We research, write and re-write content that we hope makes an impact and send it out into the World Wide Web. This process of getting good quality content costs your business a fair amount of time and money. So it is vital to know if the content has served its purpose-- How has your audience received it? And is it a good ROI? This is why the content posted on your business’s website, blog and social media pages has to be measured based on a number of metrics and parameters. This can help you create better and more relevant content that appeals to your readers. Which in turn will bring in more traffic and translate to lead generation.
While there are plenty of metrics that can be measured when it comes to content marketing, we are going to delve deeper into a chosen few.
Think you need a content audit? Start with your website content…
The content on your website is up there to be read. So one of the first things to measure is the number of visitors that come to your site (unique and returning visitors) and where they come from. Knowing the source of your visitors and when there is a spike in visitors can help you frame and share content accordingly. It is also important to know how much time the visitor spends on a page, bounce rate, and the demographic and geography your audience is mostly from. Google Analytics can help you measure a lot of these metrics. And all this insight can be used towards refining the content you are putting out.
Social Media Metrics
Your business has an online presence via its Facebook page, and Twitter account among others. Interactions take place through comments, likes, sharing of articles. But how do you measure if your social media strategy is strong? You can get some awareness by seeing how many people online are talking about your brand on social media, this could be via the number of tweets (Twitter Analytics), or the, ‘People talking about us’ metric on Facebook. Another aspect that can be measured is Engagement-- Are people sharing the content you post and liking it, are they commenting on it? Notice when there is a higher rate of this happening and what type of content is bringing it about. There are analytical tools available to help you do this. Also, make sure to reply to comments, and answer queries, critiques and doubts to increase these engagements. Then there are the followers. Every social media page needs followers and over time the numbers should increase. That is when you know you are on the right track when it comes to your organisation’s social media game plan.
You also have platforms like HubSpot, from where you can publish, monitor and measure activities on your website and social media pages. It also gives you a centralised view of all the data from these engagements, which you can analyse using the inbuilt integrations and analytical tools. The insights gathered can be used to drive your content development.
It’s all in the Leads
Finally, you can measure the ROI of content marketing with regard to leads. There are people who will download eBooks you put out, fill in forms on your website—people who are genuinely interested in the product or service your business offers. These visitors can be defined as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Based on parameters you can measure the success of this and see where most MQLs are being generated from—such as, is it from an email campaign or a white paper that you published. You can also measure click-through-rates to find out how many of the readers of your newsletter or an email, clicked on the link (call-to-action) and felt compelled to read on. The higher this rate is, the greater the proof that the content you put out is gripping and persuasive.
The content might be well written and well researched, but it has to speak to and resonate with the audience, or else there is no point to it. By measuring how it performs based on different metrics you can better customer engagement, refine the information you put out and make the content really work to your business’s benefit.
