For many brands, content marketing is the optimal approach to building credibility, engaging with their target audience, boosting revenue, and enhancing brand recognition. As the significance of content marketing continues to grow for various businesses, creating compelling content is now standard practice, but measuring its efficacy remains a challenge for most. By integrating a measurement strategy into your content marketing campaign, you can modify your method and delivery based on your analysis and achieve your desired results. This guide offers significant insights into content marketing proper, how entrepreneurs can measure content marketing, and use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
What is content marketing?
Before proceeding, it’s essential to have a firm understanding of what content marketing entails. Content marketing is a deliberate strategy that centers around producing and circulating valuable, pertinent, and reliable content to draw in and maintain a target audience. Content can take various forms, such as videos, email marketing, ebooks, blog posts, and social media. So there’s enough flexibility for content creation.
The ultimate goal is to prompt profitable customer action. Rather than pushing your products or services, you offer genuinely valuable and practical content to your potential and current customers, helping to resolve their problems. Here’s how entrepreneurs can measure content marketing.
Measuring content marketing performance
To determine the effectiveness of content marketing in terms of audience engagement, understand how it connects to your business objectives. Here are a few factors to contemplate:
Revenue
The objective is clear – all the strategies employed are to ultimately contribute to the company’s success and improve return on investment. Lead generation can lead to ordering of products or services and repeat purchase. The goal is to turn prospects into customers.
Brand recognition
Content marketing encourages customer loyalty and enhances brand recognition. The strategy aims to create a unique brand and offer exceptional value to customers. Such strategy helps to establish a remarkable first impression and cultivate loyalty.
Customer retention
Maintaining strong customer relationships is vital in content marketing. Monitoring activities, metrics, and trends that indicate fluctuations in retention is critical to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. With unique, informative content, engaging customers and keeping them interested is easier.
Leads
Leads are the tangible connections between a company and potential customers in marketing. The quantity and quality of leads are consistently among the critical indicators of the effectiveness of your marketing activities.
Commitment/engagement
Social media is central to content marketing, but merely sharing content is no longer enough. User engagement, which involves open dialogue between businesses and customers, is becoming increasingly important.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for content marketing
Entrepreneurs searching for methods to assess the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, keep reading. This guide shares several KPIs you can measure to determine the efficacy of your content marketing.
Website Traffic
You can regularly analyse your website traffic using Google Analytics. This web analytics tool provides data to help you understand seasonal patterns and use them to your advantage to expand your business. Below are several recommended metrics:
- Pageviews: This metric shows entrepreneurs the number of people who viewed a specific content, the number of times visitors viewed the content, and the percentage of your overall site views directed to this content.
- Average time on page: This metric informs you of the duration people spent consuming your content and their level of engagement with your message. Consider the content type when analyzing it. For example, a 2,000-word article requires more time for visitors to read and comprehend than a 60-second video on a page.
- Bounce rate: The bounce rate metric indicates the percentage of visitors who leave your site after only viewing the page in question, without clicking through to any other pages. A high bounce rate may indicate issues with that page’s content or user experience.
- Page value: The Page value metric indicates the estimated worth of a specific content piece that brought visitors to your site and helped them achieve their end goal. Such a goal can include making a purchase or completing a desired action.
Social media presence
While entrepreneurs might be spending money boosting their social media reach, you can’t purchase genuine engagement such as comments, likes, and retweets. If your content generates many shares on social media platforms, it’s a positive indication. It means that your audience finds your content valuable enough to share it with their network, which is an outstanding achievement.
Monitoring social media activity is a great way entrepreneurs can gauge the effectiveness of their content. The number of social shares can indicate how well your content resonates with your audience. A consistent increase in your social media following can confirm that your content engages readers.
Lead generation and conversion rates
Your site can generate leads when a visitor subscribes to your mailing list or fills out a form. You can track both processes by using landing-page service providers or Google Analytics. Conversion rates reveal the percentage of people who clicked on your links and performed specific actions, such as purchasing or signing up for a newsletter. This metric indicates the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and campaign ROI, just like lead generation.
Top content marketing analysis tools
After setting your content marketing goals and the corresponding KPIs, the next step is to select an analytics tool that fits your requirements. Numerous tools are available, so choose one that suits your budget, skill level, and specific needs. Below are some recommendations for top analytics tools:
Socialbakers
Socialbakers is an excellent tool for maintaining and keeping tabs on your social media presence. It gives you a clear picture of the likes and comments received on your posts and lets you assess how you stack up against your rivals. In addition, socialbakers allow entrepreneurs to access information like the number of retweets, likes, comments, and visitors to analyze their social media initiatives.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides options for analyzing and optimizing your content. It enables entrepreneurs to assess the number of users that viewed their content, examine the connections between different channels and obtain fundamental metrics to analyze and interpret.
Chartbeat
Chartbeat is an analytics tool that measures top-performing content and offers real-time user analysis, including their sources, time spent on pages, behavior, and surfing pattern desired pages. Its user-friendly dashboard presents this data in real time, allowing site administrators to react and interact with users quickly.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a fast and cost-effective tool entrepreneurs can use to check for popular keywords and trends. When you enter a phrase into the search bar, it displays real-time information such as likes, traffic, and followers on all social media platforms. It’s an excellent option for quickly generating content ideas in response to current trends.
