Table of contents
- What is content marketing
- Importance of measuring marketing effectiveness
- Benefits of measuring content performance regularly
- Start measuring success of your content marketing
- Set a Timeline
- Keep adding new content!
- Eight metrics to measure content marketing effectiveness
- 1. Blog traffic
- 2. Email subscriptions
- 3. Conversion Rate
- 4. Social Media
- 5. SEO Performance
- 6. Bounce Rate
- 7. Brand Authority
- 8. Backlinks
- Bottom Line
What is content marketing
Producing quality content is important, but using a strategic approach while creating content has become one of the most influential marketing techniques. Instead of directly pitching your product, the content provides valuable information that helps out the customer while marketing your service at the same time. This is known as content marketing which is currently being used by the majority of sellers.
Importance of measuring marketing effectiveness
There is no one-size-fits-all rule when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of content marketing. It depends more on choosing the essential performance indicators that are important to your brand or business. Once you know what content effectiveness means for your website and set objectives accordingly, it will be much easier to track progress.
Benefits of measuring content performance regularly
Consistently tracking your progress and measuring marketing effectiveness is critical if you want to increase website traffic and generate more sales. If things are going smoothly and the website is generating good traffic and sales leads, you are on the right track. Otherwise, you may need to rethink and ensure you are in the right direction to reach your marketing goals.
When you regularly monitor the website’s performance, you will be able to track both small and large performance shifts that will enable you to improve your strategy, drive more traffic and ultimately generate sales.
Start measuring success of your content marketing
Although content marketing is an effective way to introduce the target audience to your products, measuring its success can be a serious challenge. Website traffic, email subscribers and brand building are all indicators of content marketing effectiveness.
Set a Timeline
Without a proper timeline, it is impossible to calculate your content marketing effectiveness. Therefore, it is important to set a timeline with an end date to measure your performance and improve your website over time. Tracking monthly progress is a good way to start assessing your blog performance.
Keep adding new content!
If you are not adding new content, the old content will soon lose its spark and you will have to build everything from scratch again. In order to retain your audience and engage new traffic, you need to push out quality content regularly.
The truth is rough.
Do you want to be in that invisible ~91%? * Courtesy of Ahrefs
Eight metrics to measure content marketing effectiveness
Let’s dive in and discuss eight ways through which you can measure the effectiveness of your content marketing.
1. Blog traffic
Blog traffic is one of the most obvious indicators of your content marketing success. More traffic means your content is reaching a larger audience. However, to accurately calculate the content marketing effectiveness, it is important to dig in a little deeper instead of relying only on the number of monthly visitors.
To measure your content marketing success, you need to focus on where the audience is coming from and where it is going. First, take a look at individual blog posts to identify the most popular and least popular posts. Once you figure out the most popular topics, you can plan more content around similar topics to attract more traffic.
2. Email subscriptions
Although blog traffic is a vital factor while measuring content effectiveness, email subscriptions are the most important KPI to measure marketing success. If you have no subscription mechanism, there is no way to know if you are delivering valuable content to your audience.
It is essential to set up an email subscription form within your blog post so the audience can easily sign up for it. Once the subscription form is ready, the next step is to monitor the number of subscribers. If the subscriber growth is non-existent, it is time to rethink and improve your blog quality to retain traffic.
We are being bombarded with emails. No wonder why… This is an effective marketing strategy.
* Courtesy of Hubspot
3. Conversion Rate
Once your blog is getting a constant flow of organic traffic, the next step is to convert this traffic into actual business leads. High traffic does not always generate greater sales. A post with a decent audience can generate more revenue than a post with a high amount of traffic but no loyal customers.
Simple definition: The percentage of visitors who take the desired action.
Conversion rate is a tricky business because it is difficult to measure accurately. This is where conversation rate optimization kicks in. Before a member signs up for a product or service, he may read a number of blog posts. If most of them successfully engage his interest, you’ve got yourself a customer. So, it is important to post regular, quality content to boost the conversation rate.
FYI. Average conversion rates are varied by industry.
* Courtesy of WordStream
4. Social Media
Social media has become one of the most effective ways to market brands or boost the popularity of websites. On social media, one share can bring hundreds of new members to your blog post. Although it is a fantastic tool to drive traffic in the short term, social sharing can give long-lasting benefits to your website.
To take advantage of this side of the world, it is vital to understand the psyche of the average user. Most users on social media will just scroll past a well-written article if it doesn’t have a juicy headline or a catchy image. Keeping these things into consideration while generating a post can become a vital factor in growing your brand or website online.
Do not underestimate the social medial impact on marketing.
Do not forget to promote posts after publishing.
* Courtesy of Oberlo
5. SEO Performance
To attract large amounts of traffic, you need to get visitors from not only social media sites but search engines as well. Google Analytics is a great tool to track the traffic coming straight from search engines such as Google. However, it is often useless when you want information about your website performance.
This is where SEO performance comes in. The most accurate way of tracking your SEO performance is through SERP. SERP is the ranking of your website on search engines for a particular keyword or phrase. Ranking usually changes from time to time, so it is important to track if you are improving and gaining the trust of the community. Greater SEO performance indicates your content marketing is generating fruitful results.
*Courtesy of Reliablesoft
6. Bounce Rate
Bringing traffic to your blog is an easy task. However, retaining that traffic is where most websites lose the battle. Imagine this; a user usually has between 3 to 5 similar sites opened at the same time. To grab their attention, you must pique their interest in the first few seconds of their visit. Those few seconds decide if the user will stay or decide to hop on to the next post.
The bounce rate and average time on site are great indicators of user engagement. Better engagement means the users will stay and read. The more they read, the better chances you have to engage them with your brand or product. If the users spend a few minutes on the website and the bounce rate is low, you are heading in the right direction. If not, it is high time to switch and change your content marketing that caters to the needs of your audience.
What is an acceptable bounce rate?
* Courtesy of Digishuffle
7. Brand Authority
Brands with authority have an upper hand when it comes to their market reach because people feel more comfortable engaging and sharing posts from a well-known brand. Increasing your brand authority is one of the most important factors to generate leads and sales.
Magools LinkMiner is an easy way to discover and track your website and domain authority. Brand authority can also be measured offline. Simply keep an eye out on events or coverages by other famous websites and brands. If you are being invited to such events or getting featured in articles, your content marketing is successfully generating leads for you. If not, try to change your strategy and continue to monitor both the offline and online happenings for any improvements.
8. Backlinks
Backlinks link one website to another. Every backlink acts as quality assurance for search engines that categorize your content as valuable and informative.
In short, backlinks increase the chances of climbing the search engine ladder and landing on the first few search results that not only boost traffic but also generate sales. You can use tools such as Moz and Ahrefs to track new backlinks as well as find and fix any broken backlinks that lead to your website.
Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website.
* Courtesy of Hubspot
Bottom Line
Discussed above are some of the most important content marketing metrics that you can track to measure your content marketing effectiveness. However, it is important to remember that tracking each metric is not only unnecessary but sometimes can become counterproductive as well. Each business has its own unique set of goals that it aspires to accomplish.
Instead of focusing on all the metrics at once, choose the ones most relevant to your website, set objectives, push out quality content and track changes. If you start seeing significant results, it means your strategy is working out quite nicely. If not, give it more time and don’t let the numbers get to you or your ultimate goal.