9. Pick A Number…

Anyone who has looked at an email deliverability report or Google Analytics dashboard knows that there is no lack of data on hand. When it comes to guiding decisions, there are some obvious ones like sales, list size, likes, etc. Most of the time, leaning into what you learn from those will help guide you to smarter decisions. Especially when you kick off a new content initiative, it’s worth going through an exercise to make sure you’re paying attention to the right metrics.

Imagine your content is doing great. People are reacting exactly as you had hoped they would. Given the purpose of this content, what does your audience feel? How do they react? What actions do they take? It is possible to measure almost all those things.

Goal: an evergreen piece of reference material that really answers questions

Metric: repeat visitors

Goal: thought-leadership injecting you into an important conversation

Metric: change in the number of referring domains (sites that link to you)

Goal: pique curiosity in a more nuanced approach to metrics

Metric: number of people who reach out to see how this idea can help their business (wink wink)

I am a big believer in picking one key number that at a glance can tell you whether something has worked or not. If your main number is confusing, you can always zoom out to consider the other data that are driving it. There will never be a lack of supporting statistics to give you a finer grain of detail, but there’s a value in deciding what one metric is going to be your headline.