Content marketing is the promotion of content that you have created through different channels and geared towards a specific audience. Many people assume that content refers to any written content. However, it can be almost anything you can imagine – from infographics and slideshows to blog posts and e-books, all of them are different forms of content. Therefore, there are several ways of marketing these forms of media.
So what is the correct way of marketing them? Unless you are a person with a great deal of experience, it becomes challenging to determine which method to use without spending a lot of time and resources. With the help of professionals and analytics to see which content marketing channel is proving to be the most successful, one can quickly start turning their business into a profit.
Why Is It Important to Measure Your Content Marketing Success Rate?
Simply put, measuring success is essential, so you know whether or not you are going in the right direction. When you are promoting your content, there are several methods you can use, such as Search Engine Optimization, Advertising, Affiliate marketing and more. However, not all of these tactics will perfectly fit your business needs.
Therefore, you need to use a trial and error to figure out which of these works for you best. Quantifying your success will give you a clear picture of which method is working for you and which one isn’t.
Since it is a trial and error method, finding the correct approach may take quite a bit of time. However, you can considerably reduce the number of attempts required to make your content marketing efforts succeed.
Ways of Measuring Your Content Marketing Success Rate
To start measuring how successful you are, you need first to define what success means to you. To do this, you need to look back at what your aim was. Generally, the objective of any business is to make more money. However, if you are taking it step by step, then your goals might vary with each step.
For example, if you are starting out, then maybe your goal is to reach as many people as possible. You may not care how many people of them come to your website or not – merely letting them know you exist may be enough at this stage.
Slowly, your goal keeps changing from getting recognized to increasing the number of visitors to your site to finally increasing the number of sales. It is best to set goals and then try various content marketing tactics to see which one works for you.
There are several analytics tools available all over the internet to help you with this task. WordPress has its own analytics tools while most others all over the internet prefer using google analytics. However, these tools only give you the raw data. It is then your job to interpret them and see what changes you need to make. Of course, hiring a professional will simplify the process.
Listed below are some of the most common ways of measuring how successful your content marketing is. While there are three main categories, they have multiple metrics included in them that help you assess how your marketing tactic is working out depending on the goal you want to achieve.
Demographic and Basic Information
Demographics is a particular section of the population with distinctive traits. Based on these traits, you can classify your target audience into various categories. You want to know the kind of people are interested in your content and if it matches with whom you intended or not.
Location
One of the most critical factors in measuring success is knowing where your users originate. Imagine you are trying to target an American audience as your products currently only ship to the US. However, you see that a majority of the readers are from Mexico who can’t possibly purchase the product, then you there is something wrong with your marketing strategy. You need to focus on the American media in this case.
Visitors
The number of visitors that come to your site is another important metric to measure. This metric gives you an idea of how attractive your content is. However, it is necessary to measure the number of unique visitors since this number is what signifies real growth. Otherwise, if the same visitor keeps visiting your site again and again, then it doesn’t make sense since you aren’t growing and your user base is still the same.
Number of Page Views
Every time a web page loads or is refreshed, the number of page views increases. While this can give an estimate on which content your audience prefers on your website, there can be errors too. For example, a person with bad internet connection refreshes the page 5 times but reads only once. This why this particular metric can be misleading.
Dwell Time
Dwell time is the amount of duration that an average user spends on your website. Essentially this metric shows just how well designed and interesting your site is. Increasing the average dwell time helps with optimizing your site for SEO. Therefore it is essential to ensure that you can keep your users focused on your website for as long as possible.
Demographics
Demographics is extremely important to study what part of the population is interested in your content. It’s an essential tool since most content is geared towards a particular type of people. This may include sectioning the audience according to age, ethnicity, religious beliefs, earning capacity and much more.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and leave almost immediately without reading the content or spending enough time on it. Poor web design, poor quality content, and lack of internal linking can also be a cause. If your website has a high bounce rate, it isn’t doing well, and you need to fix your site immediately!
Social Sharing
Social Sharing comes somewhere midway along your sales funnel. Social sharing is where you start to pursue customers and start influencing them to do business with you.
Nowadays, many brands make their advertising on social media. Since there is both – paid and free advertising, it makes for a great way to attract more and more users. Especially since sites like Facebook and Instagram provide so many options to help people do business on their websites. The presence of social media influencers has also been changing the game lately. If you are trying to see how your content is dong socially, you might want to look at the following metrics.
Likes
When it comes to social media, your success is defined by how much action you inspire a person to take. So, when it comes to likes, it takes the least amount of effort. So, even though your content was relatively good, there is still room for improvement.
Comments
The next metric that you can use to measure how many people interacted with your posts is to see how many comments there are. Though, nowadays, commenting takes the most amount of effort ( compared to liking or sharing), the reach that shared post gets is much more than that of a post which gets comments.
Shares
The best social media metric to monitor is to see how many people have shared your content on that website or to other sites. More shares mean your post will reach more people. Fortunately, this means that your content is worth sharing, If someone shares your content, there is a chance that one of his or her followers will share it and so on. This sharing can create a great deal of inbound traffic for your site.
Followers
The number of followers is an excellent estimate of how well you are doing your content marketing. Not only did the user like the post you post, but they also went through a few other pages and saw more of your content. They also don’t want to miss the next time you publish something.
However, just the number of followers is not enough. It is then important to check how many followers are interacting with your promotional posts.
Another critical thing to measure is how fast your follower count is growing. If your follower count is steadily increasing at the same rate, then changing your marketing strategy made no impact. You should see if there is a positive change in the growth rate periodically. The higher the growth rate, the better your company is doing overall.
Lead Generation
Finally, coming to the lower end of the sales funnel. Lead generation is essentially getting someone interested in the products you offer. It doesn’t matter if they use the free version and can access limited features. The very fact that they have been using part of your content shows that they are interested in your services. Then, you can focus on such customers to get a higher ROI.
Click Through Rate
Whenever a promotional email is sent out, there is usually a link with a call-to-action that takes the user to the landing page of your website. The click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on the link since there are interested in your product. A high click-through rate means your content is intriguing and you are promoting it well. WIth a low click-through rate, you may have to improve the call to action or the offer you are sending out to people.
Email Opening Rate
For people to view your call to action, they need first to open the mail. This is the place where most of the promotional emails get shot down. As soon as one sees a promotional email, they immediately ignore it. Google even segregates into an entirely new category and hides it from you. Thus, you need to adjust how you send out these emails. Maybe change the content or the subject line of your mail to invite people to open the email.
Leads per channel
There are generally two types of leads you can develop – a Marketing Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Lead. An MQL is ready to be persuaded by the sales team to purchase. On the other hand, and SQL is someone who is about to buy. However what matters is how you are promoting your content and where you are generating more leads. So if you are generating more leads from social media when compared to affiliate marketing, you can change your strategy accordingly to reduce your losses.
Wrapping It Up
There are several ways to optimize your website and increase these metrics over time for yourself. However, trying to figure out which one works and then tuning each one will take time. You can discuss this with our team of experts to see exactly which kind content marketing tactic will work for you. We can then analyze the data they receive through various resources and come up with the most effective marketing plan for your site in a minimum number of iterations. Just send a message and watch how quickly your website starts gaining traffic.
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