How To Measure The Success Of Your Content Marketing Campaign

Transcript

Some business owners and marketing managers still see content marketing as a bit of an abstract discipline whose success is hard to measure. But that is a myth. Measuring the success of a content marketing campaign is equally possible and crucial as measuring the success of an advertising or PPC campaign. This is how it’s done.

When you start designing a new content marketing campaign, you need to keep your objectives in mind from the very beginning. With each creative idea you come up with, ask yourself the questions:

• How will this help meet my audience’s objectives?
• How will this help meet my SEO objectives?
• How will this help meet my Digital PR objectives?
• And how will this help meet my business objectives?

Providing value to your current and prospective clients is, in essence, the main aim of any content marketing company. Get this part right, and the rest will follow. How can you entertain, inspire, teach, help, or engage your clients or prospective clients today? How can you make them want to share your content, or spend a lot of time browsing your site?

Once you have a few rough ideas of how you’d like to tap into your clients’ passions, interests, problems and objectives, you can start viewing these ideas through a Search Engine Optimisation lens. How can this content idea help you get the rankings, visibility, and organic traffic that you want from relevant key phrases?

Next, have a look at whether this idea has the potential of providing press value. Can you provide any stats, data, or insights that can lead to backlinks, brand mentions, or referral traffic?

And lastly, how can this content campaign help meet your business goals?

Not all content ideas will work from all of these perspectives, but if you find one that does, you’re on to a winner.

Now, to answer the question that’s on everyone’s lips: which content marketing metrics can you use to measure the success of your content campaign?

You can use:

Audience Based Metrics

How many times was your content shared on social media? How many unique page views did you get? And what was the average time on site? And what does that say about the usefulness of your content? Did the visitor find the answer to their question quickly? Then that’s great. But if your intention was to entertain, a longer time on site is usually a good sign.

You can measure social shares with an online tool called Buzzsumo. Information about unique page views and time on site can be found within your Google Analytics.

SEO-Based Metrics

Rankings, visibility in search engines and organic traffic are all perfect metrics for measuring your content marketing success. Tools such as AccuRanker can help you measure rankings and visibility, whereas organic traffic is measured with a well set up Google Analytics account.

Digital PR-Based Metrics

Did your content asset receive any backlinks from online publications, preferably ones with high trust indicators? Did you see an increase in brand mentions when the content was launched? Did you receive any referral traffic to the content asset?

Tools like Majestic can help with measuring backlinks. PR software such as Cision helps you measure brand mentions. And referral traffic can once again be measured with your Google Analytics.

Business Objectives

A well-set-up Google Analytics account will give you precise information about the way your web visitors navigate your site. Did they visit any of your landing pages after they saw your content asset? Did they end up purchasing anything, or sign up to your mailing list? All these metrics are indicators that your content was useful and its viewers ended up trusting your brand more.

As you can see, there’s no shortage of content marketing metrics by which to measure your content campaign success. If anything, there are so many out there that you will need to make an informed decision about which ones matter to you. If you want to learn more about how to measure the success of your content marketing campaign, get in touch.