Content is everywhere and any brand, no matter how huge it is, cannot surpass its prominence. Content marketing is becoming more and more popular, and it is an asset that works when it is about the actual product/service/brand marketing of any business.
Ranging from Social media posts, Videos, Illustrations/Photos, Infographics, Interactive content such as quizzes to Case studies, Ebooks/White papers, Content has managed to become the favorite tool of marketers from around the world. There is a reason behind the huge success of Content marketing. Effective Content Marketing that has come around as a result of a well-organized content strategy is helping brands attain their long-term business goals with ease.
Under a well-crafted Content strategy, defined targets are set and the performance to achieve these targets is constantly analyzed. Measuring and monitoring your Content marketing performance is just as important as creating a well-laid content strategy. But, how do you do it? What are the some of the most basic determinants that help you measure and monitor the performance of your content? Let’s find out.
Visitor Traffic
The engagement and conversion that you expect from your content are only going to come to you after your content is discovered by people of the Internet or technically speaking, your target audience. The number of visitors that your content is able to attract and engage is a true indicator of how well your content is performing. If this traffic i.e. the users and the sessions, keeps on increasing over the period of time, that’s good news for you and your content strategy.
You must create a record of the traffic on your website or web resource throughout months and gauge the difference in the monthly performance. There will be certain months when the traffic is quite good. Do more of what you did with your content marketing strategy during those months. It will help you progress.
SEO Success
Once you are done creating your content and putting it out for the consumption of your audience, you optimize it as the next step. If your website or a certain landing page is performing well, that means that the corresponding content is doing well. If your content is doing well, it will show up organically in search engine result pages and drive organic engagement. This is, in fact, a very clear indicator of your Content marketing performance.
On-site time
All of us are well aware of the vastness of the Internet and the content present on it. If people/your targeted audience is taking out their valuable time and are browsing through your website, that’s good. However, this is not finished work. If your visitors are just casually dropping by and leaving in a split second, that’s bad news. Your visitors will stick around for a while if they consider your content to be worthy of their time.
On-site time is a proper indicator of your content performance. If people like what they see or read, they will stay for a longer time, and go through more of it. So, always make sure that you create your content in the manner that people like to stay and look for more of it. Gauging the pages per visit is also a great way to measure and monitor your content marketing performance.
Customer journey
Before everything else, your content is supposed to serve the purpose of easing the customer journey of your audience. When your content is the right kind, and it has been strategized well, it will engage the right buyers, at the right time. Hence, it will add more qualified leads to the funnel and drive in a higher chance of conversion.
Returning visitors
Earlier we talked about visitors, users, sessions, pages per visit and other similar elements that determine the capacity of your content marketing. Next up, measuring the percentage of returning visitors is also a great way to see if or not your content is performing at par with the content strategy. It is a usual instance if new site visitors come to your website once in a blue moon. However, what truly should happen is that these visitors should be retained and they should come back to consume your content and engage with it on a daily basis.
Brand Awareness
So, you think your content is great, and it is capable of churning expected results for you? You might be right in this assumption but if the brand awareness around your brand or business offering is not happening, is your content even performing?
Your content marketing should be such that people can find answers for their queries through your content. This content should be able to acquire qualified leads; leads that already know your product but are not sure if they will give their money to your brand. In the follow-up, your content is performing well if it is driving conversions.
Social sharing & Reputation
Your content should be such and so good that once people come across it, they are ready to share it further in their circles. This content can be an explainer video of your business offering or a simple giveaway landing page meant for the promotion of a particular content campaign. Whatever the case may be, this content should serve the purpose.
Having social sharing buttons and the share counter on your website/blog is a smart move. It not only provides new site visitors a space to share your content, but it also serves the purpose of convincing reluctant audience when they happen to see the sharing counter for your content. Hence, if your content is a champion, more and more people are going to derive value out of it and share it with the people they care about.
Conversion & Sales
The simplest gauging meter of all is the conversion and sale driven by your content. Great performing content is able to attract the audience, engage them, convince them into spending more time around exploring more content, and eventually, it is able to convert those leads into customers. However, it is simpler said than done. You must resort to using tools like Google Analytics, KissMetrics, CrazyEggs, and other Heatmap tools that will help you gain deep insights into the process of understanding your conversions and sales.
Conclusion
Gauging the performance of your Content Marketing is equivalent to tapping an endless ocean. Well, that might be a bit exaggerated thing to say but what we really mean to imply here is that you need to have a very broad knowledge base if you really want to know your metrics right. Thankfully, there are so many simpler as well as advanced measurement and monitoring tools available in the market to help you measure your content marketing performance, improve it, and eventually achieve your business objectives.
–
Pawan Sahu is the founder of MarkupTrend. He is a Digital Marketer and a blogger geek passionate about writing articles related to WordPress, SEO, Marketing, Web Design, and CMS etc.
