One area is always needed with every excellent marketing strategy – performance measurement.
No matter what chosen form of marketing your business and marketing team carries out, it won’t be enough for growing your organisation’s conversions and/or sales. Simply put, without measuring your performance, how would you know whether that specific campaign and the use of those forms of marketing were a success or not and whether you should put in the same amount of time and effort in the future? The resounding answer would be that you wouldn’t know. And, while measuring the success for some strategies such as social media could be deemed as something fairly straightforward, there are others, such as content marketing, that, in other words, is no easy cup of tea.
In this blog, we will explore the 5 metrics that you should use when reviewing the success of your businesses content marketing campaign performances to ensure what you are doing is working at its very best.
Website traffic
This is one of the primary statistics that determine whether your content is performing well. In all honesty, traffic is one metric that all businesses should measure as their primary metric. With google analytics, this one metric can be broken down into many different metrics that you can review, including users, page views and preferred device used for your website visitors. This would be useful for future content strategy as you’ll determine what type of content your visitors are finding valuable.
It is good news if you receive large traffic to your website and are not met with high bounce rates. If you create and upload content on your website, no matter how good they are, no one will land those pages, which would not do any good for your business.
A few popular tools that you can use for site traffic include Google Analytics, Open Web Analytics, and Google Search Console.
SEO efforts – views/interaction through other platforms (email/social)
Another measurement that you can use for your content marketing is all the SEO efforts you are marking. Suppose you’re optimising content with relevant keywords, and their rankings seem to be increasing on the search engine results page and pushing organic engagement. In that case, you can be sure your SEO efforts are helping.
Investing in online marketing tools such as SemRush, Aherfs, SE Ranking, or Neil Patel’s Uber Suggest will help you track all of the keywords and phrases with which you have optimised your content.
Email engagement rates
As a form of content marketing itself, analysing the results from email marketing campaigns can help when determining whether your content is working for your ideal market or not. With all email marketing tools such as Dotdigital and Mail Chimp, there are available reports that you can dig into. Knowing if subscribers were opting out of your email list or if they were interested in a particular type of content you used than other ones would help you tailor your future content to better suit them.
Remember, email marketing is a great way to deliver quality content directly from your business to your existing and potential new customers. So, take time to delve into your reports to see how best to use email marketing to take them down your sales funnel to the final conversion.
Social shares/interaction of your content
Social media is another effective tool that can help build awareness and conversions through social shares and user interaction. While most businesses are on social media, not all are used to its entirety. Alongside posting and sharing, measuring the interactions is necessary to see whether what you post is relevant to users online.
When reviewing your content, don’t stop with the likes but consider the shares and comments you get, especially on what type of content it is. Social account followers interact much more with video content than infographics or your blogs rather than your stories and images. Whatever it is, keep tabs to know what you need to change for your next campaign.
Percentage of conversion/sales.
This point covers all forms of marketing, from email to social and so on. Tracking conversions and sales are essential for determining how well your content performs. Measure your email list sign-ups, downloads for a freebie, the percentage of website visitors who contacts you or fill out a brief. An easy way to track conversions and sales through your website is to set up Google Analytics and create customisable goals.
Remember, it’s never too late to implement measurement techniques for your digital marketing tactics to understand what works for you and your business. With the use of the metrics above, you’ll have the ability to measure and analyse just about everything – even your content marketing pursuit and understand where your effort should be used.
Take a look at our digital marketing services and find out how to grow your business with content marketing. Contact us for more information on how we can help you take your business to the next level with digital marketing.
