You should craft and distribute valuable and relevant content to engage and retain the target audience. In the case of proficient content marketing, the company will increase its brand awareness, generate leads, and, as a result, boost sales.
However, how to understand you are moving in the right direction? More than simply looking at the number of likes and shares is needed to assess the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns fully. Instead, tracking multiple metrics, including KPIs and data points, will help businesses measure their content marketing efforts correctly and in detail.
This post provides an in-depth guide to determining the level of content marketing performance success. Plus, you will find specific metrics to monitor and tools and techniques to analyze data. So keep reading to develop stellar content within your marketing strategies work frames.
Before going any further, it is worth understanding what content marketing is all about. Content may involve a range of formats like email marketing, ebooks, social media, videos, blog posts, etc.
The primary (but complex) task of merely spreading your brand’s key message may require immense different marketing content-connected tasks. Content marketing takes place on the engagement and educational (brand awareness) end of the funnel, and to this end, it relates more to a conversation than conversions. Because of this, you must incorporate that strategy appropriately because it serves as the foundation of a successful outcome.
No doubt, a profitable content marketing strategy is highly time and energy-consuming to plan and takes a lot of resources to execute. Besides, you will want to ensure that you are watching a sufficient return on investment for your efforts.
To make it with flying colors, implement content marketing measurement metrics. With the info attained, you will know if what you are doing affects things, if you need to enhance your approach, or if it is better to give up on it.
In addition to getting dofollow backlinks to boost ranking, you should also pay considerable attention to traffic and engagement performance. This metric showcases the flow of visitors to your site and their interaction with your content. So keeping abreast of traffic and engagement indexes will allow companies to define which pieces of content are the hottest within the audience and incorporate relevant strategies.
When it comes to the traffic analysis, the metrics below will demonstrate if your content adds value to visitors:
Still, sometimes the heavy traffic you reach results from how you are good at involving people to click your links rather than just captivating content itself. That way, to examine if your site engagement is on a decent level, check for the following:
Measuring content marketing metrics like traffic and engagement is decisive from a business development perspective. This facilitates identifying which content formats and topics resonate the most with your audience and adjusting appropriate content strategies based on that info. When your site has a steadily high number of pages per session, a long session duration a low bounce rate, you are on the right course.
In case of people visit your site and engage with your content, it is superb. But are they clicking your links, going for more articles, or signing up for different newsletters? So conversion rate overview will detect how efficient your content is in encouraging profitable customer actions. With this metric, you can monitor the percentage of site users who take particular measures like subscribing or purchasing products/services.
Content marketing specialists may see which pieces of content provoke users to act and pick a suitable strategy to make out the best of it. To be more precise, when a specific blog has a high conversion rate, a company can craft more same-topic content or perform its repurposing to drive extra potent conversions.
Another critical component to evaluate the effectiveness of content marketing is investigating SEO performance. Of course, plenty of traffic comes from there due to the vast social media influence on the digital environment. However, search query visitors also play a significant role.
The fundamental metric to follow here is SERP ranking. You should review your current pages’ position within search engine results for specific keywords or key phrases. Subject to your correct use of relevant links in the articles based on the previous profound keyword research, your SERPs will rank high.
Ranking over time stands as one more metric worth considering. It is not a secret that such indexes tend to change, but by optimizing your content according to the audience’s preference, fluctuation will be minimal. Thus will gain in-niche trust and authority as well as improve brand visibility. Additionally, using Shine Ranker can help track your website’s performance over time and identify areas for improvement in your content strategy.
Agree that a prosperous business promotion with no social media presence is almost impossible. Therefore, verifying all metrics across these platforms should be on your agenda. Tracking likes, shares, comments, and followers will give insight into how well your content performs on social networks and if the audience interacts nicely with it.
First, you will understand which platform is better for capturing tremendous reach. It can aid in laying the foundation for content strategies engaging the target audience. And also, you will be able to define the content types of the highest popularity and user involvement.
ROI measures generated profit by the company through content marketing potential. Every business aimed at company name and revenue can only do with this metric. Comparing it with the cost of producing and distributing content is requisite. That way, you will know whether your current-day content tactics are beneficial or worth entirely switching the direction.
Calculating ROI may be daunting, especially while doing it manually. Moreover, it is possible to attain not-so-accurate information because of the human factor, which can lead to further wrong content development concepts. That’s why utilizing varied automated software makes sense. They provide comprehensive and error-free ROI analysis and save content marketing specialists time they might use for other essential tasks’ completing.
The definition of content success will change dramatically according to your movement between funnel stages. And KPIs depend on the funnel location in most cases. There is the top (web traffic, email list conversions), middle (demo/free trial requests, qualified leads, buyer energy), and bottom (sales, up-sells/cross-sells) funnel metrics.
So you must consider the specific funnel metric and correlate it to the produced content type. Let’s investigate how to measure content marketing efficacy via KPI content type.
Crafting appealing marketing emails takes a lot of effort, proficiency, and creativity. Since people are increasingly exhausted by emails flooding their inboxes, you should offer truly precious content to get them thrilled. Then an email will be a worthy content marketing strategy to continue developing. So be sure to monitor such metrics:
People adore visual content, especially videos, So there is no surprise that more than 90% of companies engage customers via video content. Still, to make it work, content marketers should keep an eye on the metrics below:
‘The more is better’ is the golden rule for all points except the last one. However, precisely this metric must be a priority. Negative reviews may decrease the audience’s reach and prevent new visitors from watching and interacting.
Webinar is the perfect marketing tool for multiple reasons:
Therefore, if you constantly produce webinar-centered content, tracking on-platform metrics will assist you in understanding whether the content resonates with your public. These metrics embrace:
Since assets like ebooks, one-pages, or white papers appear as PDF files, tracking engagement is impossible after their initial download. You take measures intuitively by utilizing tools to edit PDF documents and incorporating dynamic elements for ongoing interaction analysis. Luckily, tools allow you both to monitor a prospect’s interaction with downloadable content and receive relevant pieces, for example, eBook pages.
The leads’ reading time gets tracked and tied to each prospect record in your CRM. So how can you deny the benefits of automated software in this case?
With different SEO tools based on automated software, analysis of content marketing performance happens faster and more high quality. So if you still don’t use these instruments daily, it is time to take them on board. The following list introduces the best metrics-analyzing tools of its kind:
This service ensures companies with data on site traffic and user behavior. So if you yearn to verify the conversion rate and the target audience engagement with content, including specific pages and content formats indexes, this tool is just the thing. You can even import Google Analytics data into Google Sheets™, to analyze your traffic and content engagement with a GA4 Google Sheets addon.
When you devote sufficient time and effort to social platforms, this software will give valuable insights into how the content operates within social networks and whether it fits the target audience’s preferences. Concentrate on the number of likes, shares, comments, and impressions.
Backlinks and organic search traffic are your weak point? Monitoring SEO metrics with Ahrefs will drastically change things. A detailed metrics track and analysis will showcase how to boost rankings and generate flawless backlinks. Thus, there is no chance your content marketing campaigns can fail.
Though the metrics you target entirely result from your content marketing strategy goals, the funnel location, and content type, there are points you must constantly track to succeed:
Using the correct automated tools to analyze and measure content marketing metrics is equally essential. So choose one of the most suitable automated software above and become a market-leading business.
