Content marketing success metrics are essential components of every content marketing strategy. With so many technological innovation and cost-efficient (including free) tools and softwares, it is a lot easier to measure how well your content marketing campaigns are doing now more than ever.
The problem, however, lies with the ability to track and act on the results. To be successful in your efforts means to look into the data, be able to assess existing strategies, come up with ideas to figure out how you can improve or change these strategies if the results are bad, or how you can leverage the results, if it’s good.
Content Marketing Success Metrics that Matter
According to Jay Baer content cannot be measured by a single metric. He advocates 4 KPIs that will help you measure your content. These are: Consumption metrics, sharing metrics, lead generation and sales metrics. In brief:
Consumption metrics components include the number of people who view your content; sharing metrics refers to how many shares your content had; lead generation metrics determine how many people sign-up; and sales metric tell you how many have actually spent something after consuming your content.
These content marketing metrics already cover all the necessary areas that will lead you to assessing the success of your marketing campaigns.
More often, businesses are keen on starting with measuring how many people has consumed their content without any follow-up measures like how viral it went, how many new leads it actually opened up or how many sales it drove. This basically kills the whole system of being able to assess your content marketing strategies.
Why Tracking Your Content Performance is Important
We have repeatedly said that tracking your content’s performance is essential to gauge the success of your content marketing campaigns. Apart from that, the purpose is to help you improve your SEO efforts to appear on search engine result pages, rank higher, and increase traffic to your website.
The most important aspect however is that it serves as a guide to assess and identify what content marketing strategies work best and what strategies are doomed to fail from the beginning. This also makes the process of developing effective strategies a lot easier and efficient.
What key components of your business will the results of key performance indicators show you?
- It points you to gaps between your business goals and marketing plans
- It helps you devise strategic actions to address existing concerns in your business
- It leads you to identify where to properly allocate resources
Your Key Performance Indicators Should Influence Your Decisions
Again the results of your content’s key performance indicators serve as a guide to a successful business and you should be ready to take action in order to address the pain points that the performance data is trying to show.
The primary reason why you created your marketing plan is to achieve your business goals. The gap often happens when strategies do not address these goals. An example is when you fail to get your target market to sign to your subscription, buy your products or just simply return to your site to have a second look. Your key performance indicators will strongly show that.
So how do you address this? When you know the areas of concern focus on factors that will address the problem directly.
There are things that you should ask yourself like:
- Did you ever consider using other content marketing solutions and technology besides blogging like email, social media, PPC, etc?
- Have you identified and segmented your target audience to be able to effectively direct the message of your content?
- Do you have a content marketing team competent enough to craft optimised and rich web copy and articles or analyse existing data trends? If they do not have these capabilities, what are you going to do to supplement this?
- What channels do you plan to promote your content? Are your target market in these channels?
- Is your budget more or less sufficient? Is it allocated properly?
Once you have done this and you know where your strength and weaknesses lie, it is time to notch your content marketing benchmark one step higher. This will not only help your business to grow, it will also open new windows of opportunities.
What content marketing success metrics are you using? We love to hear your thoughts.