How to Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy
August 31, 2017
Over the last few years, businesses have been infiltrated with blogs, articles and podcasts about the importance of content marketing as part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Content is King – we get it - but now that you’ve been engaging in content marketing for some time, how do you know if it’s had a benefit to your business? Or how much benefit it’s made relative to the time and resources spent to create and distribute the content? It’s time to learn how you can measure the success of your content marketing strategy so you can adjust and improve as needed! As with any marketing effort, ROI can be difficult to measure, but we’ve compiled a list of things to keep an eye on to help see how your business’s content marketing strategy is performing:
Website Metrics
The first thing to review when determining how well your Denver content marketing strategy is doing is your business’s website. You can look in your Google Analytics account for metrics including page views, bounce rate, audience engagement, mobile traffic behavior, traffic sources and more. When sorting through this data, it is important to set the data date range to include time from before you started your content marketing efforts. This will help you to see shifts or trends that may differ from before and after implementation.
A few of the most common metrics to help measure effective content are overall page views, audience engagement and bounce rate.
Page Views: Did one of your blog posts or pieces of content receive more views than another? That means people are particularly interested in that type of content or subject matter and you would do well to focus on that again in another article.
Audience Engagement: Similar to page views, you also want to take a look at how long users are staying on your website – the longer the better!
Bounce Rate: Another crucial metric is the bounce rate, which tells you what percentage of visitors are leaving your website after looking at just one page. This will inform you whether or not the content your customers are reading is intriguing enough to get them to click through to other pages on your website. Bounce rates can be improved with better calls to action or with content that is more relevant to the searchers query.
With all of these metrics, it is important to keep in mind your website’s experience on mobile devices. Things like page views, audience engagement and bounce rate can be effected by a page not looking good on mobile or content that is too lengthy and feels cumbersome on a mobile device. If you know a lot of your site traffic is coming in via mobile devices rather than desktop devices (something you can find out in your Google Analytics account) make sure that your content marketing efforts are mobile-first! Easy ways to do this are to include more images and infographics and to produce smaller pieces of content to make the mobile user experience more enjoyable and easy to navigate.
Social Media Metrics
One of the greatest places to post your content and drive traffic back to your website is on social media platforms. Take time at the end of each month to review how your content marketing strategy has played out on social media. See how many people were reached when you posted links to your content, the engagement on each post and most importantly, the click through rate. Because the success of content marketing depends heavily on its shareability, be sure to pay extra attention to how many shares you have on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, re-pins on Pinterest and reposts on Instagram. This metric will give you an idea of how engaging and relevant your content is, since social media users will not share something unless they feel passionate about introducing it to their friends.
Be sure to pull the metrics from each of the different social media platforms that you use. Compare your content’s performance on every platform to determine whether you should focus your time on one or two that are performing well over the others, which don’t seem to be reaching your target audience.
Comments
Some forms of data cannot be measured with numbers and percentages, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. When analyzing the success of your content marketing strategy, always look at the qualitative data that can be found in comments on your blogs and social media pages. What are your customers saying about the content that you post? Are they tagging other people in the comments as a way of sharing what you’re writing? If customers are asking questions, this is a sign that they’re highly engaged with your work, so keep it up. But, if there’s not much in terms of conversation in the comments section, you may need to rethink your strategy to make it more appealing to your audience.
E-Newsletter Subscribers & Email Metrics
One goal of any good content marketing strategy is to increase e-newsletter subscribers, so another important metric to look at is your number of subscribers. People who take the time to sign up for your e-newsletter are probably either customers or close to converting on your website, so it’s essential that you grow this list and keep in touch with everyone on it. If your subscriber growth has died down or even decreased, this is a sign that customers are bored—or even annoyed—with the content that you’re writing and blasting out to them.
After you’ve analyzed your subscribers, dive deeper into your email marketing metrics for a better understanding of how successful your marketing strategy is. It doesn’t matter how many people have subscribed to your newsletters if no one is opening the email or clicking through to read the rest of your content. Be sure to keep an eye on email opens, click-through rates and conversions, which will give you a better idea of how well your content is working and if it is engaging.
Inbound Links
Every content marketing strategy should attempt to increase the number of backlinks, also called inbound links. An inbound link is a hyperlink posted on a third-party website that links back to the content on one of your website’s pages. Search engines view websites with a lot of inbound links as relevant and meaningful, so they factor this into the ranking algorithm and use it to determine who will show up first on the search result page. When you have a strong content marketing strategy, chances are other brands will find your content and link to it as a reference when they put together their own content.
There are dozens of tools out there to help marketers track the number of backlinks that show up on the web. A great choice is Moz, which allows you to copy and paste a URL into a search bar to pull up a list of pages that have linked back to it. Learn more by reading these inbound link FAQs.
Leads
In business it’s all about the bottom line, so measuring the number of leads you are generating with your content marketing strategy is imperative. Do you make visitors to your website fill out a contact form before gaining access to your content? Or perhaps you give visitors a sneak peek at your content, but make them sign up to get access to the exclusive pieces. Regardless of your strategy, make sure you are tracking the number of leads that are coming in solely because of your content.
Looking for a team of experts to help you craft the perfect content marketing approach? The team at Denver Website Designs can assist you with everything from crafting content to SEO strategies. We assist businesses of all kinds and will approach the website holistically to maximize traffic and boost your business. Learn more about our process and how we can help your business grow!
Go Back Website Metrics
The first thing to review when determining how well your Denver content marketing strategy is doing is your business’s website. You can look in your Google Analytics account for metrics including page views, bounce rate, audience engagement, mobile traffic behavior, traffic sources and more. When sorting through this data, it is important to set the data date range to include time from before you started your content marketing efforts. This will help you to see shifts or trends that may differ from before and after implementation.
A few of the most common metrics to help measure effective content are overall page views, audience engagement and bounce rate.
Page Views: Did one of your blog posts or pieces of content receive more views than another? That means people are particularly interested in that type of content or subject matter and you would do well to focus on that again in another article.
Audience Engagement: Similar to page views, you also want to take a look at how long users are staying on your website – the longer the better!
Bounce Rate: Another crucial metric is the bounce rate, which tells you what percentage of visitors are leaving your website after looking at just one page. This will inform you whether or not the content your customers are reading is intriguing enough to get them to click through to other pages on your website. Bounce rates can be improved with better calls to action or with content that is more relevant to the searchers query.
With all of these metrics, it is important to keep in mind your website’s experience on mobile devices. Things like page views, audience engagement and bounce rate can be effected by a page not looking good on mobile or content that is too lengthy and feels cumbersome on a mobile device. If you know a lot of your site traffic is coming in via mobile devices rather than desktop devices (something you can find out in your Google Analytics account) make sure that your content marketing efforts are mobile-first! Easy ways to do this are to include more images and infographics and to produce smaller pieces of content to make the mobile user experience more enjoyable and easy to navigate.
Social Media Metrics
One of the greatest places to post your content and drive traffic back to your website is on social media platforms. Take time at the end of each month to review how your content marketing strategy has played out on social media. See how many people were reached when you posted links to your content, the engagement on each post and most importantly, the click through rate. Because the success of content marketing depends heavily on its shareability, be sure to pay extra attention to how many shares you have on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, re-pins on Pinterest and reposts on Instagram. This metric will give you an idea of how engaging and relevant your content is, since social media users will not share something unless they feel passionate about introducing it to their friends.
Be sure to pull the metrics from each of the different social media platforms that you use. Compare your content’s performance on every platform to determine whether you should focus your time on one or two that are performing well over the others, which don’t seem to be reaching your target audience.
Comments
Some forms of data cannot be measured with numbers and percentages, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. When analyzing the success of your content marketing strategy, always look at the qualitative data that can be found in comments on your blogs and social media pages. What are your customers saying about the content that you post? Are they tagging other people in the comments as a way of sharing what you’re writing? If customers are asking questions, this is a sign that they’re highly engaged with your work, so keep it up. But, if there’s not much in terms of conversation in the comments section, you may need to rethink your strategy to make it more appealing to your audience.
E-Newsletter Subscribers & Email Metrics
One goal of any good content marketing strategy is to increase e-newsletter subscribers, so another important metric to look at is your number of subscribers. People who take the time to sign up for your e-newsletter are probably either customers or close to converting on your website, so it’s essential that you grow this list and keep in touch with everyone on it. If your subscriber growth has died down or even decreased, this is a sign that customers are bored—or even annoyed—with the content that you’re writing and blasting out to them.
After you’ve analyzed your subscribers, dive deeper into your email marketing metrics for a better understanding of how successful your marketing strategy is. It doesn’t matter how many people have subscribed to your newsletters if no one is opening the email or clicking through to read the rest of your content. Be sure to keep an eye on email opens, click-through rates and conversions, which will give you a better idea of how well your content is working and if it is engaging.
Inbound Links
Every content marketing strategy should attempt to increase the number of backlinks, also called inbound links. An inbound link is a hyperlink posted on a third-party website that links back to the content on one of your website’s pages. Search engines view websites with a lot of inbound links as relevant and meaningful, so they factor this into the ranking algorithm and use it to determine who will show up first on the search result page. When you have a strong content marketing strategy, chances are other brands will find your content and link to it as a reference when they put together their own content.
There are dozens of tools out there to help marketers track the number of backlinks that show up on the web. A great choice is Moz, which allows you to copy and paste a URL into a search bar to pull up a list of pages that have linked back to it. Learn more by reading these inbound link FAQs.
Leads
In business it’s all about the bottom line, so measuring the number of leads you are generating with your content marketing strategy is imperative. Do you make visitors to your website fill out a contact form before gaining access to your content? Or perhaps you give visitors a sneak peek at your content, but make them sign up to get access to the exclusive pieces. Regardless of your strategy, make sure you are tracking the number of leads that are coming in solely because of your content.
Looking for a team of experts to help you craft the perfect content marketing approach? The team at Denver Website Designs can assist you with everything from crafting content to SEO strategies. We assist businesses of all kinds and will approach the website holistically to maximize traffic and boost your business. Learn more about our process and how we can help your business grow!