For starters, let’s define what makes a successful content marketing.
Successful content marketing supports your marketing and business goals. If you manage to accomplish your goals, like getting new clients, increasing sales or building brand awareness, with the help of content marketing, it means that you have the right strategy.
On the other side, if you notice that your content marketing isn’t effective enough, it’s crucial to measure your content effort to discover what’s not working. Is your copy persuasive enough? Does your blog cover relevant topics? Are your buttons clickable enough?
Therefore, go through following a four-step framework that contains important metrics which define the success of your content marketing and put it on the test.
1. Discovery
The first metric for checking the effectiveness of your content is to determine its discoverability. When your content is easy to find, more people have a chance to see it and interact with it. If not, then you need to work on the visibility of your content efforts and help your readers find it without a hitch.
There are four metrics you should keep an eye to – Impressions, site visitors, Click-Through Rate, and Clicks.
– Impressions show you the visibility of your content on search engine results pages. This metric brings in connection the relevancy of your content to searched keywords.
– Site visitors are the people who discovered and came to your website. Make sure you have a constant flow of new visitors and keep a balance between unique visitors and repeated ones.
– Click-Through Rate is a figure you get dividing total clicks by total impressions for a certain keyword. This metric helps you track the performance of your content.
– Clicks reveal how often the users click to visit your site when they get search results. This metric shows how appealing your content is to the audience.
2. Engagement
When a visitor comes to your site, it’s time to measure engagement to determine the efficiency of your content. The longer the visitors stay on your site and browse other pages the better it is for engagement. In this phase, you should track Time on Page and Bounce Rates metrics.
– Time on Page indicates how much time the user spends on a page. Should you notice that this metric is low on a page important for your business goal, find a way to bring traffic to it.
– Bounce Rate shows that a visitor came to a page and stayed there without browsing through pages. Try to minimize Bounce Rate on your content pages.
3. Conversion
Conversions are the crucial element of your content measurement because they indicate the performance of your content, i.e., whether you managed to achieve the planned goals. Conversion actions allow you to connect with your visitors further. For instance, “Sign up to newsletter” is the most common conversion action on a website.
According to australian essay writers, it’s crucial to track conversion and make necessary changes if you notice that some elements don’t deliver good results.
Therefore, make sure you keep track of everything, as well as traffic sources and universal event tracking. Also, determine your conversion goals in the web analytics platforms and assign an approximated dollar amount to every conversion goal. Assign higher values for more difficult conversions.
Over the time as you analyze your reports, you’ll gain significant insights, like what type of content drives more site revenue, what topics are popular or what type of CTA performs best. This exact data will help you improve your content marketing strategy and achieve better results.
4. Social share
Social sharing is a sign that visitors like a piece of content and that they consider it worthy to share it with their family, friends, and acquaintances. It also shows the effectiveness of your content, so this is a metric you should pay attention to, especially to following things:
– Shares include re-grams, retweets, reshares and re-pins. The higher this number is, the more valuable your content is, and people are more likely to continue spreading the word about your brand. Use tools, such as Hootsuite to keep track of all social shares.
– Comments on the website or social media posts are a great indicator that your content resonates with the audience. So, any comment expressing compliments, agreements or disagreements is a good sign because it evokes some emotions and interest.
– Follower growth is also an indicator that more and more people are interested in what you have to say, so don’t forget to keep an eye on this figure.
Final thoughts
Tracking your content marketing efforts can be overwhelming. However, this framework with precise metrics will guide you through the entire process, and you’ll be able to transform your content performance, achieving all your business goals.
