Important Metrics to Help You Measure Your Content Marketing
Top marketers agree that executing the right content marketing strategies can help companies gain new customers, increase conversions, and grow their businesses. But unless marketers establish clear-cut and measurable goals, they cannot clearly demonstrate how successful their strategies have been for the business.
This is where content marketing metrics come in. Sustainable success doesnt usually happen overnight, regardless of the tactics marketers have implemented in their marketing campaigns. Knowing when a strategy is working is undoubtedly essential, especially for marketers who have established goals for a specific time frame. When executed and monitored correctly, content marketing initiatives can yield more successful results.
The Importance of Goal-Setting
Before you can decide whether a marketing strategy or tactic is working well or not, you need to know what you are trying to accomplish, Armando Roggio (@armandoroggio) wrote in an article that appeared on Practical Ecommerce (@PracticalEcomm).
Roggio encouraged marketers to identify their goals before they try to measure their content marketing initiatives. He emphasized, In fact, you need to know what your business goals are before you start to create content so that your content can be tailored, if you will, toward success.
What do you want to accomplish in a period of four months? In a period of one year? The first step to know whether youre actually hitting the bulls-eye is to understand your objectives. In his article, Roggio mentioned the importance of establishing SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals, and how breaking these objectives into dependencies could help marketers effectively measure their content performance. [See Figure 1]
Figure 1 (Source: Practical Ecommerce)
If your content aligns with these goals, youll be able to measure the impact where you need to see impact, with the help of some important metrics.
Measuring the Success of Your Content Marketing
Once youve established the objectives and components of your content marketing plan, the next step is to determine which metrics you will use in order to accurately define the success of your content marketing.
Listed below are some of the metrics recommended by Jay Bear of Convince & Convert (@convince):
- Consumption metrics. These metrics should provide you with the actual or estimated number of people who consume your online content, measured as page views, downloads, or views. You can easily derive these kinds of data through platforms such as Google Analytics or Facebook Page Insights.
- Sharing metrics. These metrics should let you know the number of shares your online content receives. Knowing this can help you better understand if your content is in fact resonating with your target audience or if you need to adjust your tactics to more effectively engage your prospects.
- Lead generation metrics. Monitoring whether your lead generation efforts are successful is one of the most valuable metrics you need to take note of when it comes to content marketing. Lead generation metrics can be measured through factors like number of whitepaper downloads or email subscriptions.
- Sales metrics. Do your online visitors often convert into paying customers? Sales metrics will help you track whether youre getting ROI or simply wasting money on your content marketing. In the end, the revenue you get from you marketing efforts is what determines the success of your campaigns.
Apart from these four, several other metric categories with their associated KPIs were mentioned to further help marketers monitor their content marketing. These include their total reach, engagement, and conversions. Figure 2 show more metric categories with their corresponding KPIs.
Figure 2 (Source: Practical Ecommerce)
What metrics do you use to measure your content marketing? How often do you analyze the impact of your strategy?
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