Before getting into content marketing, we need to clearly define our objectives so that we can create a plan that helps us achieve our goals. We also need to decide what metrics we’ll track so that we can measure our success.
1) Define Objectives
Before investing in content marketing, you should first clearly define your objectives. Two common objectives for content marketing are (1) SEO and branding and (2) generating leads and sales from content.
Getting leads and sales from content tends to be a good objective for lower priced products and services. Businesses are more likely to get leads and sales if what they are selling is closely related to the content being written.
For example, let’s say you write a social media marketing guide and are successful in driving lots of traffic to that piece of content. An eBook or course on social media marketing would be closely related to your content and people reading your guide might be willing to buy your info product.
Social media software solutions and other services are related, but people who are reading a social media marketing guide are still in the research phase and might not be ready to make a purchase. So for higher priced services or products, you may want to adopt a long term mindset and branding / SEO might be a better objective.
Oli Gardener published an article on the Unbounce blog presenting the results of a 30-day experiment and discovered that their content only converted about 0.3%, meaning that despite his efforts to increase product awareness, only 0.3% of visitors signed up for a trial of their products. He reached out to a few other successful content marketers and found that increase in traffic from SEO and brand awareness were what really drove most of the growth to businesses in many cases, rather than direct conversions from their content.
Once you’ve decided on your goals, think about what metrics you will be using to measure your success. Some useful metrics might include traffic increase, increase in social shares on blog articles and of course increased sales. Once these metrics are decided, you’ll be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing and make adjustments as you go along.
Content marketing is costly and resource intensive, but it can be a great way to accelerate growth and brand awareness if you have a proven product or service and enough revenue to support it.
2) Define Metrics
Asides from creating goals, you also need to decide what metrics to track. There’s a saying that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. We need to measure things like traffic and sales to make sure that our content marketing is effective. Here are a few metrics you may want to track.
– Sales and conversions
One big challenge of content marketing is that it is often difficult to attribute sales directly to content marketing, even with the analytics tools available today. People can read content on multiple devices or hear about your company from someone else that found your business through your content.
For many businesses, like SAAS and service based businesses, content marketing drives sales through branding and allowing the business to achieve SEO rankings for their main keyword on their home page.
Although businesses sometimes get conversions directly from content, the direct conversion rate for many products and services is often low, which can create the misleading impression that our content marketing isn’t working that well. However, if your content is driving a significant amount of direct conversions, then you should track that metric.
For products with longer sales cycles (i.e., non-impulse buys), sales can come much later and result mainly from brand exposure or word of mouth. Sales is often a good metric to track, but because of the difficulty in attributing sales directly to content marketing, businesses should also track other metrics as well.
– Traffic
Another metric that business should track is website traffic. If your business starts a blog and creates content regularly, then traffic should gradually increase over time as your create more content. An increase in traffic along with a corresponding increase in sales can be a good sign that your content marketing is effective.
Besides measuring overall traffic, you should also examine where your traffic is coming from and what types of content are driving traffic to your blog. Are certain types of articles driving more traffic than others?
Analyzing traffic and allow us to improve our content strategy by telling us what types of content are popular with our readers. It can also help us identify which of our marketing channels and strategies are driving the most traffic.
– Brand Mentions
Brand mentions are another great metric to track. Search engines are able to track brand mentions and some people speculate that brand mentions could be the future of SEO and that brand mentions might be a stronger signal than links for determine a site’s authority.
An increase in company brand mentions should occur if people are talking about your content.
– Follower Growth
Another metric you may want to consider tracking is follower growth. Email list subscribers and social media followers are some popular follower metrics that businesses track. Tracking email list growth may be important if email marketing is part of your sales funnel.
Follower metrics are not necessarily important to track closely for many businesses. Some businesses are more concerned about attracting a smaller niche audience, for example, rather than a larger audience. And for other businesses, the conversion rate from follower to customer might be relatively low.
– Engagement
Finally, engagement might be another metric worth paying attention to. Email open rates, the number and quality of blog comments and social media conversations about your content are a few ways that you can track engagement.
Engagement levels might be important if you are trying to achieve thought leadership with your content.
Although you could track all of these metrics, you should pick the ones that make sense for your business. For the sake of simplicity, many businesses may want to start off by simply tracking traffic and sales.
Check out the rest of this content strategy guide or click here to return to the first page of the guide:
Objectives and Metrics – We need to set goals and define metrics to track our success so that we can measure our content marketing effectiveness.
Content Creation Strategies – Creating content on an ongoing basis is one of the biggest content marketing challenges. In this chapter, we’ll discuss ways we can create content that stands out and drives traffic.
Content Promotion Strategies – We need to promote our blogs to gain visibility and grow our following. This section discusses some popular promotion strategies and when to use them.
Types of Content that Create Engagement and Build Influence – Certain types of content are effective in creating engagement and building influence. This section will examine the types of content that other influencers have used to outperform other content marketers.
About Brian Liang