How to Measure the Performance of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Fresh, well-customized and relevant content can do wonders for the success of your business. Content marketing, when viewed in numbers, costs 62% less than outbound marketing. It also generates 3 times more leads, resulting in more and more companies kicking the use of traditional online advertising formats in favor of content creation.

But, to make the most of your content marketing strategy, you will need to regularly check and measure how well your content is performing, and whether the pieces of content you deliver to your prospects are fulfilling their purpose. This is what you should start monitoring right now.

Website traffic

Measuring website traffic is the starting point. It says nothing about your potential customers’ engagement or their movements from “suspects” into prospects, but if you want to progress, you need to see a constant rise of this.

However, this metric reaches its full potential only in combination with other relevant numbers, such as pages per visit, dwell time, returning visitors, or social shares.

These can help you see the whole picture and establish whether your visitors actually love your content enough to spend more than a couple of seconds reading it, as well as whether they find it interesting and relevant enough so that they decide to share it on their social media channels and return to your blog.   

Search rankings

It is a well-known fact that 93% of online experience begins with a search engine, while the search most often finishes on the first page of search results. Establishing how well your business ranks in the search results will show you how well your content is search engine optimized.

Although aiming for the first page of the SERP may seem like an impossible goal, start by optimizing your website for local searches, because the competition isn’t as fierce as on a global level.

Subscriber growth

Stats say that for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can get an average return of $32, so you need to see the number of your email subscribers grow.

A well-created email campaign should almost certainly be a part of any content marketing strategy, as email marketing tops the chart when it comes to customers acquisition and retention.

There are many ways in which you can make your email content more attractive for your prospects, and this is where stats come in handy again:

• Make your emails interactive, as adding video to your emails generates 300% higher click rates
• Make them personal, as a personalized subject line, for example, increases open rates by 50%
• Make them regular because almost half of the customers would like to hear relevant news from you weekly.

Social media feedback

As social media nowadays is of tremendous importance for your content marketing strategy, you should measure its effectiveness too, by using reliable social media monitoring tools. Although being called vanity metrics, the number of your followers, as well as the number of shares, may tell you a lot about your content too and lead you to the conclusion about what kind of content is appealing to certain groups of prospects.

You should consider the traffic each social media channel attracts, as well as measuring the overall shares and shares by channel and length.

Measuring the kind of engagement these shares bring is also of vital importance.

Measure time

If you measure the time spent on your content, you will get a fair notion of how effective you are when it comes to keeping your viewers engaged, and you can make necessary changes accordingly.

Research shows that 55% of people spend less than 15 seconds actively on the page, but if your web traffic consists mostly of such views, you must be doing something wrong. It could be that your content doesn’t grasp their attention, but it could also mean that you are not attracting the right kind of crowd, so think of the ways to improve.

When doing the time measurements, you should always compare the time spent on the page to the time it takes to consume the material, so do not compare 60 seconds spent on watching a 90-second long video to the same amount spent on a 5-minute read.

Clickthrough rates

Now, no matter what type of content you are using to attract, engage and retain your prospects, this metric is the one that shows how successful your efforts to bring clients on your landing page or another desired destination are.

If your CTRs are low, then you should check your calls-to-action and optimize them. Another culprit behind this issue might be cluttered and poorly optimized landing pages.

The added value of this measurement lies when combining it with other data you find relevant, which can be later used in advancing your content marketing strategy.

The number of leads

A new subscriber, a demo request or a free trial are just a few types of leads you can get, and the ones you should definitely keep a close eye on and measure.

The key to your success lies in determining precisely what type of content generates such engagement so that you can tweak your strategy and focus on producing the kind of blog posts, videos, or e-books that your audience wants.

Analytics plays an important part in your content marketing strategy, as it will help you determine what roads to follow and what to avoid, in order to make your content more effective. Start by implementing these metrics, and use them wisely, to make the most of your content and maximize your profit.