By now, and especially if you have been following our blog, you already know very well that, nowadays, content marketing is crucial for the online success of a website and, consequently, of a business. In one of our last articles we talked about a few strategies for generating leads: betting on interactive content, communicating with our audience to obtain user-generated content, etc.
However, how can you know if you are on the right track and if your content marketing efforts are paying off? Next, we will talk to you about the different marketing metrics that you can use to evaluate the results of content marketing.
Challenges and opportunities
Unfortunately, in the business world, time and patience are often scarce resources. This is why it is necessary to find a way to measure the results of content marketing in a way that allows justifying at an executive level the need for a specific budget and subsequently demonstrating the financial impact, that is, the ubiquitous return on investment (ROI).).
However, measuring results has benefits beyond this. If we constantly measure the results of our content marketing campaigns, we will have very valuable information in order to guide our future strategy. On the other hand, when you work with content, it is important to always keep in mind that the ultimate goal, beyond providing quality content, is to achieve business objectives and improve the results of our business.
Content Marketing Metrics
In order to analyze the results of our content marketing efforts, we must rely on the appropriate tools. The most notable is perhaps Google Analytics, a great starting point. However, there are many other options that allow you to measure different aspects, from mentions on social networks to the spread of links.
The list of content marketing metrics is quite extensive and knowing which one we should use at any given time depends on the type of content and the objective we intend to achieve with a certain campaign or strategy (raise the brand, obtain leads, increase sales…). To try to simplify things, we have followed a typical classification in 4 areas, each of them with their respective metrics: consumption, diffusion, lead generation and sales.
Consumption: how many people consume your content?
This category includes the most fundamental metrics. This data is essential to know if your content is truly reaching your target audience. Google Analytics, as we mentioned before, is a tool that allows us to see this data in a simple way. Typically, they are measured in page views, downloads, or video views.
Important: although these data are extremely relevant, you should not be left alone with them. Many marketers make the mistake of evaluating whether or not their content works simply based on visits. However, visits alone are not enough if they are not later transformed into leads or sales.
Dissemination: Do users share your content with others?
This type of metric is increasingly popular, and not without reason. Everyone knows that the importance of word of mouth is key to the success of a business. In the digital and social media era, word of mouth is shares on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So the answer is easy: by measuring how many times your content has been shared, you can check its success.
Whatever marketing techniques you use, and regardless of whether you have a master content marketing strategy, long-term, sustainable success is not achieved overnight. Book marketing company has proven effective in establishing and growing the visibility, credibility, influence and desirability of a business, but only as a result of a slow and steady process.
Logically, if many users participate on their own initiative in the dissemination of your content, your visits will increase exponentially (and hopefully your sales as well). Furthermore, another advantage of having your content shared is that this provides you with backlinks, which are one of the determining factors in achieving good positioning in search engines.
To analyze this data, you can use the information provided directly by social networks, tools such as Post Rank (now part of Google Analytics) or Seaquakes and backlink reports such as those provided by Majestic.
Lead generation: do users who consume your content become leads?
Once we know that users like our content so much that they not only visit it, but even share it, it is time to find out if all this traffic is really bringing us any benefit.
The quickest and most direct way to know how many leads our content is generating would be to require users to register before consuming our content. In this way, we could obtain a lead for each new visitor. It sounds easy right? Unfortunately, this technique is not highly recommended, since it is typical of paid sites and will not help users trust our company, one of the main objectives of content marketing.
Instead, the most appropriate thing is to measure the leads that are generated once the user has consumed the content. A simple way is to place a form on our page right after the content in question. Different cookies or scripts are very useful in recognizing visitors throughout different sessions and identifying whether the resulting leads come from the content.
Sales: do your content consumers become customers?
The fourth category is key to measuring and evaluating the real impact of content marketing on your business activity. To do this, you will need a database or CRM service (such as High-rise, Salesforce, Market, etc.) that is capable of analyzing the behavior of potential consumers, finding out the pieces of content they have consumed, and giving those pieces a corresponding value depending on the volume of business they have generated.
Conclusion
If you manage to answer all the main questions of each category, you will have in your hands a system to measure content marketing that will allow you to judge the activities and content that you have published in the past effectively and that will be very helpful to you. to plan new content marketing strategies.
Finally, and as we mentioned previously, successful online content marketing is not only about strict consumption, but also about dissemination, leads and sales. Creating content that truly generates benefits is not easy. However, you can always rely on the experience of Text broker, a safe bet in the field of content marketing.
