Content marketing embodies an array of tactics from blogs to videos to whitepapers to social media campaigns. As a content marketer, it’s your job to determine which tactics work well for your business and which ones don’t. Conversely, it’s your responsibility to prove that your current content marketing strategy is in fact worth the investment. But how do you measure the success of content marketing? Is it through likes, re-tweets, or the number of unique blog visitors?
A recent infographic from Brandpoint, a company specializing in travel marketing services, explores three ways to measure content marketing success. In content marketing, the ultimate end-goal is to move potential customers through the conversion funnel. This is done by creating compelling content that builds brand awareness, boosts customer engagement, and converts leads into customers, which also happen to be the three ways businesses can measure their content marketing success.
1. Brand Awareness
If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear, does is make a sound? The same theory can be applied to your content. Creating a killer blog or infographic doesn’t do your business any good if no one sees it. In order to determine whether or not your content is getting noticed you must measure brand awareness.
Brand awareness is exposing new people to a brand, product or service. With 93 percent of online experiences beginning with a search engine, brand awareness is critical. So how do you measure brand awareness success? By determining your search engine rankings, measuring your website’s “first time visitors” and calculating your social media metrics such as likes, followers and +1’s. If these three things are high, it means your brand awareness is right where it needs to be. If not, it might be time to change up your content strategy.
2. Customer Engagement
Now that you’re on your customers’ radar, it’s time to fully engage them. Think of brand awareness as your bait and customer engagement as your hook. You don’t want your customers just to click on your whitepaper; you want them to actually read it. And the more they engage with your content the better. Search engines rank content based on relevance like – time spent on site per user, amount of pertinent, original content, and social chatter.
Ways in which you can measure customer engagement are: increased total page views, longer visit duration, lower bounce rate, and social metrics. If you’re having trouble boosting customer engagement, try sending out an email marketing campaign or newsletter promoting your latest whitepaper or infographic.
3. Conversion
The final way to measure content marketing success is conversion, or when a customer finally makes the choice to purchase a product or fill out a form to be contacted. The three ways to measure conversion success are – increased conversion rates measured by sales or leads, referrals from social media and subscribers versus non- subscribers. If you’re struggling with conversion rates, try adding calls to action to each content piece making it easy for your customers to engage with sales.
Determining where the majority of your leads come from will help you understand which tactics deliver ROI and which ones aren’t being well received by your audience. After conversion, the next step is refilling the funnel with quality content and starting all over again.
To view the full infographic, click here.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
