6 Ways to Determine if Your Content Marketing Team is Delivering Results The key is in knowing your marketing goals and whether you've reached them.
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You know content marketing drives success both online and offline. But how are you supposed to tell if it's working so you can improve your content marketing efforts? And if you can't tell, then how can you justify continuing to sink any part of your marketing budget into creating, publishing and promoting your content?
After all, resources are finite. You, as the founder, CEO or CMO of your company, must make some hard decisions about where to allocate those limited resources such as money, time and attention.
Related: Here's How to Improve Your Business's Content Marketing
How clear are your content marketing goals?
So, the bottom-line question you need to answer is: How can you tell if your content marketing team is succeeding? Yet asking that question simply begs another one: Succeeding at what, exactly?
You can measure content marketing performance through any number of metrics, including KPIs and ROI. However, first and foremost, it requires clarity around your goals. Why did you invest in content marketing in the first place? Those goals can include any of the following:
- Generating and capturing more qualified leads
- Enhancing or improving your company's brand reputation
- Bringing more targeted traffic to your website
- Promoting specific new products
- Prompting higher customer engagement rate
- Increasing customer loyalty
Additionally, make sure you've clearly communicated those goals to your team. After all, you can't blame someone else for not reading your mind, right?
With that in mind, let's examine some of the best ways to evaluate the results your content marketing team is delivering.
What's happening with your site and social metrics?
In and of themselves, site metrics don't necessarily convey useful information. As with all metrics, you need to consider the entire picture of how users interact with your site, content and social media accounts. That's when you can get a fairly reliable sense of how well your content marketing team is doing in pursuit of your goals. And that is why it's important to look at basic site and page metrics. These include the total number of unique visitors to your page, the pageviews and unique pageviews your site attracts and the sources of that traffic.
Also track your content's impressions and click-through rate (CTR) metrics over time. These metrics are available through Google Search Console. Like every metric and KPI you might use to evaluate your content's performance, CTR and impressions won't paint the complete picture of how well your content marketing team is meeting its goals. It does, however, illuminate where specific tweaks should be made.
For example, if you're seeing a high impression rate but low CTR rates. There may be a disconnect between the promise of the content's headline and snippet text and the degree to which the content itself delivers on that promise. At least in the eyes of the user. If you're seeing high CTR but low impressions, there's room to improve in your content promotion efforts.
Related: If You Want People to Actually See the Content You're Creating, Follow These Steps
How is your content ranking for your primary keywords?
Many CMOs and CEOs consider ranking highly in organic search results (that is, the results in Google or other search engines that are not paid ads) to be the Holy Grail of online marketing. It's important to realize that no content marketing professional can guarantee you that result. However, it's certainly reasonable to expect new content pages to be indexed by the search engines and for optimized content pages to improve their position in SERPs (search engine results pages).
There are many tools available that can help you track your SERPs performance, including in Google Search Console. Implement one of these methodologies and check those rankings regularly as part of a more comprehensive SEO strategy. That strategy should also include creating more polished, useful content. Also, mapping your overall content keyword usage to make sure that content is highly aligned with the user's search intent.
How do your users behave on site and on social media?
Tracking user behavior metrics in a vacuum won't really give you the whole story. Instead, look at them in the larger context of user engagement and content success. Let these metrics help you fill in the details of your analysis:
- New unique visits: Is your content drawing in new visitors to your site?
- Bounce rate: Do new and returning visitors find what they're looking for on your site and hang around to read more, or do they bounce quickly?
- Time on page: How long are your users staying on any specific page of content?
- Pages per session: After consuming a specific piece of content, do your users then check out other pages on your site? How many pages on average do they look at?
You can find this information in your site analytics reports.
On social media, look at how many times users share your content and interact with it. Likes, retweets, shares by reposting and comments all indicate that your content is reaching an audience and evoking a response.
Are you generating more leads?
Of course, you don't just want any response. You want the right kind of response, from the right kind of user. Additionally, you need some mechanism in place to capture key information from those leads. That information should include at a minimum the user's name and email address, but may also require additional data such as location. For B2B brands, you may also want to capture the user's industry, size of company and specific role within the company.
Your targeted audience includes your potential leads and future customers. That's if you can keep converting them and moving them through your sales funnel efficiently. To evaluate how well your team is performing in lead generation, look at the data from all of your sign-up forms on every applicable page and track those numbers over time. If you're generating more leads, your content team is most likely doing its job.
Are your conversions increasing?
Finally, the ultimate metric that matters to every business is how well your content marketing is persuading readers to continue in the customer journey. Your conversion rate is about that next step, whatever it might be. From email sign-up to downloading a free white paper or discount code. All the way through to registering for a free trial or making a purchase.
What counts as a conversion is wholly up to you. But whatever it is (e.g., through a sign-up form for your email list), it's important to designate it. Then establish the mechanism to enable that conversion, as well as the metrics and analytics that help you track that conversion rate over time.
Keep the end results in mind
Measuring your team's performance can be as complex or as simplified as you decide to make it. Throughout the process of creating your plan for evaluating that performance, be careful not to choose metrics simply to pad a report. Every metric should support your objectives and deliver actionable insights that help you optimize your content marketing plan for the best possible results.
Related: The 7 Things Successful Content Marketers Do Differently
