One of the biggest challenges that most businesses face is implementing an effective content marketing strategy and measuring its effects. Many B2B businesses are unable to measure if their investments in content marketing campaigns are paying off. In this article, we shall learn how to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.

Content Marketing Strategy - Measure Your Content Marketing Campaigns

First, you must identify your target audience. When you have identified your buyer persona, creating content for them becomes easy and targeted. You can create a variety of content like blog posts, infographics, case studies, social media posts, guest posts, images or videos. Tools like Google Analytics, Omniture and others have enabled businesses to track different metrics associated with each content type. However, instead of tracking so many different tools, simply set up Google Analytics and you will be able to measure almost all the metrics. Once you have identified your ideal customers, created awesome content for them, and set up Google Analytics to measure your content effectiveness, you should proceed to the next steps. [embed]https://youtu.be/KWBE2rJcTEI[/embed]

Step 1: Identify your marketing goals and the metrics associated with them

Create a spreadsheet and add all the metrics that you will measure. It’s good to use Google spreadsheets because your teammates can easily have access to them. For example, if you have created a blog post, you should be interested in measuring whether it is attracting traffic, if it is being read till the end, and whether or not it gets you email subscribers.

Step 2: Identify how you are going to measure those metrics

Set up goals in Google Analytics and identify how you will measure each metric.

Step 3: Data collection, reporting and review mechanism

Track the data collected in Google Analytics and update your spreadsheet for those involved. Having all the data in one place for easy reference will help you in gauging what works and what doesn’t. Only measure the metrics that are relevant to your business.

1. Your goal may be to track where your subscribers are coming from. Then you should be interested in finding out if free downloadable e-books, lead magnets, blogs, webinar registrations or podcasts are helping you get those subscribers.
2. If your main goal is to get backlinks through a big pillar article, then monitor the backlinks that the post generates and keep tabs on your search engine rankings.
3. If you want to build buzz around your product launch through social media campaigns, then keep track of your social media engagement and media mentions.

Now let's look at the metrics that are important for measuring content marketing strategy.

Important Metrics on How to Measure Content Marketing

For all your content marketing materials, here are the broad-level metrics that you should measure.

1. Lead quality

Great content attracts an audience and, consequently, leads. Suppose you've created a pillar blog post with a lead magnet or content upgrade. You’d expect blog readers to give their details in exchange for the lead magnet.

• If people read your blog posts and grab the lead magnet, it indicates that your blog post is effective.
• Website visitors are interested in your content if, after reading, they check the related resources on your blog that are a part of your conversion funnel.
• When people book pre-sales appointments, then you generate a lead.
• If people check out the pricing page after reading your blog post, then it indicates that quality leads are being attracted.

On the other hand, if your blog post attracts huge traffic but the bounce rate is also high, people aren’t reading your posts. Either your blog content isn't good enough or the lead quality is poor.

2. Sales

You will be able to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing planning if you know how many of the generated leads have resulted in sales and the value of those sales. When you generate leads for your sales funnel, you should also nurture them with the right content.

• To find out the channels or pages that give you the sales or assist in conversions, you should track the pages that the customer visited before making a purchase.
• You can also track the channels from which the leads that converted into sales were generated.

It’s easy to measure the leads and sales metrics because they are very definite.

3. Website traffic

You expect your content marketing to generate traffic to your site or landing page. You need website traffic metrics to know the following:

• Page views show which and how many pages are viewed on your site. This helps you in knowing which pages on your website attract the most traffic.
• Unique visitors (UV) tells how many unique visitors are there on your site. This is done by tracking the visitors’ IP addresses and browser cookies.
• You can also track the sources from where your traffic is coming on different landing pages. For example, you might be promoting your content on social media but if you are not getting enough traffic from that source, then you need to adjust your social media strategy.

4. Engagement

Just getting traffic to your website is not enough. Your content also needs to engage it. Some observations for website engagement are:

• If your bounce rate is low and there are repeat visitors, then your content marketing strategy is working.
• Time on site is another metric that tells how much time website visitors spend consuming your content.
• If people are engaging with your content by reading till the end, subscribing to your email list, sharing your content on social media or leaving comments, then your content marketing planing is working.

5. Social and sharing

It’s important to measure offsite engagement too when you want to know how to measure content marketing strategy.

• Make your content easily shareable on social media by enabling sharing buttons.
• If your content is being shared on social media and attracting likes, comments and engagement, then you are on the right track.
• The growth of your social followers, likes, tweets and retweets are other indicators for social engagement.

Conclusion Measuring content marketing strategy doesn't have to be difficult if you have done the proper groundwork. Measuring content marketing campaign often translates to measuring only leads and sales. However, if you consider the other metrics mentioned in this article, you will be better prepared on how to measure content marketing planning effectiveness.

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