How to Measure Content Marketing Performance
Are your online content marketing efforts having a positive impact on your brand? CONTENT CREATION takes effort and we need the right systems in place to measure the value of content marketing.
Brands often spend big on paid media campaigns because it’s relatively easy to measure their return on investment (ROI). However, you don’t have to pay for every impression or click on your owned content. If your content marketing strategy is executed well, it can deliver a lot of value to your brand over time.
Content marketing can be used to educate, inspire, and inform your audience without overtly selling to them. It helps potential customers decide whether your brand is right for them on their terms.
So, how do you measure if your content is improving brand awareness and creating new business opportunities? How can you keep track of content marketing ROI from day one? Firstly, you need to establish a framework for measuring the success of content marketing.
Step 1: Determine your content marketing goals
It’s important to know why you’re creating content. If you don’t know why you’re investing in blog posts, articles, case studies, landing pages, and social media content, it will be hard to know if they are serving their purpose. You might have a few goals in mind and some common ones are creating brand awareness, increasing sales and leads, improving customer service, and boosting customer loyalty.
Step 2: Define your content marketing KPI’s
Establish a shared understanding of how you will measure the success of your campaigns. There are a variety of content marketing metrics and key performance indicators you can set to track your progress towards your goals.
Traffic and Reach
This measures the volume and sources of visitors coming to your website. You can also measure impressions to count how many times your content displays on people’s internet devices.
Engagement
Engagement metrics assess how your audience is interacting with your content. They can include time spent on a page, click-through rate, bounce rate, social shares, comments, and likes.
Conversion
Conversion metrics monitor how often your content drives people to take a desired action. For example, you can monitor how many site visitors fill out a form and contact you, purchase products, or sign up for your email list.
Audience REACH
Observe the demographics of the audiences engaging with your content to assess if you are reaching the right people. You can use dimensions such as age, gender, interests, and behaviours to define and track your audience.
Step 3: Set up your content marketing analytics tools
There are a variety of content marketing analytics tools you can use to track the performance of your owned content and generate new content marketing ideas.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a great platform for monitoring how your web content is performing in Google search. It will tell you how many visitors find your website through organic search, and the queries they use to reach your brand. You can find your average position in the search engine results pages for various search terms and learn about your most visited landing pages.
You might see that your landing pages and blog articles are ranking for queries you haven’t thought of targeting yet. This can be a great source of ideas for new content that meets your audience’s needs.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics can give you insight into how people engage with your content and what they do on your website after they view it. By tracking conversion rates and revenue, Google Analytics can help you monitor if your content contributes to your leads and sales goals. You can also use attribution modelling to assign credit to various touchpoints in the customer journey.
SEMRUSH
SEMRUSH is a content marketing tool that shows you the positioning of your competitors relative to you in Google. You can use it to find the keywords your competitors are ranking for and determine what content you need to create to achieve the same organic search position. It can also give you an overview of your top-performing keywords and where they are positioned. It’s a good idea to set up email alerts for position changes, so you can optimise any content that might be losing its position.
Social media analytics
If you want to get more value out of the ideas that have gone into producing your web content, you can repurpose them on your social media channels. Most social media platforms provide analytics data to help you measure content performance and get better at engaging your audience.
You often need to set up a business page or profile to see these insights. Once you have done that, you can see the number of accounts your content has reached, the impressions it has generated, and engagement rates. Social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Sprout Social can also consolidate your social media analytics from multiple platforms and provide powerful insights.
Email marketing Data
You might be drip-feeding your content to your audience via email marketing campaigns. If that’s the case, remember to track engagement. You can monitor open rates and click-through rates to learn what content resonates with your subscribers. If you integrate your email marketing platform with your website, you can also track on-site conversions generated from your email campaigns.
Customer relationship management platform (CRM)
A CRM can help you keep track of the number of leads your organisation generates. Hubspot and Salesforce are two popular CRMs. If you integrate these with your website, social media channels, and email marketing platform, you can also track what content your leads view in their consideration journey with you. You can also use these insights to tailor your sales approach to their needs and interests.
Determining the value of your content marketing strategy
Content marketing is creative and subjective. While you might receive varied opinions on the brand messages and information you share, a content analytics system will help you assess whether your strategy is working. It will also help you value content marketing more accurately.
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