Apparent overnight success can be years in the making and this is equally true for content marketing. However, measurable and demonstrable results are always top of most marketing departments agendas, so how do you go about reporting on your content strategies performance in a meaningful way from the start?
It’s important to know if people are commenting or voting on your content, if they are reviewing or rating. Are they sharing your content and creating a viral effect? This then feeds into brand impact – how often are people mentioning your products, brand or business, what is the online brand sentiment? What’s being said about your competitors and how does this relate to your brand?
The main social networks have analytics built in; Facebook Insights breaks down the performance of your posts, Twitter Analytics breaks down timeline activity and engagement rates. AllMyPlus.com provides full metrics on your Google+ posts and LinkedIn has its own dedicated analytics tab.
This enables you to easily see which content is proving to be the most compelling and update your delivery strategy accordingly on the fly.
Because clicks, open rates, page views, sentiment, sharing and so on are all straightforward to measure it’s all too easy to get caught up in stats for consumption and sharing of content. These have their place, but it’s ongoing levels of sales engagement that you should be focused on – in short, good old ROI.
Leads and sales are the results that show real business benefit and will make your strategy sustainable.
Getting these numbers is of course more challenging, but if you set up your metrics from the get go you’ll have a more meaningful picture in the long run through sourcing leads and tracking conversions. Google Analytics will help you understand traffic but to measure ROI you then need to draw that traffic into a CRM programme.
The best way to achieve this is to employ data capture to convert traffic into customers. If you think of the traffic drawn to your content as leads, then additional compelling content can be used to encourage the leads you have generated to provide more information about themselves so that you can begin to track their behavior in much more detail convert them into customers.
Now you can see how many purchases your content marketing has driven, the average sale value, the average ROI per content consumer, the conversion rate and so on. You can also start to make some informed decisions about when to contact these customers, what to talk to them about and their potential value.
Always remember that your content market strategy needs to work hand in hand with your wider brand and marketing strategy. Nothing exists in isolation and your content strategy should be working to bring you closer to that all important single customer view.
By Roj Whitelock, Creative Director at Jacob Bailey
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Digital Marketing Show Content Masterlcass, 2nd May, Ravensbourne College, London.
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