How to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing

Do you know if your content marketing efforts are working? And how well are they working? Is there one form of content that elicits a better response from your readers? In order to answer these questions, you need a system to measure the results of your content marketing efforts. You need to identify the most important areas to measure for your business and which tools will accomplish this for you. First you need to identify the goals for your content marketing efforts. If you have clearly defined goals, this tells you what results you hope to achieve. These are the results you can measure to see if you're meeting your goals or not. There are three main areas of measurement – awareness, engagement, and conversion.

Awareness is who knows about you? Goals for measuring awareness track your reach online. They measure how many new people are coming into contact with your content. A few examples of these types of goals might be increase in traffic per stated period of time, social media likes and shares in a given time, number of new links built from authority websites and people recommending you to their friends

Engagement refers to who is talking about you. In addition to who is seeing your content, you also need to measure how much your audience is interacting with and engaged with your content. You need to consider the best way to evaluate whether people are actually reading or consuming your content. For this you could look at social media shares and comments, comments on blog posts or YouTube videos, online reviews of your products or services, webinar enrollment and comments or time spent viewing or reading your content. These are metrics that would show you that your content is not only reaching a large audience, but having the desired effect upon them.

The last key area is conversion. In other words, are people taking the action that you want them to take, such as signing up for your email list or purchasing a product? For each campaign, create a goal for conversions and track links and tags to see which content is bringing you these conversions. You can also run split-tests, which are tests where you run two versions of the same content with only one slight difference, and see which performs better.

In all of your goal setting, goals should be as specific as possible. Identify specific numbers and milestones for each. There are a number of different tools you can use for tracking. Start by looking at the analytics tools that are already available in the programs you're using. For example, most social media sites allow you to track some data, such as new followers and likes. Constant Contact and other autoresponder programs provide detailed analytics to help you measure your email marketing campaign. For your website, there's Google Analytics. For the sake of organizing and putting together a "big picture" view of your progress, create tracking spreadsheets to comprehensively measure and direct your content creation.

You should have one comprehensive integrated content planning template where you can see everything that's going on in one place. You should also make the content marketing results sheet mentioned earlier. Another important tracking sheet to create is an editorial calendar for your content creation and distribution. Other good tracking sheets to make include a social media strategy tracking sheet and a sheet for auditing your social media where you compare goals to results. Some templates can be found at Content Marketing Institute and Curata.

Tracking your content marketing is an ongoing job. You need to check regularly and this should be worked into your schedule. Set aside a time each week or whatever works for you to check your results. You may also want to schedule a big review on a less frequent basis, especially if you have many metrics to check. Your big review can be done to compare your results with long-term or overall goals. An easy way to work this into your schedule is to get regular automated tracking reports. These reports would be sent directly to your email so that you don't have to think about them. When you get your report, you can go over it. Check whatever software program you're using because many of them offer these automated reports. The time you spend in analytics will be time well spent. When you know what your return on investment is for each type or piece of content, you will know what you need to tweak in your content marketing strategy.

Start measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing now. You will know what you need to change or improve upon to be more effective.

Source: How to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing