How to Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Efforts

Do you put in a lot of work into creating some great content for your website but end up feeling like you are addressing a deaf crowd? That’s probably because once you hit the ‘Publish’ button, you forget about your content. Do you make sure that your content is performing well? Are you measuring the impact of your content marketing efforts? 

If not, the fault doesn’t lie with your audience. It’s in how you are communicating with your audience. Tracking the key metrics helps you improve your content, and then, nothing can stop you from evolving your content marketing strategy. Only then, you can identify the gaps and write the right content. 

Content creation and distribution is only half the battle won. Analyzing that content and its effectiveness is key to winning the content marketing game. When you go out to observe, you’ll see that 

65% of successful content marketers rely on a documented content marketing strategy and have a list of important metrics to track to ensure success.

As Peter Drucker says “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

So, what are those metrics? 

In this post, we’ll look at those metrics and empower you to make data-driven decisions that fine-tune your approach for optimum results. 

Why Do You Need to Measure Your Content Marketing Efforts

1. Evaluate Success

Are you tired of speculating on the success of your content marketing efforts? The secret to realizing your campaigns' full potential is measurement. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can help you learn more about what works and what doesn't. Moreover, it helps you enhance your marketing strategy and boost your ROI. 

2. Justify ROI

Evaluating your content marketing efforts is more than simply tracking data; it also entails demonstrating the value of your investments to stakeholders. Start by evaluating return on investment (ROI) and understand how your content marketing activities contribute to the success of your organization. This can be easily done by monitoring KPIs. 

3. Optimize content

Measuring your content marketing efforts provides insights into what content resonates with your audience. There are a plethora pf tools available that can help you track metrics like bounce rates, unique likes, and social shares. Once you have the analysis, you can see which content performs well and which needs improvement. 

4. Inform strategy

Measuring your content marketing efforts enables you to make data-driven decisions when developing new campaigns. By analyzing data and identifying trends, you can gain insights into what content formats, topics, and channels work best for your audience. This information can then inform your overall content marketing strategy.

5. Stay competitive

Measuring your content marketing efforts helps you stay ahead of your competitors. By keeping track of industry benchmarks and analyzing your own performance against them, you can identify areas where you're falling behind and make adjustments to stay competitive.

4 Content Marketing Success Metrics You Should Start Tracking

1. Traffic 

The lifeblood of internet content is traffic. Creating good and valuable content is only half the battle. You cannot reap the full benefits until your page is attracting visitors. After all, what good is investing time and resources to create eloquent content if no one reads it? Simply put, you can increase traffic and accomplish your content marketing goal if you decide on creating informational and relevant content that attracts visitors (and is often shared and talked about).

The ultimate objective of content marketing is to engage with as many people as you can by providing them with useful material. And the gauge used to determine how many people are viewing your material is website traffic. You can determine how effectively your content is connecting with your audience by keeping an eye on your traffic statistics and adjusting your strategy as necessary. 

Are there frequent visits to your website? Or has your traffic slowed down? This insightful information may help you improve your content strategy, concentrate on the subjects that interest your audience, and market your material in a way that draws even more readers.

2. Conversions

Conversion tracking is critical for determining how effectively your content marketing is functioning. Tracking conversions help you determine whether or not your efforts are in the right place, or whether you need to rework your strategy. For example, a conversion could be:

• A purchase made directly from the website after clicking on a call-to-action within a piece of content
• A form submission for a free trial or consultation
• A download of a whitepaper or other resource
• An email sign-up

Conversion helps to assess the content’s effectiveness in generating leads and driving sales. Consecutively, resulting in refining content marketing strategies and optimize content to attract the target audience.

Businesses efficiently measure conversions in their content marketing initiatives by using the right web analytics tools and marketing automation software. Companies may decide how to optimize their content for better outcomes by being able to track website traffic, analyze interaction with material, and obtain insights into which pieces of content are most efficient at generating conversions. By using a data-driven strategy, organizations may achieve their objectives and increase the return on their content marketing investments.

3. SEO Performance

Start tracking SEO performance because it shows how well your content is performing on search engines. Want to increase your website traffic and conversions? Your SEO performance will determine if it will happen or not. 

Tracking SEO performance, you can

• Ensure that your content is more visible to your target audience. 
• Make sure that your content is visible, reachable, and impressionable. 

Visibility is key. The better the chance of conversions with more people viewing your content.  Thus, with SEO-friendly content you cultivate your brand's image and attract a larger audience pool. Moreover, this will boost your chance to engage with your audience and promotes conversions, resulting in high-quality traffic.

4. Engagement

Engagement can be used to gauge how much your audience engages with your content. Simply put, it evaluates the audience's level of interest. Engagement uses various indicators to help you easily optimize your content strategy and improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Let’s take an example. 

You have been posting content for a while and you observe that your blogs are getting a lot of likes from the audience, but there are only a few comments. What would this mean? This indicates that your audience finds your content likable, but isn't engaging in a more meaningful way (that can generate tractions). 

Now, ensure that your content is not only likable but also engaged with your target audience. You can do this by optimizing content strategy. Experiment with different content that your audience will like, share, and comment on. Plus, this will help you build strong connections with your audience.

Wrapping Up

Content marketing requires time, effort, and resources. And once you are investing in it, you need to understand how your marketing efforts are going. Thus, evaluate your KPIs to keep a tab on your content marketing efforts. This will enable you to generate content that your audience will find alluring and will choose you over your competition.
Struggling to measure the success of your content marketing efforts? Growth Natives has the expertise to help you track your key metrics and optimize your strategy for maximum impact. Contact us today at info@growthnatives.com or call +1 855-693-4769 to take your content marketing game to the next level.