A successful content marketing strategy can help build relationships and encourage brand loyalty by cultivating a sense of community for your brand. It also provides you with the opportunity to position your brand, sell, and provide insight to your target audience.
From creation to promotion and distribution, the ability to evaluate your content marketing activity is crucial to determining its success. Interestingly, only 8 percent of marketers believe they are successfully tracking and understanding content marketing ROI.
Perhaps the most important question a content marketer should ask is: why am I writing this piece of content? Ultimately, what you measure will depend entirely on the goals of your content. There is no advantage to writing content and then establishing the objectives and measurement metrics. Always avoid creating a piece of content without setting the objectives in the beginning, they are vital to determining the parameters of success. Standard content marketing objectives may include increasing brand awareness, upselling, or customer retention. Whichever objective(s) you set, be sure to understand these before putting effort into creating your campaign.
Consumption Metrics
Consumption metrics look at the number of readers who consume your content, the channels they use, and the frequency of their consumption. Those who are in the consumption or sharing phase are likely to be in the early phase of the sale process or at the top of the funnel. These consumption metrics are fairly basic metrics, useful as a starting point. They will answer your most fundamental content questions and provide you with an overview of how your strategy is performing.
Google Analytics
- Users: This provides the total number of unique visitors to a particular page on your website.
- Pageviews: Records the total number of times a particular page on your website, be is a product, or blog post, is viewed.
- Unique Pageviews: This metric combines pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session, so you can gain an insight into the number of sessions during which that page was viewed.
Don’t forget to combine the basic consumption metrics with the additional insights within Google Analytics.
- Source/Medium: Provides information on what channels assisted with the consumption of your content, so you can create content to complement these channels
- Location: This can really help with your content creation process. For example, if the majority of your blog traffic comes from Canada, perhaps you should focus on trying to reach out to prominent Canada influencers to contribute to your blog.
- Mobile: This is useful to look at how many users are consuming your content via mobile devices. This will allow you to establish how much you should focus on formats that are easy to view on mobile (e.g., video).
Conversion Metrics
Conversions from your leads, subscribers, and visitors drive revenue for your business and illustrate the true value of your content marketing. Monitoring the impact your content marketing efforts have on your conversion rate can help you to better target your audience and educate them on your expertise.
Lead Generation
If you have a form on your site, you can measure lead generation success by determining how many people went to the lead form immediately after consuming your content. You have the ability to set a browser cookie and track when someone completes the lead form after viewing the content. If your leads are handled purely via phone, you can install a simple script that shows a different (traceable) phone number when people first watched the video or downloaded a white paper. Top Tips Set up goals within Google Analytics to help you measure to what extent you have achieved your target objectives through your websites content. For example, you could set up goals including newsletter sign ups or contact form completions. The key question answered here: How often do content consumers turn into leads?
Sales
Determining how many sales have come from content pieces on your site can be a lengthy process and a relatively difficult objective to complete. If you are using a database for your sales, you can note in the prospect column to record when a potential customer consumed content pieces A and B. When your sales team then goes on to turn the prospect into a sale, you are able to determine the project revenue and profit of that customer and assign it to the content pieces. Top Tips
- Use the transactions in Google Analytics to apply a filtered view. Here you can easily see what percent of revenue for online transactions your blog, for example, was responsible for.
- Time to purchase is a metric that can show you the total number of days it took a user to complete a purchase, helping inform your content creation and map the different stages in your sales funnel.
- The assisted conversions can be filtered within Google Analytics to view assisted conversions in relation to your content on a goal by goal basis.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics are vital for understanding the customer relationship and loyalty. The following metrics can help you determine how much engagement your content is generating among your audience.
Google Analytics
- Average time on page: If the average time a user spends on one blog is 5 minutes and another blog is 2 minutes, you’ll have new insights about how well your content is performing.
- Referral Traffic: This report can give you insight into which websites and what types of industries are reading, linking to, and sharing your content.
- Page Sessions: This report will help you understand the extent to which users are interacting with your content.
Social Media
Tracking data such as shares can demonstrate the reach of your content, and includes insights of retweets, re-pins or anything else that is channel specific. Benchmarking and tracking follower growth can assess those who have consciously decided to be exposed to the content you produce, keep track of these with regular reporting. In addition, you can also take comments into consideration, showing how often individuals are engaged with your community. For Twitter, this could include things such as mentions.
Email Marketing
Analyzing subscriber growth and unsubscribes can provide you with an understanding of how well your email database is engaged with the content you regularly produce. Subscriber growth, as with social follower growth, gives you the view of users who have actively chosen to receive content updates. Although this is an undesirable metric to review consistently, unsubscribed numbers are still a representative how your audience is engaging with your content, or perhaps not as the case may be.