Is there anything innovative or noteworthy that marketing experts can learn from developers? Definitely, the answer to this lies within the concept of DevOps. By becoming more agile, digital marketers can be more flexible while employing the best tools for content creation and marketing campaigns.

For organizations to achieve digital transformation, it’s imperative to track the key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to business goals and required to achieve business success. As Paul Proctor -- VP Analyst at Gartner -- points out, “the value of a metric lies in its ability to influence business decision making.”

To keep up with consumers' changing needs and stay relevant, digital marketers must become even more agile and flexible. Tracking key performance metrics is crucial to achieving this.

With that in mind, let's look at how marketers can learn from a developer's approach to tracking KPIs.

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Digital Marketing and Software Development

There are two core components to enabling an enthralling digital experience. You have the underlying code on which the application runs, and then there’s the content it delivers to the audience. Marketers and developers represent the two sides of this conversation. They are both crucial to the development of any content-rich software application or digital experience. 

Content marketing represents the cornerstone of most digital marketers. 70% of digital marketers now invest in content marketing. By producing content consistently, traffic to a website increases, which also boosts conversions. You can view these conversions as building blocks for your sales funnel. 

Developers have found ways to remain effective and agile as applications become more ubiquitous. For digital marketers to continuously meet rising content demands, they must emulate the agile principles within a CMS. The question remains, what can digital marketers learn from DevOps?

The DevOps Way: How Developers Track KPIs

As a means of enabling continuous development, developers have to be able to respond to change. Fail fast, fail often, learn fast, and iterate. The goal of this principle lies in rapid application delivery and flexibility in delivering improvements on previous iterations. By quickly identifying failures, you can accelerate learning and optimize faster. In other words, continuous learning equates to continuous improvement. 

However, one thing is certain, if you can’t measure your applications and identify failures, then you can’t improve them. In every DevOps implementation, metrics are crucial for understanding user responses and application performance. That way, you can get a clear view of its real-world impact in terms of revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Some of the KPIs that developers track to measure success include: 

• Lead time: This refers to the amount of time it takes for an organization to develop, review, test and deploy code into production. 
• Deployment frequency: This metric refers to the number of deployments made over a particular period of time. 
• Change failure rate: This refers to the percentage of changes or deployments that fail in production. It is the number of changes within code that require fixing or corrections after production.
• Mean time to recovery: The duration of time it takes for an organization to recover after a failure occurs.
• Change volume: This refers to the amount of code you deploy to production per release. 

How Marketers Can Track KPIs Like A Developer

In general, digital marketing KPIs are benchmarks or measurable goals that allow you to track your success. In an ever-changing digital landscape, it's become more imperative to plan and track KPIs. By tracking KPIs, digital marketers can demonstrate the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Focus on Business goals

Before any marketing campaign, focus and consideration should be given to the actual business goals of the organization. Developers can teach marketers how to prioritize goals and the plans for achieving them effectively. Despite not appearing like a revolutionary suggestion, marketers can learn a lot from it. 

For developers, the only surefire way to deliver applications with minimal error, risk, and downtime is to have a clear goal in mind. For you to achieve this, you should adopt a binary approach to setting your marketing goals. Every content marketing strategy begins with clear and precise goals, which require the use of relevant marketing metrics to track progress.

Let your goals serve as a destination, then metrics will represent the compass that guides you towards it. Metrics can help you gauge your progress toward your goals. On the other hand, metrics can serve as indicators for when things don’t go right, ensuring you get back on track.

Prioritize Automation

Technology represents an integral part of every modern workplace, transforming every facet of the organization in the process. Developers look to automate as much as possible, implementing tools that make work easier. Marketers are no different. The objective is to automate repetitive tasks as much as possible to improve productivity and efficiency, therefore enabling marketers to focus on implementing successful marketing strategies. 

It is impossible to know the success of a marketing campaign without measuring its results. It’s crucial to evaluate every action to evaluate the current campaign and plan future campaigns. By automating marketing campaigns, it will be easier than ever to target users and customers.

Through automation, you can track open & click-through rates for every email, customer acquisition cost, the conversion rate for marketing campaigns, website traffic, social media traffic, and many more. You can also implement a digital assistant as the first point of conversation for the landing page. Chatbots and digital assistants can replace human customer service agents for simple tasks, increasing marketing efficiency and response time.

Ensure Data-driven Marketing

Data is an increasingly valuable resource in marketing today. Through user data, digital marketers can continuously learn, refine, and improve their marketing strategy through the data generated from users. For businesses to succeed, marketers must develop campaigns that drive the conversion rate, lead quality, and customer satisfaction.

Just as developers measure progress and performance regularly, marketing teams must do the same. How else can you enhance the digital experience without leveraging data-driven marketing? 

With the focus on omnichannel marketing nowadays, marketers are often tasked with increasing production while improving and simplifying content creation efforts. According to HubSpot, over 75% of marketers believe that marketing campaigns directly influence revenue. As you can see, it is extremely crucial to the success of any organization.

With this in mind, regularly checking the relevance of digital content is increasingly vital for marketers to determine its effectiveness and make necessary adjustments. For any organization to stay ahead of the competition and meet pressing demands, marketers must take advantage of a headless CMS to enable marketing automation and handle big data. 

Foster Collaboration Within Teams

With DevOps, organizations facilitate better collaboration between development and operations, which results in improved communication. This approach, however, fails to factor in the importance of marketers. For content-driven applications, marketers must work closely with all stakeholders in an organization.

An effective marketing campaign depends on cross-collaboration. If not, how will you evaluate and adjust marketing campaigns on time? To effectively market a product, marketers need to know which features and capabilities the product has and when new features get introduced. 

For instance, marketers cannot say one thing about a product when it does something else instead. Poor collaboration also results in the ineffective implementation of marketing automation and lack of content reuse.

Fortunately, DevContentOps methods enable successful communication and collaboration between the marketing and development teams. Through DevContentOps, marketers can benefit from the DevOps approach and principles of continuous learning and improvement, a sophisticated git-based version control system to enhance content reuse, and improved collaboration with all application development stakeholders.

Getting Marketing, Development, and Operations to Work & Learn Together

As digital experiences evolve rapidly, marketers and developers will need to work more closely together. That would require employing the tools and processes to facilitate collaboration. In this way, organizations can implement strategies that help track KPIs for developers, marketers, and operations, enabling higher brand awareness, customer satisfaction, and sales, resulting in better ROI. 

For any organization to effectively track key metrics, a DevContentOps-friendly CMS will be vital. With it, you can leverage a headless CMS together with a sophisticated Git-based repository, and a platform for marketers, developers, and operations to collaborate efficiently.