By now, you probably know how important content marketing is for any business online to succeed. However, before you begin writing tons of new articles, website content, and social media posts to disperse among the Internet, knowing how to measure the success of your content marketing strategy will make a huge difference in having a strategy that gets results versus content that gets ignored. In order to successfully measure the effectiveness of your content, it all starts with goals. So let’s get started on my top 5 tips on measuring how well your content is doing.
1. Set a Goal for Every Project
As with anything you do, you should have specific goals set in order to determine what results you are expecting to get. The same goes with your content marketing projects. Instead of lumping them all under the same category, setting up a goal for each project will give you a better understanding of which projects are getting better results and which ones either need more work or should be removed from your campaign altogether.
2. Decide on a Tracking Program
There are tons of tracking programs and software available to determine how much traffic your content is getting, as well as bounce rate, unique visitors, page views, conversion rate, and inbound links. Google Analytics and Webmaster’s Tools are the most popular tracking systems used, but there are also a variety of other tracking systems available to find out the success of your content. Hubspot also has a fantastic tracking tool available.
3. Monitor Conversions
Conversions can be anything, from subscribers to an email newsletter to customers who make purchases on your website. Track which content sources are contributing to your sales, subscribers vs nonsubscribers, and how many people are finding your content on search engines and other websites. These results can be found through the tracking systems discussed in tip #2.
4. Monitor Your Social Media Accounts
How often are people sharing your links and posts on your social media pages? Knowing which ones are popular among your audience will give you an idea of what topics they are interested in the most. Some things to look at are how many likes, retweets, comments, and shares your content has received. While some content is more popular on one of your social media channels, it may not be equally accepted on the others. Take that into consideration in the future in order to determine which networks your audience spends the most time on and are the most active on.
5. Don’t Expect Overnight Results
Ok, this isn’t technically a tip on how to measure your content marketing success, but more of a reminder. Many exhibitors think that as soon as they put some content out there for all to see, they will magically get tons of new traffic, but that’s not the case. It can take months before all of your efforts begin to pay off. Keep your head up, consistently put quality content out there, and you will surely see favorable results.
Since results don’t always significantly change from one day to the next, measure your success rate once or twice a month. These tips will help you effectively find out how well your audience is responding to the information you are writing about.
What other tips would you add to this list?