Return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important aspects or barometer of success. This is true for any activity, and a content marketing strategy is no exception.
Content is all around us, this article you’re reading, the social platform you discovered it on, and the platform you’ll share it on are all part of content marketing. As a business, content marketing can help you build and scale your brand by effectively connecting with your audience. There are several benefits of content marketing viz. building a solid audience base, generating leads, boosting brand visibility and more.
As a content marketer, it is crucial to know and measure if your content is working and producing the expected results. If yes, you can improvise on it. If not, maybe you need to revise the plan. All of this is only possible if you measure how your content is performing. Needless to say, there are several reasons why you should measure the performance of your content. However, before we proceed to that let us first understand the kind of content you should create as part of your content marketing strategy.
Content That You Should Create
It is important to create content that adds value to your content marketing strategy and eventually contributes to the ROI. Here are three things to keep in mind when creating content for your brand:
- Figure out which content works
There are innumerable ways to promote your business and engage your audience. Content that leads to higher engagement and conversion can help establish and position your brand better. However, the trick lies in figuring out which is the best one. Figuring out which type of content is performing well can help you create a strong strategy or tweak your current content strategy.
- Content that provides quality
Anything that does not add value — in life and in business — is easily forgotten. Whenever you create content for your business, it should be with an aim to add value to your audience. At the same time, it is important to measure which content piece performed the best, so as to enable and guide you on what kind of content you should create next.
Tracking and measuring engagements using tools like Google Analytics, FoxMetrics, etc. can be a great way to measure what content your followers prefer and if it’s in line with your business.
- Build upon content that already works
More likely than not, there will always be certain content pieces that will stand out from the rest. If these content pieces perform well repeatedly, you might as well convert them and repurpose them on different platforms. The idea of measuring and repurposing your existing content is that you need not always invent new strategies but only reinvent them.
If it was a blog post that went viral, you might convert it into a video, or an infographic and post on your other social channels. Chances are it might receive high engagement. Measuring how your content is performing enables you to zero-in the next steps in your already established content marketing strategy.
Reasons to Measure the Performance of your Content
As seen from the above points, the success of your content marketing campaigns depends on the effectiveness of your campaign viz. the efforts and their direction. After all, content that works eventually adds to the content marketing ROI. Hence it is crucial to analyse and measure the performance of your content marketing strategy from time to time.
Here are a few reasons to measure your content performance:
- Brand awareness
- Engagement
- Lead generation
- Measuring organic traffic
- Customer retention
- Upselling/Cross-selling
Metrics to Measure Content Marketing ROI
Now that we’ve figured out why it is critical to measure content marketing ROI, it is now time to figure out how to measure your content marketing ROI.
To measure content marketing ROI there are several metrics you may want to measure. We’ve listed the top 5 metrics that are the most helpful.
- Website Traffic
It is crucial to measure metrics that give insights into the behaviour of your website visitors. These include metrics such as bounce rate, read-time, sessions, views, and more. Tracking user activity helps you understand what is working and what needs to change, to make the most of your content marketing strategy.
Tools like Google Analytics, FoxMetrics, Matomo, Open Web Analytics and more are some popular tools to measure website traffic.
- Comments
Irrespective of a website blog post or social media platforms – comments are everywhere. The number of comments on your content piece can help you determine if your content added value to your audience. Comments also help you connect with your audience and build a level of trust and open conversation.
Also, keep in mind that your comment portals (for blogs and web forums) are simple and allow quick submission.
- Likes and Shares
Although comments may help indicate that your audience considers you an established thought leader in your industry, it is not always the only measure you can rely on. The reason for this is simple, comments take time and sometimes users only prefer to either Like or Share your content on social media.
Most social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. provide insights on how your content has performed, the social engagement, likes, shares, saved posts and more. Measuring this metric is a great way to know which type of content helps reach and engage more followers.
- Subscribers
If you run a blog or a youtube channel, you most likely know what a subscriber is. It is important to measure the overall subscriber count. However, it’s vital to know how many people signed up to be your subscriber after a particular post or video was released. This helps you measure the value of the content piece and also helps you in repurposing said content on various platforms.
- Email Click-Through Rate
Email marketing is an important measure when it comes to content marketing strategy, especially when it comes to measuring the performance of an email marketing campaign. That is, how many subscribers actually open the email and then go onto clicking the links. These links can either take subscribers to your website, blog or another platform. Measuring the click-through rate of your email and the link your subscriber clicks is a great way of knowing which content works well with your audience.
Analyse and Engage to Achieve Success
Content marketing is a wonderful way to engage your audience, and a good content marketing strategy can take your business places. Nevertheless, it is equally crucial to always measure how well your content is performing and if your return on investment is greater than your investment itself. After all, content marketing just like any other form of marketing requires substantial investment be it for running Ads, promoting posts, generating leads and more.
If you are still not measuring your content marketing ROI and performance, what are you waiting for?
If you have any questions, suggestions or comments please feel free to drop them below. For more on marketing tips, best practices, updates and information, head to our Marketing Blog category.
