We have decided to utilize a content marketing strategy to educate, inform our target enterprise customer via slideshare, what are the key metrics?

You could look at views to each slideshare to determine which pieces of content are most popular/resonating best with your audience, but the key metric here is really the number of demo requests you generate from this channel. You can include a different tracking token in each slideshare link that sends viewers to your website or demo page, and use that to determine which ones are leading to the most conversions.

We do inbound content marketing for Close.io and have grown our bootstrapped and profitable business using inbound leads only. We're targeting SMBs and tech startups on the web using our blog.

We produce 2-3 blog posts a week, 2-3 videos a week, 1 interview/podcast a month with a high profile individual. We promote our content on Hacker News, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Recently we launched a book as well which we are promoting on all of the above avenues as well as on Amazon.

Here are the metrics we track:

1) Unique visits to close.io as a whole and on a per blog basis
2) Trial Signups
3) The conversion between 1 and 2
4) Comments/responses to blog post content
5) Shares on twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
6) Up-votes and comments on HackerNews
7) Shares / Views on youtube.

Using the above we can usually pinpoint which pieces of content are most effective in bringing in the most trial signups. We can then fine tune our content to increate signups and eventually conversion to customers.

Let me know if you want to learn more about our inbound flow.

I would set up conversion tracking for your sign up form in Google Analytics, and then analyze the amount of traffic you receive from SlideShare to your website that leads to sign ups.

In my opinion, newsletter sign ups are the key. There are dozens reasons why. The biggest is they have already exchanged their personal information to learn more about what you are doing.

It defines the audience. While the mission statement covers what your audience will get from your content marketing strategy, you also need to think about what your business will get from it. The first step is to collect demographics on your visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers. Social media sites offer similar data. When you have demographic data and customer feedback, you can create or flesh out buyer personas. Buyer personas, also known as customer avatars, describe your ideal readers and customers so that you can target content better. The best customer avatars include information on your customers' pain points, challenges, sources of information, and behavioural motivators. This will include content that is on your blog, as well as social media content, podcasts, videos, and so on. If you want to log all your site or blog content, Screaming Frog is an excellent starting point. To do this, set up a project and select the section of your site you want to audit, such as your blog. Export the data to create a simple spreadsheet that contains all the URLs.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath