So, your experts are creating content, sharing their expertise and building their online presence…fantastic!

Now you've got metrics like website visitors, bounces, session times, shares, likes, subscribers, clicks, opens (you get my point) being delivered to you across multiple dashboards - but how much of this can help form your ‘BD Loop’?

By ‘BD Loop’, I'm referring to the process whereby content, particularly expert-led content, forms a valuable part of your business development strategy…

While a lot of data is somewhat informative, you'll likely want to focus on those metrics that can guide your strategy. Ask yourself…

Am I focusing on vanity metrics? 

A vanity metric lacks substance. It is overly simplistic to monitor and measure and is not contextual.

Figures like total views are a great indicator of how many  people your content has reached and, in turn, how many people know what your firm offers. However, these numbers are broad and a little simplistic. What they do not tell us is whether this content is helping to push the firm's strategy forward.

How can I focus on actionable metrics?

Actionable metrics are the metrics that directly relate specific business actions to observable results.

Actionable metrics are going to help drive your content strategy forward. Dig deeper into those broad metrics to see if you can find out the following…

• Is our content being read by clients and prospects? 
  • If not, think about where your clients are reading content and how you can get your firm's content in front of them.
• Which content or topics are driving the most engagement from clients? 
  • These metrics give you a solid basis to continue your content strategy, or even explore a topic that wasn't previously a focus.
• Are clients/prospects visiting other relevant content or expert profile pages?
  • What else is on offer to your readers on the website?  Perhaps they're looking for more expertise on that topic or more from that author. 
• What are our subscribers reading? 
  • Open & Click-Rates definitely help mark the success of your newsletters, but finding out who those ‘openers’ are and what they're actually reading gives you actionable data for your content strategy.

Now, to bring this all together. 

These actionable metrics can often be dispersed across your marketing stack. Finding a way to align all this data (perhaps on one platform that provides a single pane of glass) will assist in closing that loop. Link your content strategy with data you can act on to push your firm forward.