To truly gauge the success of your content marketing efforts, it's essential to track a variety of metrics. These indicators will reveal how effectively your strategy is performing and how well it's propelling you towards your marketing objectives. Content marketing spans a wide array of formats that businesses utilise to captivate their audiences and inspire meaningful engagement. Let's dive into some of the most popular and impactful forms of content marketing:
Blog Posts and Articles:
You are reading a blog post we’ve written and published on our website to support and educate business pro’s on how to ensure content is top notch and worth engaging with. Blogs are really versatile and can cover a wide range of topics relevant to the business and its audience.
Videos:
Video is a super engaging form of content and can be used for tutorials, product demos, customer testimonials, and storytelling. Platforms including YouTube, Vimeo, and social media channels like TikTok and Instagram are popular for video content engagement.
Infographics:
Visual representations of information designed to present what can often be a complex process or data in an easy to understand way.
Podcasts:
Audio content delivered in a series of episodes that discuss topics relevant to the audience's interests that feature interviews, discussions, or storytelling. The great advantage of Podcasts is you can listen to them on-the-go. Podcasts are increasingly simple to produce quickly and independently.
Ebooks and Whitepapers:
Long-form copy content that dives into a specific topic. They provide in depth insights, research, or industry expertise and are often gated behind a form to generate email leads for the business publishing them.
Case Studies:
A structured and detailed analysis of how a product or service solved a specific problem for a customer. Case studies are really good to provide proof by demonstrating real-world experience and results from your products or services. Check out our case studies for the marketing services we provide.
Webinars and Online Events:
These can be live or pre-recorded presentations, workshops, or Q&A sessions and are delivered online. Webinars (when LIVE) should be interactive and allow guests to engage directly with the content and presenters - by asking questions in real-time.
Social Media Posts:
Content shared on social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn can be designed to engage followers or those you’d most like to engage with to promote your products or services, and drive traffic to other content assets on your website. Posts can also provide small bite sized pieces of content to help grow awareness and trust in your brand.
Email Newsletters:
Most of you reading this will receive multiple regularly scheduled emails from your favourite brands with updates, news, curated content, and more often than not, limited time promotional offers. Newsletters are really good at helping maintain engagement and nurture your leads over time.
Interactive Content:
It’s a great idea to test engaging formats including quizzes, polls, assessments and calculators to encourage active participation from your audience.
User-Generated Content (UGC):
This is when content is created by customers that shows their experiences with a product or service you provide. UGC can be shared on social media or featured on company websites and you’ll see it often used for fashion, beauty and food brands.
Content Hubs:
Who doesn’t love a collection of content based on your specific interests, including video, blogs, guides and infographics that are easy to access? Content hubs are basically an area of a website full of information for easy access by your audience. They will rank well for SEO with Google when serving up search results to those who need your helpful information.
The main thing to consider is that any form of content marketing can serve different purposes so you use them to achieve your specific marketing objectives. Your objectives will most likely be to engage your different audiences, drive desired actions like downloading guides or clicking through to your website to read a blog.
Successful content marketing strategies often involve a mix of formats that work best for the preferences and behaviours of your target audience.
Yes, but how do I know it’s working?
The great advantage of providing awesome content online, is that you can track loads of results including how many people are consuming it, for how long (particularly videos), how many other pages they’ll view on your website and if they’re sharing it with their contacts and networks.
Here are some key content marketing results metrics to track:
1. Traffic:
- Website Traffic: Total visits to your website driven by your content - you can see what’s increased your traffic by the day, hour and even time if you want to.
- Traffic Sources: Because marketers will often be using multiple platforms with their content you can see which channel/source your website traffic is coming from including organic search, social media, referrals, email and other online sources.
- Page Views: For specific blogs and content on your website, it’s a great idea to track this so you know if the content was worth the time, energy and resource to create it i.e. if less than 10 people read it - is it worth it producing more?
2. Engagement:
- Time on Page: Particularly for blogs, the average amount of time visitors spend on your content pages will give you an idea of whether they’ve read the whole blog.
- Bounce Rate: This is really important as it shows you the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. If they’re being sent from your social promotion of that blog, you need to address what you’re telling them you’re giving them OR if your website is suitable and optimised for mobile. Many people consume online content on their phones.
- Social Shares: Number of times your content is shared on social media platforms. It’s really hard to get people to do this for educational content, but demo’s on solutions to everyday problems can be really effective for social shares.
3. SEO Performance:
- Keyword Rankings: It’s a bit more in depth but tracks the position or ranking of your content in search engine results pages (SERPs) for targeted keywords. Using specific keywords in your content that are relevant to your product or service, should help you increase your results and ranking online.
- Organic Search Traffic: This is the traffic generated through unpaid search results, and one of our favourites. Any content should be SEO’ed prior to loading on to your website so you can optimise what traffic will find you for free in online search results.
4. Conversions:
- Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action like signing up for a newsletter, downloading a guide or visiting your website and making a purchase.
- Lead Generation: This is the number of leads generated through content forms or downloads. This is particularly helpful on LinkedIn or Facebook when using Lead Gen campaigns.
- Sales Attribution: You should always track marketing qualified leads through the sales funnel to see what results in a sale (be it online or offline with a sales team). Revenue can then be directly attributed to content marketing efforts.
5. Audience:
- Subscriber Growth: It’s a great idea to set targets around increasing your lead database with email subscribers or newsletter sign-ups.
- Audience Engagement: You should set goals for comments, replies, and direct messages should your content be distributed on your social channels.
6. Content Performance:
- Content Downloads: It’s simply measuring how many people download the content you’re providing like whitepapers and guides.
- Video Views: Tracking the number of views on video content hosted on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo is really important. It’s also great to track ‘complete views’ as then you know they’ve watched your video from start to finish.
7. Customers:
- Customer Retention: Keeping track of the percentage of customers who continue to engage with your brand after their initial purchase or interaction.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This is a biggie. Tracking their interactions and spend over a period of time will help you predict revenue you can attribute to a customer over their lifetime.
8. Sentiment:
- Surveys and Feedback: Qualitative (what people actually have to say) insights can be gathered through customer surveys, feedback forms, social media post comments or through social listening tools.
- Sentiment Analysis: An analysis of sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) expressed in comments, reviews, or mentions related to your content is great to track as you can address any issues you’re not directly aware of before they become larger.
9. Cost and ROI:
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA): Is a must when selling online products and store sales. It’s the average cost incurred to acquire a new customer through content marketing efforts. You will then know how much you’re prepared to pay on paid channels to get a sale.
- Return on Investment (ROI): This is the ratio of revenue generated to the cost of your content marketing efforts. By discovering your benchmark, you’ll then be able to address a bad ROI by reviewing every area you’re spending.
By regularly monitoring your chosen content marketing metrics, you can see the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement. Then you can make data-driven decisions to optimise your content marketing efforts for achievement of your marketing goals and measures of success.
How do you improve your content marketing and reach those KPIs?
Improving your content marketing efforts will require you to focus on multiple areas to enhance engagement, increase visibility, and effectiveness.
Here are five essential things you need to do to make your content marketing better:
1. Understand Your Audience:
Conduct in depth audience and persona research to understand your desired customer demographics, content preferences, online behaviours, challenges and pain points.
Once you’ve done this you can then create ‘customer personas’ to represent the different groups of your audience. Doing this will help you tailor your content to their specific needs and pain points.
2. Set Clear Objectives and KPIs:
You need to establish clear, measurable goals for your content marketing efforts. These should include metrics like increasing brand awareness (reach/engagement/recall), generating leads (lead gen rates), or driving sales (conversion rates).
By identifying the relevant metrics to your marketing challenge to track progress towards your goals will ensure you prioritise your efforts and allow you to report back on results to your team and managers.
It’s a good plan to compare your performance against industry standards and your marketing's past performance to identify areas for optimisation and improvements.
3. Create High-Quality, Valuable Content:
Ensure your content addresses the interests, needs, and challenges of your customer personas. When creating it, keep in mind the end user of the content - will they find this helpful, is this relevant and will they want to engage with it?
Be original and authentic with your content by giving unique perspectives, insights, or data that differentiate your content from your competitors.
You can do this by providing practical advice, solutions, or entertainment that adds value to your audience’s lives. Use visuals, like infographics, videos, and images, to enhance engagement and provide information effectively.
And then, most importantly you need to maintain a consistent publishing schedule to keep your audience engaged and build credibility as a reliable source of information.
4. Optimise Content for Search Engines (SEO):
By identifying relevant keywords and phrases your audience uses to search for content related to your industry or products, you will be SEOing the heck out of your content.
On your website, ensure you optimise titles, meta descriptions, headers, images and content structure to improve visibility in search engine results. Also, ensure your content is optimised for mobile devices to give the ever increasing number of mobile users an awesome online experience with your brand.
5. Promote and Distribute Your Content Strategically:
Distribute your content across multiple channels, including social media platforms, email newsletters, industry forums, and guest posting. You’ve spent time creating content, now make the most of your efforts by sending it out to industry contacts, and using the platforms that make sense and give you wider reach. Consider sharing your content through partnerships with influencers, industry publications, or content syndication platforms to reach broader audiences too.
Use paid advertising, including social media ads or search engine marketing (SEM), to amplify the reach of your top-performing content. Be sure to know that no platform survives on posts alone, there are thousands of businesses getting in front of us all by investing in ads to ensure we can see their awesome content.
Definitely participate in relevant online communities, forums, and groups to share your content and engage directly with your target audience in the space they’re comfortable in.
Continually monitor the performance of your content distribution efforts and adjust your strategy based on insights and feedback.
By focusing on these five key areas—understanding your audience, setting clear objectives, creating high-quality content, optimising for SEO, and strategic promotion—you can significantly enhance the effectiveness and impact of your content marketing efforts.
Need help with your content marketing?
We're really, really good at writing blogs and case studies that resonate with all types of audiences. Based on our easy to use briefing form you are able to brief us directly, we then review the brief and plan how best to incorporate best practice search engine optimisation (including keywords) and prepare your content for approval.
Your new content will aim to drive organic traffic to your website, position you as thought leaders and create brand awareness - powerful stuff!
Connect with us and find out more here.
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