You’ve invested a significant amount of time and money into your content marketing initiatives so, as with all marketing activity, you need to measure the effectiveness of your efforts in order to evaluate a return on your investment. The first thing to keep in mind is that content marketing is a long game; it will take time and consistent effort before you begin to see any significant results. This makes it all the more important to track and measure your efforts from the start, to help you notice slight patterns and improvements that will allow you to tweak your efforts and will give you incentive to keep going. It can be a slow process and a lot of hard work but if you efficiently create and execute a content marketing plan, content marketing is extremely effective.
The benefits of content marketing reach further than lead generation and sales; it also helps to increase client engagement and brand awareness. You need to track the success of your efforts so you can see what’s working and what’s not. The great thing about content marketing is flexibility; you can test a type of content or idea out and if it doesn’t yield the results that you expect then try something new. As long as you have your goals in place and ways to measure the success of your content marketing efforts then you can have a lot of freedom with it.
Success is different for every business and the metrics you use to track your progress will depend on what you’re hoping to achieve with your content marketing. You should go back and look at the goals you set at the beginning of your content marketing plan. If your goal was to increase lead generation, you know that you should be measuring leads as your metric. Content marketing isn’t always this simple to measure, however. Using leads as a metric is perhaps one of the most straightforward, but there are several other factors to consider too that are just as, or even more, valuable.
There are two metrics you should consider measuring: consumption and behaviour. Consumption measurements are all about the number of people consuming your content, whereas behaviour measurements track people taking actions after consuming your content. Each of these categories has a number of factors you can track; for example website traffic is a consumption measurement, while subscriptions to your blog is behavioural. Not all of the metrics will be relevant to your businesses objectives but if you use a combination of the ones that are, you can get a rounded view of your performance.
It is up to you to choose the metrics that you think will provide the most insight for you, but to get you started here are four metrics that are a good place to start:
1. Traffic
By creating content and distributing it to your audience you hope to drive quality traffic to your website which will hopefully convert to leads and ultimately sales. Measuring an increase of organic traffic from the search engines to your website is a worthwhile method of determining whether the content you are creating is engaging enough to draw traffic to your website.
Measuring your web traffic is essentially a vanity metric; it doesn’t really matter how many viewers and views you have if they’re not doing anything on your site and are not enjoying your content. But measuring traffic does give you an idea of which content your audience enjoys the most, which pages of your website get the most hits (and, importantly, which get the least) and what you should continue to use or use more of.
2. On-site engagement
Once your content starts driving traffic to your website, take a look at the on-site engagement that the traffic has generated. It’s one thing to drive traffic to your website, but if that traffic doesn’t engage with your content then you need to evaluate what you could do differently. Look at the traffic that each piece of content is driving and focus on the bounce rate, time on site, and pages per visit of those particular visitors.
You can look into whether traffic generated from content marketing is typically more engaged than traffic from other sources by looking at what they do once they’ve landed on your page: how long do they spend on it? Do they click onto other pages on your website? Do they bounce off your website more or less often than other generated traffic? Asking these questions is a good way to determine if your content marketing efforts are driving real value to your business.
3. Social interactions and engagement
A metric that allows you to better understand whether your content is a success with your online audience is the amount of quality social interactions each piece receives. This can mean shares and likes on social media as well as comments on your blog. The key word here is “quality” interactions; remember that engagement isn’t always positive, so it’s important to consider sentiment alongside volume of engagement to make sure your content isn’t getting negative feedback.
By monitoring the gross amounts of tweets, retweets, likes, shares, comments, mentions and more, your business will be able to see what content was well received, on what platforms and by what users. A high level of engagement in terms of comments and social interactions suggests a high level of relevance of your content and audience participation. Identify types and topics of content that have performed particularly well socially to help you in deciding what you should focus on creating more of in future.
4. Lead generation
The most valuable metric to monitor when it comes to your content marketing efforts is number of leads. Generating a certain number of leads per month is perhaps the metric that most directly impacts the bottom line from a marketing point of view. These leads will have voluntarily given you their contact details to you in exchange for access to some of your content and by doing so they have consented for you to market to them (and at a later stage, to be contacted by a sales person). You need to define what constitutes a marketing qualified lead for your organisation as the goal posts can change. It could be anyone who has filled in any form on your website. Or it could be more complex, for instance someone who has visited the website more than three times in a week and has downloaded two case studies.
You should measure which forms generate the most leads, which source is bringing the most leads in (is it social media, organic traffic or perhaps PPC?), and which types of content encourage the most numbers of form-fills (maybe it’s case studies or webinars). Even simply providing a newsletter subscription form is a good metric for content marketing measurement. It’s likely that if someone is signing up to your newsletter after viewing your content, they liked what you had to say and found your content to provide interesting and relevant information and they want to know more about you.
Remember: dig deep and don’t give up
Understanding and presenting these performance metrics is important for your entire team and for your management but it will only offer so much insight. These metrics are key and tell you how you are doing, and they should give you insights to what is working and what isn’t. These metrics won’t tell you why they aren’t working; for this you need to dig deep and look at each piece of content individually and see where you can make improvements. Remember, it will take time before you begin to see significant ROI. But if you continue to follow and implement your content marketing strategy, you will build brand awareness and client engagement and eventually you’ll be able to match sales to your content marketing efforts.
