Content marketing is one of the hottest things in digital marketing and SEO. So much so that content marketing services are now on the menu for most digital marketing and SEO agencies. Here is the big question for organizations utilizing such services: is my content marketing achieving anything meaningful?
All things digital marketing and SEO should produce some sort of value. The only way to know if such value is being realized is to measure results. So how does an organization measure the success of its content marketing efforts? It depends.
Start With the Goals
It is impossible to measure the success of an organization’s content marketing services without first knowing the goals being pursued. Think of it like the sport of running. In a quick dash around the track, speed wins the day. But in a marathon, it’s all about endurance. Different goals dictate different ways of measuring.
Content marketing is a strategy that can be leveraged in many different ways. It can be used to achieve a variety of goals. Sometimes it is just one goal while other times a marketer is pursuing several goals simultaneously. Figure out the goals and measuring success suddenly becomes clear.
5 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success
I asked my friends over at Webtek Digital Marketing how they measure the success of their content marketing services. As a Salt Lake City, Utah digital marketing agency, content marketing is a big part of their operations. They returned an answer with a long list of assessment strategies, including these five:
1. User Engagement
One of the primary goals of on-site content is to engage with users. You want them engaged enough to make a positive decision, whether that means buying something, making a donation, or signing up for a newsletter. How do you measure success with this sort of thing? You track the amount of time spent on a page, what users do while on that page, and so forth. Tracking social media shares in comments also helps.
2. Customer Conversion
Content marketing is differentiated from SEO via conversion rates. SEO drives traffic while content should convert at least some of that traffic into paying customers. So if increasing sales and revenues is the goal, an easy way to measure content marketing success is to look at conversion rates. Is content contributing to more customers buying more products or services?
3. Search Results
When content is leveraged mainly as an SEO tool, the main goal is to drive traffic. That is easy enough to measure just by looking at search data. Figure out how much organic search traffic is being produced by your content, and you can easily measure that content’s SEO effectiveness.
4. Social Engagement
Webtek reminded me that plenty of agencies combine content marketing services with social media management, the goal being to boost social engagement with high quality content. Measuring success is a matter of tracking social media likes, shares, and comments. If content seems to be resonating with followers, it is likely doing its job.
5. Brand Awareness
Lastly, content marketing may be used as a tool for increasing brand awareness. Although measuring success is a bit more difficult here, it can be achieved by tracking brand recognition by way of backlinks, brand mentions on other sites, and similar references.
Content marketing services are such that they can be leveraged to accomplish multiple goals. They should be measured to determine whether they are succeeding. Measurement criteria are determined by what marketers hope to achieve. Figuring that out might be the most difficult task of all.
