One of the cornerstones of inbound marketing is content marketing. It’s an immensely powerful strategy that can help a business stand up in the market and competition and it becomes a more and more powerful way to be successful with your business on the internet field.
It can establish a brand as an industry leader and can convert more quality leads to sales.
You cannot afford not to have a content marketing strategy for your business if you want it to succeed. You need to start planning an effective strategy as soon as possible to get more leads and engage customers in the long term. Also, talking about content marketing, SEO optimization is unavoidable if you wish to be found on the internet and get more traffic in this way. You can learn more about SEO content optimization here. Also, you should know that you must renew your content regularly.
Here, let’s break down how to measure your content marketing campaign’s performance.
Measuring Success with Content Marketing
So you have decided to out a month’s worth of relevant and informative content to get more email subscribers or convert more leads. How do you find out your content strategy is actually working?
First, you need to determine what your marketing goals are first. Write them on a spreadsheet in order of priority. Be as detailed as possible. It’s important that you are very clear about what you want to accomplish.
Knowing what your goals are would help you determine which KPIs you would track.
KPIs or Key Performance Indicators will be used to determine whether your content marketing effort is actually effective.
For example, if you are a beginner website owner and trying to grow your followers, you may want to monitor your email subscribers.
Find out where they are coming from. If they mainly come from your website, determine which content or topic made them sign up. Was it the article you published or did they download the free ebook you provided?
When you know which content effort is working, improve on that to generate more leads or email subscribers.
Sample Metrics You Can Track
You do not need to track every metric. Tracking too many metrics will be too overwhelming and difficult too. Monitor only those that can help you achieve your goals.
Here are a few metrics you can use for tracking performance:
- Sales – track online and offline sales. Compare it with your target. Did you reach your monthly sales goals?
- Brand awareness – monitoring website traffic would be best. Other metrics you can track include downloads, referral links, and page views.
- Lead generation – find out where your leads are coming from. Did they subscribe to the website or download a freebie? What is your conversion rate?
- Engagement – social media is a powerful content marketing tool. Track likes, blog comments, shares and forwards.
When choosing relevant metrics, align it with your goals. If your business already has great visibility or if you already have millions of followers, web traffic or social media likes may not be the relevant metrics. You could probably focus on other metrics such as lead generation or sales.
It will always depend on your end goals.
Data Analysis
It’s not just enough to monitor metrics. An analysis is also crucial to business success as it will help you determine whether your content marketing effort is effective or if it needs any improvement.
When you measure and then do a careful analysis of all data available, you would know what works and what doesn’t. You’d be able to leverage high-performing content to lead to a sales conversion.
Lastly, never analyze the data using just one metric. Carefully examine the entire data as a whole to gain a complete understanding of it. The bigger picture is always good.
If you need tools to track your performance in the first place, you’ll need to get Google Analytics and Ahrefs.
Google Analytics is perfect for seeing incoming traffic, measuring bounce rates, and retention. Also, it shows you your audience age, gender, countries they are coming from, the behaviour and other important metrics to analyse.
Ahrefs is every SEO expert’s favorite tool for measuring ranking, domain authority, keywords difficulty, and many other metrics related to content marketing. It also allows you to compare your main competitors profiles with yours.
How to Stand Out With Content Marketing
You need relevant and valuable content to be successful with your content marketing efforts. But if you want to really stand out in the crowd, you need to find out who is really involved in the final buying process of your product or service.
Tailor your content to that information. Use distribution based on who is the final decision maker to be able to convert more sales. And make sure it is distributed through the right marketing channels.
After measuring how effective this strategy is, ensure that you are doing something about it. Use all relevant data and information to your advantage. Improve your content marketing strategy based on the data and analysis that you have gathered.
Final Thoughts
Remember that content marketing is a long-term plan. You should not expect to see significant results right away. For measuring its effectiveness, you should do it ideally on a monthly basis. Compare the results with your goals.
It may take several months to see your return on investment. This would all depend on your business goals and objectives. As much as possible, do content marketing as soon as you start building a business and measure the key performance metrics based on goals.
Content marketing is not easy but it is not as expensive as traditional marketing and yet it is very effective when most of the clients come through the internet. If you know how to do it right and how to measure it carefully, it will let you generate 3x as many leads when compared to traditional marketing.