You’ve invested some time and some money into a content marketing campaign—but what do you have to show for it?
That’s the question that many small business owners ask; after all, the whole point of this is to get results. Since the dawn of content marketing, however, there has been much disagreement about how those results can be adequately measured.
A lot of it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your content marketing. Many small business owners are looking to boost their brand’s online prestige, its reputation among customers. That’s a perfectly reasonable goal, and certainly possible, though difficult to quantify and measure.
There are, however, a few ways in which you can quantify and measure content’s efficacy. So if you’re looking for some metrics to watch, here are a few that we recommend:
Website traffic. One of the main goals of content marketing is to drive traffic to your company website, where you aim to gather leads. To measure how effective your content is, simply check your website analytics for organic search, visitor numbers, and referral traffic from your social media. After four or five months, you should start to notice some significant increases in these metrics.
Signups. Speaking of capturing leads… hopefully, you have something like an e-mail list people can sign up for, or a downloadable e-book. One way to measure content marketing success is to look for upswings in these figures—though again, it takes time. Also make sure you look at actual names and e-mail addresses; if all of them appear to be bots (fake names with weird-sounding e-mail handles), be cautious.
Social media followers. This isn’t an end unto itself, but if your Facebook likes and LinkedIn followers steadily increase, even during seasons in which you are not actively promoting posts, that’s a good indicator that your content is making an impact.
Inbound links. You want to get traffic from the Web, but also from specific sites—including social networks. Look for good, authoritative links that are referring traffic to your site.
A fuller Google Page 1. One content marketing goal might be to fill the first page of Google search results, for your company name, with content—social platforms, blogs, videos, and so on. If you go from having just two or three listings on page 1 to having domination over the whole page, well, that’s definitely a worthy metric, and a sign of success!
Better connections. Great content should position you as an industry thought leader—so if you suddenly start getting a lot of LinkedIn connections, unsolicited phone calls, more inquiries from potential clients… well, all of these can be taken as signs that your content marketing is working.
Keep these metrics in mind, and watch: Your content marketing won’t suddenly transform your numbers overnight, but it should start to make a real impact after a few weeks.