6 areas to measure in your content marketing

How to tell if your content is performing well or lagging behind 

Your organization’s blog is up and running! You’re generating topics that are valuable to your audience and planning ahead with a long-term content strategy. Now what?

Measure and analyze your content marketing efforts every quarter or biannually to make sure you’re on the right track. Start by looking back at your S.M.A.R.T. objectives, which you should have listed in your content marketing plan.

Your objectives should be all of the following:

• Specific: Decide exactly what you want to achieve and how you will implement that objective. Make sure you ask who, what, when, why and how.
• Measurable: Break it down and find the concrete element that you can track consistently.
• Attainable: Don’t overpromise and set yourself up for failure.
• Relevant: Your objectives need to really matter to your organization and cause change.
• Time-bound: Include an end date in each objective. This date is when you’ll take the final measurement and see your end results!

Measuring and tracking your content marketing efforts ensures you’re reaching goals and driving sales for your company through your content marketing. It takes time, effort and strategic thinking to build a successful business blog. Here are six areas to measure for content marketing effectiveness.

1. Brand awareness.

Reaching lots of people and familiarizing them with your company is a terrific way to introduce your product or service to potential customers. You can measure brand awareness through referral traffic and mentions on social media as well as earned media.

2. Engagement.

This measures how many people are interacting with your content, not just seeing it. Do they like, comment and share your content? This is a great area to measure because it shows you valuable feedback from your customers on what kind of content they enjoy.

3. Lead generation.

Look at the quality and quantity of leads coming from your content.

4. Conversion and sales.

Decide which conversions are important to measure (it can be a sale or even a newsletter sign-up) and track them to learn what marketing efforts are providing the best ROI.

5. Loyalty and retention.

Look at your current customer base and find the segment with the best retention rates and lifetime value. What do they like? Think of how you can create content to encourage all your customers to remain loyal to your brand.

6. Website performance.

Make sure website visitors can easily find their way around your website. Look at metrics such as unique visitors and page views.

It’s not necessary to include all six areas in your content marketing efforts. Select the areas that fit your company goals. Start by asking what you want to accomplish and your answer will show you what areas you’ll need to track.

Content marketing is a process that grows with your business. As your company offers new products and services, revisit your content marketing strategy and adjust it. Pay attention to changing technology and new SEO practices to be sure your content creation and promotion methods stay up to date. Download Axia Public Relations’ e-book Maximizing Your Public Relations Investment to take your inbound marketing strategy to the next level.

Katie Boyles regularly creates PR and online content that is engaging for target audiences. She improves clients’ online presence and search engine optimization through premium content like e-books and webinars as well as social media posts, blog posts, online articles and more. Katie has been with Axia since September 2015. Learn more about Katie Boyles. Connect with Axia on Twitter @axiapr or tell us what you think in the comments below.

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