The question of how to measure success of content marketing is one that many business owners ask themselves. The answer isn’t as simple as how much traffic you have, how often people share your content, or how many likes/comments on social media you get. There are a number of metrics and analytics that can be used to determine how successful your content marketing strategy is.
In this blog post, we will discuss some different methods for measuring success in a way that will work best for you and your company!
Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are how you measure the success of your content marketing.
A blog will likely have a few KPIs that help determine how successful it is at achieving its objectives: traffic, engagement, and leads.
Traffic is the number of unique visitors per month to the site or post from any source including search engines like Google®, social media platforms such as Facebook® and Twitter®, or other websites.
Engagement is how often people are staying on your site to scroll through content, how many likes/shares they’re generating, comments posted in response to the blog post, etc. Engagement can be a good indicator of how certain articles resonate with others and how much people are enjoying your content.
Leads refer to how many visitors have converted into a lead by submitting their email address, filling out an online form, or other actions such as downloading the PDF version of this post for later reading.
KPIs can also be tracked on social media platforms after posting and measuring how much engagement has been generated for how long.
Determine the Metrics That Are Most Relevant to Your Business and Your KPIs
Measure the stats that matter to you. Metrics vary from industry to industry, but typically we’re talking about reach and engagement metrics like clicks, views, shares, likes, or comments on Facebook posts. These should be easy enough for anyone in the company to track.
You should also track how much time each content marketing piece takes to create, so you can see how it affects your bottom line. This will allow you to adjust how and when you do things in the future. It’s important that marketers remember this is not an end-all-be-all but rather one more tool in the marketing kit.
For a blog post, how many shares does it get? For an email how well is the click-through rate and how often are emails opened? These questions will help you determine how successful your content marketing strategy is as it relates to other tools used by marketers.
It’s important that every metric be judged in the context of how it relates to your KPIs and how much effort is required. If you’re not seeing any engagement on a post that took 12 hours to write, it would be wise to put more time into posts with higher reach potential.
Create a Content Map for Each KPI
Create a content map for each KPI with specific goals, tactics, and measurement methods.
- Establish how you will measure success (ex: conversion rate)
- Identify how your content is designed to achieve that goal
- Add the stats in Google Analytics or another analytics software suite as desired to track the progress of the strategy
A content map for customer acquisition might include the following:
- Goals – how many new customers were acquired in a given time period, or how much revenue was generated from those leads.
- Tactics – how to attract more visitors to your site (whether that means creating more engaging blog posts, optimizing keywords on your website, using pay-per-click advertising, etc.)
- Measurement methods – how often you need to create new content in order to be seen by potential customers
- Analysis method – how you will measure the success of your strategy. For example, a conversion rate is how many visitors clicked on an ad and converted into paying customers. If this number was 100%, your strategy was successful.
Know Your Measuring Tools
Measurement tools can include Google Analytics or other analytics platforms, surveys, interviews, A/B testing, and more.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free, powerful tool that helps you track how people are interacting with your website and where they came from. It’s easy to set up and it doesn’t take much time or effort for those who know how to use the product. The important thing about Google Analytics is how it provides data on two different channels: “organic” and “paid.”
Organic traffic is how people found your site in the first place. It may have been a Google search, or maybe they saw something on Facebook or Twitter that prompted them to click over to your content.
Paid traffic means you purposefully went out and advertised somewhere with an ad – like on social media, email, or a website that specifically targets your type of business.
Surveys
A survey is one of the best tools to measure how people feel about your content. Surveys can provide a snapshot of how well-received they are, how useful and easy it is to understand they were if there was any confusion or questions that need addressing in future posts/articles.
Surveying visitors after delivering an article on how to measure the success of content marketing is a good way to find out how well they understood what was being discussed.
If there are questions, articles with the most Q&A or comments from readers show that it didn’t adequately answer their question in-depth enough and may need more clarification and details about how to do something.
Interviews
Consider conducting interviews with content marketing leaders who have been successful in their own endeavors. These insights could help you measure how they define success and how they create it for themselves.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is a powerful way to measure how effective your content marketing strategies are, how well they resonate with readers and how changes in wording can affect conversions. There are many ways you can A/B test your content such as using Google Analytics Content Experiments or Optimizely for WordPress. The most important thing about any A/B test is that you need to measure how your content marketing will perform on a variety of metrics.
You can use these tools by getting familiar with how everything works and what’s available in each one, then strategically using the appropriate ones at different stages of your content marketing process.
Using Artificial Intelligence on How to Measure Success of Content Marketing Campaign
One of the many benefits that artificial intelligence provides is how it can help measure success rates. It’s important to be able to assess how well content marketing campaigns are doing so they can improve and get better results in the future.
There are a few different ways one may go about measuring this, but there are two main types: content engagement and conversion rate. Content engagement is how much time a visitor spends on the content before scrolling past to another page, while the conversion rate refers to how many visitors are clicking through for more information about your product or service.
For example, say you have an opt-in form at the bottom of each blog post with a call to action to subscribe for email updates. If you’re using a tool like HubSpot, it’ll track how many people are clicking this and how many of them actually sign up for your mailing list.
This is how you can measure content engagement with conversion rates since if that number goes down then the success rate will go down as well.
Conclusion
In conclusion, how to measure the success of content marketing is not rocket science. There are a number of criteria that can be used to determine how successful your content has been.
We hope that this article was helpful in how to measure success of content marketing.