goals you’ve set for your business. You want to make sure that they know what they’re working towards, and with every step they make, be able to tell if their effort is paying off.

There’s a way a well-defined marketing goal looks like. The same way you can look at a goal and be able to tell if it’s poorly defined.

Poorly-defined Marketing Goals for Your Business

If your goals don’t exactly fit into the SMART bill, then you don’t need to be reminded that you still have some serious work to do on them.

Examples of undefined goals that don’t do much justice to the overall well-being of your marketing strategy include:

• I hope to attain more web visitors, increase the number of leads I’m generating and in the end be able to drive more sales.
• I want to grow my email list
• I want to climb up the search engines ranks, make sure my website appears in the first pages of Google in all the relevant keywords.

It’s easy to talk about your dreams and the list of things you want to achieve, but until you quantify them, then measuring them would only prove to be difficult. If you want leads, then you’d want to ensure you’ve specified the number of leads you wish to generate. It could be 100 more leads or even a thousand more on top of what you’re currently getting.

If it’s about growing your email list, you have to include the number of new emails you wish to generate.

And if it’s about securing a prime ranking in the SERPs, you have to start by being specific with regards to the list of keywords you want to rank on.

Example of Well-Defined Marketing Goals

Simple, well-defined goals are SMART in nature, and examples include:

1. We’re looking to generate 100, 000 new visitors, increase the number of leads by 1, 000, and win about 100 new customers by the end of the year through our inbound marketing strategy that will be working towards helping us achieve our $1, 000, 000 revenue goal.
2. We plan to generate 2 new clients from our current email marketing list. We’re also planning to add all the qualified leads into our mailing list. This will allow us to keep them warm for future sales.
3. We want to propel our website to the first page of Google for the following list of keywords. From what we know, this should be able to generate about 1000 new visitors to our website every month.

Important Tips on How to set up well-defined Marketing Goals for your Singapore Business

Here’re some primers on how to set up well-defined goals that are in perfect sync with the business goals you’ve set for yourself:

1. How Much Revenue do You Wish to generate from the Marketing Efforts you apply?

This should be easy. You can start by looking at the amount of money your business made in sales the previous year. The point is to grow the amount of revenue you generated the previous year by a certain percentage you’ve set for yourself.

So if, say, you made $1, 000, 000 in revenue last year, why NOT increase the number to $1, 500, 000 and figure out the best marketing strategy to get you there from that.

In other words, you have to adjust your marketing strategy so you can earn $500, 000 more on top of what you made the previous year.

2. Determine Number of Sales You Need to Make to Hit Your Revenue Goals

Now that you know the amount of money you wish to make by the end of that financial year, you can go ahead and determine the number of sales you need to make to hit that goal.

Simple, just take your target revenue amount and divide it by the value of an average sale. For this case, your revenue goal is $500, 000. Assuming you make $10, 000 per sale, then the number of sales you’ll need to make to hit your revenue goal will be $500, 000/$10, 000, which amount to 50 sales.

Meaning, you need to make 50 new sales to hit this new revenue goal.

3. What’s your closing Rate and the Number of New Opportunities that You Need?

Not every opportunity that you get amounts to a sale. Only a certain percent of the people that show interest in your product or service actually make a point to go through with a purchase.

You can start by looking back at your business to attach a percentage to your closing rate. Simple, how many of the leads you attract to your site translate into real sales?

In this case, if your closing rate is 50%, and you’re looking to lock in 50 sales to hit your $1, 500, 000 revenue goal, then simple math demands that you work towards generating 100 new opportunities to hit the new marketing goal.

4. Determine the Number of Sales Qualified Leads You’ll Need

A Sales Qualified Lead is the number of leads that you’ll be passing to your sales team to hit your targeted number of sales.

Speaking of which, if this is the first time you’re carrying out an inbound marketing campaign, then coming up with this number can prove to be a little problematic on your part, unless otherwise.

As a starting marketer, 50% can be a good number to start with. So for this case, with a closing rate of 50%, the number of SQL’s you’ll need to drive to your site hit your new revenue goals is 200. Meaning, you have to send 200 leads to your sales team, and if 50% of them turn out to be new opportunities, then you’re likely to end up making 50 sales, provided 50% of the 100 decide to close the sale.

5. Determine the Number of Marketing Qualified Leads You’ll Need

A Marketing Qualified Lead is a term for any qualified lead you attract that isn’t exactly sales-ready.

In order for this type of lead to qualify, then you must be willing to put in more work. More marketing will be required for the lead to be more marketing ready. For instance, you have to do some little bit of lead nurturing in an effort to get the leads more sales-ready.

If you have no history to go through and estimate your MQL rate, then your safest bet would be to go with a 50% rate. And depending on the results you get, you’re allowed to make the necessary adjustments to the rate until you settle for something that’s more accurate.

Now going off the above example, you’ll need to generate 400 MQLs within this coming financial year to hit the revenue goal you’ve set for your business.

6. Determine the Number of Leads You’re Targeting to get

A lead can be defined as the visitor you’ve managed to convert on one of your offers. It’s to be however noted that NOT all leads are actually qualified, so it’s important that you limit your estimates to qualified leads only, or those you’re convinced are qualified enough to pass as Marketing Qualified Leads that hinge you closer to your revenue goals.

Simple, try to focus on improving the quality of the content you produce to increase the conversion rate of the leads you’re attracting and end up with more MQL’s.

For instance, to generate the 400 MQLs in our example, you may be required to generate 1000 leads. So to break it further, we need like 1000 new leads to generate the 50 new sales that will be making us $500, 000 more revenue income.

This is one area you’re expected to monitor more closely and make necessary adjustments to it until you’re able to tell how many of the leads you generate quality as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).

7. Determine the Amount of Traffic You Need to Achieve Your Revenue Goal

Based on your traffic history, it’s possible to come up with a percentage estimate of the amount of traffic you’re expected to generate to reach your revenue goals. In our case, our new revenue goals register a 25% increase in the revenue generated the previous year.

So assuming it took us estimated traffic of 1 million visits to achieve the $1000 000 revenue goal, we might want to increase the amount of traffic we’re driving to 1.25 million to hit the new revenue goal.

Meaning, we have to make sure we’re directing 12.5 million visits to our website and landing pages in order to hit the new target.

8. Align it With Your Other Business Goals

Your primary focus should be on the key goals you’ve set for your business. Look at the key areas you want to grow in your business and make sure you align them with your marketing goals.

Here’re a few examples of other business goals you might want to create some metrics for:

1. 1. The targeted number of sales of a particular line of product. Rather than setting up a general sales goal for the goods and services you’re offering, you simply identify a line of product that’s doing pretty well or generating the highest amount of revenue and direct the bulk of your marketing effort towards it.
   2. The revenue from existing customers. You want to make money off returning clients. So set up a new marketing goal that will be attracting the bulk of the clients you’ve had the privilege of serving to return and make a new purchase.
   3. Increase the retention rate of current customers. The point is to convert the majority of the customers you’ve ever served in the past into loyal customers that will always be buying from you. Works even better if you’re selling recurrent items that your customers will be buying on a regular basis.
   4. There’s a fair chance your business will be growing. There’ll be more customers, which may be translating to more workload on your part. So it’s important that you factor in the possibility of employing more people. Take a keen look into your business and find out if the team you have has the capacity to deliver on the increased workload. If NOT, consider expanding your team.

Keep in mind that these goals will always vary depending on the nature of your business and the needs it has.

9. Set Benchmarks

Results don’t start to show at the beginning of implementing your marketing strategy. You must be able to give it some time and observe some patience as you give your business the much-needed time to pick up.

So as you’re about to find out, your business will be gaining more traction during the last quarter of your fiscal year than it did during the first quarter.

Start by dividing the year into four quarters and set a benchmark for each, but with the last quarter being much higher than the first.

In our example, our quarterly benchmarks for the number of visits we direct to our site can grow from 100, 000 visits for the first year, to 200, 000 visits for the second year, to 400, 000 visits for the third year, all the way to 550 000 visits for the fourth quarter when the business is at its peak.

You’re expected to set benchmarks for all the metrics you’ll be tracking including the number of new customers you plan to attract within that financial year.

In other words, every single one of the business goals you set must be accompanied by quarterly benchmarks that you’ll be tracking.

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How To Use The Right Metrics To Set Your Marketing Goals In Singapore

As a Singapore business owner or marketer, it is imperative to take the time to set marketing goals for each campaign. The goals will help you to stay on track and monitor the performance of each strategy. If you decide to do inbound marketing using social media marketing, regular monitoring will help you to know if your ads are performing as expected.

Today, we will look at how to use the right metrics to set your marketing goals in Singapore. However, before we look at the various metrics that you can use to gauge the performance of your marketing strategy in Singapore, let us discuss how to pick marketing goals in Singapore.

How to Pick Marketing Goals in Singapore

The first thing to note is that there is no universal formula for setting marketing objectives because each campaign is different and brands have varying objectives. Do you have an idea of what you want to achieve from the campaign, but are all the goals worthy?

Here are some questions to help you test if a particular marketing goal is worthy.

The final list of goals/objectives will help you come up with robust campaigns and monitoring metrics.

• If you could change one aspect of your brand, what would result in the biggest impact?
• Where do you envision your business to be a year from now? Which specific goal would prove that your business has grown and achieved its objective?
• As you review your Singapore marketing reports, what is one metric that truly reveals your company’s weakness? Where is the black hole in the current marketing funnel?
• If you succeeded in achieving this goal, what else would you be able to do to continue scaling up your business? To help you answer this question correctly, note that goals are like chess pieces, you decide to focus on a particular goal because it present or opens doors for more business growth opportunities. Achieve that one major goal and you will be in a position of power. You will reign supreme in your niche but you have yo continuously work on enhancing your processes.
• Be honest to yourself, can you realistically achieve this goal? One of the mistakes that most digital marketers make is not been honest with themselves. Tripling the amount of organic traffic or number of sales sounds great can you could actually be able to map out exactly what needs to be done to achieve that goal. However, is it realistic? Do you have what it takes and is your business ready for a sudden surge in traffic and sales? Ideally, you should set goals that you can achieve not a moonshot.

These five points will help you choose the right marketing goals for your Singapore digital marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that selecting a primary marketing goal should not be done alone, but as a group so consult your in-house digital marketing team.

This is based on the fact that the goal will be the focal point of all marketing campaigns and processes. All members of your team will be working towards it and so it is necessary to ensure that you are all on the same page from the start.

Attaching a Metric to your Singapore Marketing Goals

Now that you have the main goal and other objectives that you want to achieve from your Singapore marketing campaigns, be it inbound or outbound marketing, the next step that you need to take is attaching a metric to the goals.

The metrics will help you to track the performance of your marketing processes. Think of the metric as a ruler that you will be using to measure success.

Some goal metrics are easy to monitor and measure. For example, if the goal is to attract new leads, you define the number of new prospects yo want to fill the contact form or contact the support team. Such a metric is clear and easy to track.

As noted in a recent article, B2B attribution, generating more business leads is not always the ideal way to improve your Singapore business. This is based on the fact that leads are not equal.

Some leads are more affordable than others, but when you check their performance all the way to the revenue earned you will realize that the source of the most prospects is not necessarily the source that generated the best leads overall or even the most profit or revenue.

With this understanding, you will be able to shift your digital marketing goal from getting more leads to getting better leads. Go an extra mile and make the metric even more specific, for example, “to lower the cost per sales qualified lead by 50%.”

Customer retention and lifetime value are two of the most popular metrics used to measure marketing goals. Lifetime value is a smart metric that will have more impact on your business than most of the other metrics. You may ask why – a digital marketer who manages to record the highest lifetime value can easily outspend the competitors.

In the event that you have more than one major goal, tracking each independent can be cumbersome and time consuming. You might also not get a clear perspective of your campaign. So, sometimes it is recommended to track a constellation of goals at the same time.

Let us shift gears and look at a series of plausible Singapore marketing goals and their respective supporting metrics.

Increase Organic Website Traffic

• Time on site
• Value per visitor
• Amount of social media referral traffic
• Percentage of returning visitors
• Referral traffic from your email marketing campaign

Increase Revenue

• Value per lead
• Average order size
• Customer lifetime value
• Average customer acquisition cost
• Shopping cart conversion rate

Effectiveness of Advertising Campaigns

• Conversion rate
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Engaged/Cost visit

We hope that the above list gives you an idea of the metrics you should focus on when doing digital marketing in Singapore. More often than not, the most difficult part of tracking digital marketing results is deciding the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to cut out and which ones to focus on at each stage of the marketing campaign.

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A lot has been discussed about setting marketing goals for your business. Now, let’s shift gears and look at the key metrics you should monitor to determine digital marketing campaigns’ performance accurately. 

For now, we will focus on the three main strategies used by brands to generate sales, namely;

• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing

Top 5 Email Marketing Performance Metrics

Email is one of the sure ways of connecting with customers at a personal level. In 2022, 4.3 billion people use email, which is expected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025. The average ROI for email marketing is $42 per $1 spent. 

Here are the top email marketing performance metrics to focus on to record such a high ROI.

• Open Rate

Open rate refers to the number of people who open the emails. If you do not get much sales and traffic from the email campaign, there is a high likelihood that most of the recipients are not opening your emails.

A low open rate is an indication that the email subject is not grasping the audience’s attention. Also, a high open-rate but low conversion rate means that the email copy is not compelling the potential customers to visit your site and convert.

It’s also likely that the email clients are marking and filtering your emails as spam before the target audience reads them. A/B testing will help you know which subject line format or writing style resonates best with the audience. 

A survey can also help you know exactly what the users like or don’t like about the content. Ideally, personalised content is more effective in generating engagement and sales than generic content. So, take the time to craft compelling subject lines and resounding copy to support it.

Segment your audience in different groups and send out personalised emails. Research shows that non-segmented content results in more than an 18% open rate, while segmented content gets at least a 28% open rate.

• Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) refers to the percentage of recipients who click on at least one of the ads or links in the email copy. Virtually all email service providers have a dedicated analytics page with reports on CTR and other important email marketing campaign metrics.

A high CTR means that the users find the content relevant to their needs, and the opposite is true. Most email service providers provide details of the total number of clicks and the specific ads or links that get the most clicks.

Such information will help you refine your email marketing campaign by incorporating ad formats and content that the audience enjoys reading and engaging with.

• Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is another invaluable metric that you should continuously monitor when running an email marketing campaign. It refers to the number or percentage of potential customers who abandon the cart or fail to complete a purchase after adding products to the cart.

A high cart abandonment means friction points in the buyer’s journey need to be eliminated to make the process smooth and customer-oriented. It may have nothing to do with the email copy or links but the website itself.

However, it’s easier to sell a product or service to a prospect who is already interested in it than a brand-new prospect interacting with your website for the first time. Target this select group of customers with personalised cart abandonment emails.

The first cart abandonment email should be sent around 1 hour after the target customer leaves your store. The email should be a polite reminder that they added products to the cart but forgot to checkout. Ask them if they are still interested in the product.

If you don’t get a response, send a follow-up email, and this time spice it up with a discount coupon. Once you regain the customer’s attention, use the opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell related products to get maximum profit from the sale.

• Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the number of people who receive the email and respond positively to its content and CTA. This group will visit your website and purchase the marketed product or service. A high conversion rate is a good sign that your email marketing campaign is well structured and working. 

However, if the conversion rate is low, consider changing certain aspects of the campaign, such as the email copywriting style and subject line. It could be you are sending emails to people who are not interested in the products. Segment your target customers in groups based on factors such as past interactions with your brand, buying behaviour, age, social class, and location.

It’s not easy to track sales as a majority of the email service providers don’t include this information in their reports. We recommend using Google Analytics to track the sales or other tools such as Omnisend.

• Unsubscribe Rate

Unsubscription is one of the harsh realities of email marketing that you should be prepared to deal with as you strive to expand your clientele base. Some users won’t be happy with the email you send and will opt to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

All eCommerce email marketing campaigns face this problem, with most experiencing a 0.17% unsubscribe rate on average. If it’s higher than this average, something is wrong with your campaign and must be resolved quickly. 

Investigate what’s turning off the customers or why they are not interested in buying the product or service. Writing better content can help reverse the trend, but the decision should be based on recent A/B tests and other experiments.

They could also be opting to leave because you’re sending too many emails. Give the audience the freedom of selecting how often they would like to receive an email from you. Also, ask them which kind of content they would like to receive. Use such information to refine your email marketing campaign for better results. 

Please get to know their pain points by requesting feedback more often. The email copy should address these pain points amicably. Check the reports provided by the email service provider for more insights on what could be wrong with your emails.

Top 5 Social Media Marketing Performance Metrics

Social media is a digital marketing powerhouse with the incredible potential to grow online businesses. There are more than 4.5 billion active social media users globally. With new emerging platforms such as TikTok having more than 1 billion users, the number is expected to continue steadily rising. 

Promoting your brand on social media platforms that the target audience frequent will give you an upper hand in the market.

Here are the key performance metrics you should monitor to know if the campaign is working.

• Brand Awareness

Brand awareness refers to your brand’s attention across multiple social media platforms in a given reporting period. Attention can be gauged based on several factors such as shares, links, mentions, and impressions. 

It’s recommendable first to decide the attention metric you will use to gauge awareness and the reporting period to get the right data. Be consistent in posting and engaging with followers by responding to their comments and messages. 

Hootsuite is one of the best social media marketing tools you can use to track brand awareness. Learn how the tool works to interpret the reports correctly.

• Audience Growth Rate

The audience growth rate is closely linked to brand awareness as it gives insight into the speed at which your brand increases its followers on different social media followers. 

The idea is not to be contented with the total number of followers accrued over time but the net number of people who started following your brand last month or the last two weeks. Divide the number of new followers by the total number of followers and multiply by 100 to get the average audience growth rate percentage.

Photo Credit: Hootsuite.com 

While there, track the progress of your competitors to know which strategies they are using to speed past you and get more leads. Use the findings to restructure your strategy to get better results.

• Post Reach

Post reach refers to the number of people who see your post when it goes live. Your goal should be to create engaging posts that reach as many people as possible in your business’s areas. 

This metric is dependent on the timing (is the audience online) and the type of content (is the content valuable to the audience). Consider changing the content and timing if you continuously record a low post reach percentage. 

Photo Credit: Hootsuite.com 

Facebook has one of the best analytics compared to other platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. One of its valuable features is the “When your fans are online” that informs marketers of the best time to post. Use its recommendation to boost your post reach.

Photo Credit: Hootsuite.com 

Potential reach is another metric you should consider alongside post reach. Simply put, potential reach refers to the estimated number of people who could realistically see the post if you posted at a different time or if the content was different. 

Usually, the potential reach ranges between 2% and 5% of the theoretical reach. If one of your followers decides to share your post on their profile, 2-5% of their followers will be factored in the post’s potential reach.

• Average Engagement Rate

The essence of running a social media campaign is to engage with the users and generate rates. The average engagement rate will help you know how well your post resonates with the audience based on the total number of comments, shares, and likes.

A high engagement rate means that your content matches the audience’s needs. Twitter and Facebook posts record the lowest engagement rates from 0.5% to 1%. Instagram has the highest engagement rate of between 3% and 6%.

Photo Credit: Hootsuite.com 

Two other essential engagement metrics you should factor in to make an informed decision are:

• • Amplification Rate: The ratio of shares every post gets to the total number of followers. A high amplification rate means more followers are willing to associate with your brand. 
  • Virality Rate: Total number of people who shared your post on either platform relative to the total number of unique views (impressions) in a given reporting period. 

The additional two engagement metrics will give you a deeper perspective of the performance of your posts. In a nutshell, the info will help you know whether you should change how you communicate with the customers.

• Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of followers who click on the post link and take the desired action, such as registering for a webinar, downloading an eBook, or subscribing to your newsletter against the total number of page visitors.

Not everyone who clicks on the link will convert, so this metric will come in handy to help you gauge the quality and relevance of your content. A high conversion rate means that the content and offer resonate with the target customers. 

We recommend including a CTA link in the post to track this metric accurately. The link should be trackable or a cookie in the target audience machine. Use one of the many social media monitoring tools to monitor each post’s number of clicks and conversions. 

Other important social media performance metrics that you should also factor in when making decisions include:

• • Click-Through Rate (CTR): Number of clicks on links and CTA in the posts.
  • Bounce Rate: Number of page visitors who click on the post link and visit the website but leave soon after without interacting with the elements or browsing other pages.
  • Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Amount of money charged per click on sponsored ad or post.
  • Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM): Total amount you pay for every one thousand people who view and scroll past the social media post or ad.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure/degree of customer loyalty
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSat): how satisfied a customer is with your service or product
  • Conversation Rate: Ratio of the total number of comments a post gets compared to the total number of followers you have on the platform. 

The reports from the social media monitoring tool may be too detailed and intricate to understand for novice marketers. Don’t hesitate to seek help from a reputable social media marketing agency to avoid misinterpreting the data. 

Top 5 Content Marketing Performance Metrics

Content marketing is the secret ingredient in the recipe for generating more organic traffic and sales from search engines. Here are the performance metrics you should focus on to grow your business.

• SERP Ranking

SERP stands for search engine results page. SERP ranking measures how well search engines such as Google perceive your content to match the user’s search query and search intent. 

Google doesn’t index every form of content you might think of, from blog posts, product listing pages, sponsored Google ads, podcasts, forum questions, to YouTube videos. Therefore, it’s essential to optimise every form of content you publish on the site and other platforms.

Photo Credit: Uptimiser

The higher your rank for the target keywords, the better. Highly ranked websites enjoy massive organic traffic, resulting in more sales. Focus on creating high-quality evergreen and cornerstone content and optimise it using short-tail and long-tail keywords. Sprinkle question-based keywords to increase your site visibility in voice search results pages.

• Unique Page Views

Unique page views are different from the total page views. It gives an insight into the total number of people who have either seen or visited a particular web page without factoring in repeat visits and views. 

That means if a visitor refreshes the page, the new page access will be considered as a unique view. This metric will help you know the quality of traffic you get from search engines.

High unique page views mean that your content is excellent and appeals to the target audience. It also shows that the viewers are interested in the topic – and so you should probably focus on creating more such content to get even more results.

Photo Credit: Google Analytics

Low unique page views but high total page views mean that most of the target audience visits your pages repeatedly. This information can be used for creating a retargeting ad campaign. Comparing the numbers with the conversion rate will enable you to gauge the effectiveness of your advertising and content marketing campaigns to convince website visitors to convert.

• Pages Per Session

Pages per session refer to the average number of web pages visitors view in one session. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of page views by the total number of sessions recorded. 

How can pages per session help enhance content marketing strategies? Well, it shows how engaging or interactive your content is by measuring the amount of time the average web visitor spends on your website.

For example, a website with five average pages per session means that the average visitor browsers five pages before exiting. 

It would help if you strived to record a high page per session average as it means that the content is engaging and resonates with the needs of your target audience. Increasing the quality of content and researching topics that the audience is most interested in will enable you to achieve this goal. 

For eCommerce websites, this metric indicates the products that a majority of the customers are most interested in. Use it to know which products to create custom landing pages for to generate more sales from the traffic.

• Backlinks

A backlink from an authority site related to your niche will crank up your site ranking. As mentioned earlier, a high-ranking result in more organic traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing.

Top-rated websites get four times more backlinks than ordinary websites. Their content is packed with valuable information such as statistics and case studies that other authors cite in their articles. It’s a sign of how other content creators and publishers value your content.

As a content marketer, you should check your backlink profile to know the number of new backlinks received within a given period. Also, confirm the quality of the links to avoid attracting a penalty from Google. Get rid of links from sites with a poor reputation, such as those flagged by Google for various malicious activities such as hacking.

Photo Credit: Ahrefs Backlink Checker

Desist from creating a backlink profile using blackhat SEO strategies such as private blog networks. You are better off getting links legitimately through guest posting and collaboration with other industry leaders. 

• Traffic Sources

It’s important to know where your website gets its traffic to optimise your content marketing strategies accordingly. There are three primary types of traffic sources, namely:

• • Direct traffic
  • Referral traffic
  • Search traffic

Note that traffic from banners and ads is not included in the list above, even though it impacts the total traffic.

Photo Credit: Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to know the different sources of web traffic. With this report, you can come up with ways of increasing traffic from the sources that generate the most traffic. 

Go further and look at sources that channel the lowest amount of traffic to your website. Re-evaluate your content marketing strategies to start getting traffic from those sources also. 

Concisely, analysing the high and low traffic sources will enable you to create robust content marketing strategies. 

Bonus Metric: Conversion Rate

Content marketing conversion rate is the percentage of people who take the desired action after viewing your content. The desired action used to measure this metric is dependent on the primary goal of the campaign. 

The action doesn’t always have to be sales; it can increase sign-ups and subscriptions to newsletters or mailing lists. 

The conversion rate will give you a picture of the performance of your marketing efforts. If you recently created a landing page, the number of sales it gets will help you decide whether to retain the content or rehash it. A low conversion rate means that probably the copy is poor quality, page design needs to be improved, or you’re getting unqualified traffic. 

The decisions to restructure the content marketing campaigns should be based on results of split tests or A/B tests.

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Let’s wrap it up

The goals you set don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to waste all your time trying to tweak the numbers and sharing it with the other members of your team to solicit for their opinions and others.

Instead, use the time you have to dig for accurate data about your business history and make your estimations. Be sure to define the capabilities of the team you’ll be working with, and make smart decision directing them on where you want them to go. The rest of the time should be spent on getting started.

With the help of this guide, we hope that you will be able to use the right metrics for your marketing goals. Be sure to contact our Singapore digital marketing team for more details about how to set goals, monitor and interpret marketing reports.

Our main goal is to help your brand get a firm footing in the country without spending a fortune. Let us teach you how to start doing digital marketing in Singapore the right way today

Also, if you need help setting up your marketing goals based on the business goals and budgets you’ve set for yourself, don’t hesitate to talk to us. We’re always happy to help.