Content marketing allows you to create valuable pieces of content, share that content with the world and then measure the effectiveness of the content.
By measuring the effectiveness of your content, you know what works and what doesn’t, then you can improve on it.
However, measuring content marketing metrics isn’t easy.
Why?
Many different things turn into a metric depending on the type of content and how it is used by your audience. For example, if someone clicks on an article about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), does that increase your brand’s exposure? It could be if the content is valuable and shareable.
This shows that content type matters and plays a big role in how your metrics perform.
So, which metrics should you use? That’s where I would like to help — with this article!
Content Marketing Metric #1 – Website Traffic
Traffic is the most important thing in SEO. You need to get as much traffic to your website as possible. To achieve this, you can use many different methods including social media and search engine advertising.
If you want to increase the number of visitors to your website, then you will need to make sure that it ranks high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
The more people who click on your website or article (that ranks with SEO), the more traffic you will get, and this audience can be retargeted with ads later on.
Content Marketing Metric #2 – Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who take some form of action after seeing your content. It is a measure of how many people are interested in learning more about your product or service, and how many of them become customers.
There are two types of conversions:
- Conversions happen when a user clicks on an article on your website or signs up for your email list.
- Conversions happen when a user takes some other form of action on your site, like downloading an ebook or filling out an online form.
Content Marketing Metric #3 – Engagement and Reach
Engagement is a key factor in your business’s success. It’s the measure of how much traffic you get from your website, and how engaged your visitors are with what you have to offer.
A high engagement rate means that more people are visiting your site, staying on it, and interacting with it. This means they become customers, advocates, or even friends of your brand.
Engagement also plays a big role in how many people click through to other pages on your website — which is important because this is how people discover new content and information about your business and products/services.
Reach refers to the number of unique visitors who visit a single page on your website over time. Reach can also be referred to as “relevance” or “click-through rate” (CTR).
Reach is one of the most important metrics when it comes to measuring how effective your marketing campaigns are at driving traffic to your site or app.
Content Metric #4 – Return on Investment
Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much money you made from content marketing in comparison to how much you spent. In other words, (Return – Investment ÷ Investment) x 100 = ROI.
Return – Investment
ROI = ________________________ * 100
Investment
Remember to include the total investment in your ROI calculation rather than the cost of the piece of content itself. This could include labor costs, advertising expenses, software, or any other monetary impact caused by your content.
Content Marketing Metric #5 – Estimating the number of leads generated
The main goal of content marketing is to attract your prospects or customers. Every communication’s ultimate goal is to guide your prospect through their buying cycle – to subtly lead them to your solution or product and convert them from prospect to customer.
However, it is important to remember that all of these digital communications will not generate the same type or volume of leads.
Content that addresses trends, risks, or opportunities early in the purchase cycle will not receive the same number of downloads, views, etc., as late in the purchase cycle content where fewer prospects click or download but whose quality and intent to buy is stronger.
Therefore, in measuring the number of leads generated from your content marketing strategy it is important to know if your marketing goals align with your bottom line goals, which is to generate leads and ultimately make sales.
Conclusion
Content Marketing metrics are very necessary for content marketing and their importance can’t be understated.
Use metrics to improve your content until the content performance is profitable for you.
In this way, you know exactly if your content marketing methods work.