What does it mean when you say that your content marketing is ‘working?’ In general, this means that it’s supporting your marketing as well as your business goals. More than 80% of organisations use metrics in order to determine how well their content is performing. This shouldn’t come as a great shock because any good marketing tactic has to be measured consistently in order to make sure of its effectiveness.
Decide What You Should Be Tracking
Although you are able to measure just about anything these days, it doesn’t mean that you should. Metrics can quickly get to the point where they are all-consuming and confusing – particularly if you gauge performance against far too many goals.
In order to optimise the time that you spend on metrics, begin with a few measurement fundamentals, such as:
- Outlining your organisation’s definition of content marketing success so that everybody on your team intimately understands what their efforts are meant to accomplish.
- Identifying your top performance priority areas – based on the content marketing goals which are most important to your business – in addition to the various metrics which you can track in order to measure for them.
- Creating performance benchmarks for content in your industry in order to enable easier analysis – as well as comparisons – to be made across all your efforts.
- Calculating the baseline costs that are involved in executing on your content plan in order to effectively gauge content marketing ROI down the line.
When you master the basics and your programme grows increasingly sophisticated, expand your focus in order to incorporate additional data points – and more advanced analytics techniques – into your measurement efforts.
