It takes a lot of time and effort to create marketing content, so how can you be sure that’s time and effort well spent?
First, you have to lay out a strategy to try to create content that interests your target audience, on topics that have not been covered to death by your competitors. Then you have to distribute that content in places where your target audience is most likely to see it. But then there’s another step: trial and error.
Even if you do all your research and you’re as strategic as possible with your content marketing strategy, you could still miss the mark. Maybe you land on the target, but it’s not quite a bull’s eye. This is because research will tell you what most people think, feel, are interested in or motivated by, but it won’t tell you about your unique target audience.
For that, you need to build an audience, create content, and measure your results. Measuring your results requires monitoring your content marketing metrics, but you can’t use just any metrics. Some metrics will give you valuable information, while others make you feel good about yourself and your marketing strategy, even if they don’t point to any specific results your marketing efforts are generating (or not generating).
To help you avoid committing the same errors over and over again in your marketing content, I’m going to go over the content marketing metrics you need to track, and which ones you can ignore. I’ll also provide tips to help you tell the difference between them.
Table of Contents
- Brand Awareness Metrics
- Engagement Metrics
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Metrics
- Lead Generation Metrics
- Sales Enablement Metrics
- Which Content Marketing Metrics Should I Be Tracking?
- Questions?
Brand Awareness Metrics
Brand awareness is one of the main goals of marketing. Brand awareness metrics often get overlooked or dismissed as “vanity metrics,” but that’s not entirely fair. It’s true that brand awareness metrics on their own don’t tell the full story, and brand awareness does not always lead directly to sales — at least not right away. On the other hand, no one can buy from you if they don’t know you exist.
So, no, you should not rely exclusively on brand awareness metrics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, but you do need to track them. Knowing your brand awareness metrics gives you an idea of which strategies and tactics are getting you in front of the right people, and which ones lead to you just screaming into the void.
Brand awareness metrics can be divided into two different groups: social media and website. This means that, in order to get a full picture of how you’re increasing (or failing to increase) your brand awareness, your website people and your social media people need to be in conversation with each other.
Examples of Social Media Brand Awareness Metrics Include:
- Followers
- Impressions
- Likes
- Shares
Examples of Website Brand Awareness Metrics Include:
- Users — how many people visited your page
- Pageviews — the number of times your page was viewed
- Unique pageviews — the number of times a single visitor viewed your page
- New vs returning users — are you attracting new people to your website, or is it just the same people who already know you coming back again and again?
Social media metrics are pretty easy to track, since almost all social media sites provide them for you right there in your profile.
The website metrics can be a little trickier to track down and to separate brand awareness metrics from other types of metrics. When it comes to your website, you need to get comfortable with Google Analytics or something like it so you can see so who’s using your website and how they’re using it to determine whether your content marketing strategy is having its intended effects.
Engagement Metrics
The next step you want people to take once they become aware of your brand is to engage with your brand. If people are seeing your content, that’s great. That means you’re putting your content in the right places.
But if no one is engaging with your content, that means it’s not having an impact on them. They don’t find it interesting, or they’ve already seen it all before and they’re scrolling past your content to find something new.
As with brand awareness metrics, engagement metrics can also be divided into social media metrics and website metrics. Again, this is why it’s critical to have your website people and your social media people collaborating on projects and campaign analyses. Their effects are too intertwined to be conducted or measured separately.
Social Media Engagement Metrics Include:
- Click-through rate (CTR) — How many people click from the social media post (or your email) to your website.
- Comments
- Shares
- Mentions
Your social media channels should give you a good indication of your CTR, as well as comments, shares, and mentions. But it’s important to remember that you can also keep track of your CTR from social media through Google Analytics. It tells you how much of your website traffic came from social media, and from which social media channels. So if you want to get a good idea of which social media channel is getting the best results for your business, see which one is driving the most traffic to your website.
Website Engagement Metrics Include:
- Bounce Rate — the percentage of visitors who click through to your site only to leave immediately or almost immediately. Also keep track of what’s considered a normal bounce rate, because it’s probably higher than you think.
- Total Time Reading (TTR) — are they taking time to read your content, or are they glancing at it only to click away?
- Average Time on Site — similar to TTR, but instead of the total amount of time everyone spent reading your content, it gives you an idea of the average amount of time individual visitors are spending with your content.
- Inbound links — when you’re checking to see which social media campaigns are driving the most traffic to your site, be sure to check all your referral sources, especially if you’re running a linkbuilding campaign.
There are a lot of different things that can affect your website metrics. Content is one, but so is design and Page Load Speed, which is how quickly it takes your site to load when someone clicks on the link or even puts it directly into their browser. If it takes more than a few seconds, people are significantly more likely to click away.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Metrics
We all want to rank on the first page of Google, but that’s much easier said than done, especially if you’re in a competitive field. And of course, checking on the progress of your SEO strategy isn’t as easy as Googling your company, because it will always come up first when you search for your own company thanks to Google’s Personalized Search. Here’s what you need to look at instead:
- Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) — use an SEO tool, such as Serpstat, to get an objective view of your ranking.
- Backlinks — are high-quality sites linking to yours when you ask? Are they doing so even when you don’t ask? That’s an excellent sign that you’re establishing yourself as an authority in your industry, and Google will notice.
If you noticed I didn’t include domain authority in this list, it’s because your domain authority can’t tell you anything you won’t learn from your SERP or a backlink analysis.
Lead Generation Metrics
Once people know who you are, you need to lead those viewers through the buyer journey so you can turn them into leads, and eventually customers. That requires having a compelling call to action (CTA) attached to each and every piece of marketing content you produce and publish. It also requires you to measure whether and which of those CTAs are having any effect, and if so, how much of an effect.
This means some examples of your lead generation metrics could include:
- Newsletter subscribers;
- Webinar attendees;
- Book sales;
- Downloaded PDFs;
- Click-through rate — most likely from your email campaigns, but if you’re running ads on social media, you’ll also want to check the CTR of those campaigns.
Every step you want people to take towards buying from you needs to be measured and added to your overall content marketing metrics.
Sales Enablement Metrics
Finally, we get to the money! After all, the whole point of investing time and money into marketing is to drive more sales for your business, right? It probably won’t happen right away, but it should happen eventually if your marketing is doing its job. Keep an eye on these marketing metrics to see if your efforts are resulting in sales or just a waste of time:
- Requests — the type of request you want to get from your prospect depends on the type of business you run and your goals. It could be a demo request. It could just be a request to have a conversation with you to learn more … a conversation you or your team member can then leverage into a sale.
- Sales — if you’re selling something directly through your website, you can track how many people click the “buy now” button, or the percentage of people who view the sales page click the “buy now” button.
- Sales Cycle Length — Some industries have a longer buyer journey than others and there’s often little we can do about that. But if your content successfully educates your prospects and convinces them they need your product/service, you can shorten the sales cycle by addressing (and resolving) their objections before they even ask.
Which Content Marketing Metrics Should I Be Tracking?
Now that you know all about the different types of content marketing metrics, let’s talk about how you can determine which ones you should be tracking.
- Your Overarching Goals — what do you hope to accomplish for your company in the next 5-10 years? How do you want your brand to be perceived? Which content marketing metrics can tell you whether you’re accomplishing that goal? Are there any other metrics you should be tracking to measure your progress towards that goal?
- Your campaign goals — everything you do in marketing needs to have a goal. Ideally, your short-term goals should tie into your long-term goals, so keep that in mind when determining your goals for each marketing campaign you undertake. Then take a look at the metrics mentioned above and figure out which metric will best indicate your level of success towards reaching that goal.
Questions?
If you’re like me, writing a blog post sounds easy. If you’re like most of my clients, it sounds like something you dread more than cleaning your toilet.
Regardless of which camp you fall into, it can be hard to come to terms with the fact that writing the blog post is just one step in a long, complicated marketing campaign.
If you find any of this overwhelming, you’re far from the only one. Just reach out if you have any questions, because I’m always happy to talk about content marketing strategies and metrics.
If you liked this content and you’d like to receive more of it, you can sign up for our newsletter in the space below to make sure you never miss an update. You can also see what we’re up to by following us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
