How To Optimise Your Content Marketing Performance

Say ‘content marketing optimisation’ and most marketers instinctively think about search or perhaps social media. Even Gartner defines content optimisation as the process by which content providers improve search results as well as ranking. In addition, providers improve their content’s value with the use of content management automation which enables them to develop new pages on-the-fly.

While this definition is good, it doesn’t go far enough to support your digital marketing because content delivered via connected devices and digital media of all types have evolved beyond information that’s only sought and delivered through search.

Why Measure Your Content Marketing

Measuring the performance of content helps with maximising sales leads, conversions as well as return on investment. Incorporating measurement into your content marketing strategy seems like an easy win. After all, measuring your content marketing allows you to:

• Understand how specific assets are performing
• Learn which pieces of content relate naturally to one another
• Test and validate where content needs to be placed in the buyer’s journey
• Determine which metrics determine the most accurate performance of content
• Understand all possible paths to ROI/conversion in order to inform future content marketing plans

While knowing the advantages of a measurement plan is vital, the power of optimisation is realised in its approach.

In order to successfully create as well as deliver content, you need to design a plan which generates visibility into how content types perform within specific segments, channels as well as positions in the buyer’s journey.

We have elected to break this plan down into two parts.

1. First, determine the most appropriate metrics for each piece of content, establish benchmarks/goals, and then continuously measure performance against these marks. This gives you the opportunity to understand the impact of each asset.

In addition, you should look at your aggregate assets in each phase of the buyer’s journey. This data assists with identifying a return on your efforts by journey phase.

2. Second, understand an asset’s impact on conversion rates. Measure if a specific piece of content leads audiences to the next phase of the buyer’s journey.

Listen And Learn

While it’s important to gather quantitative data in order to validate your content’s value, you are also able to gauge your content’s impact through listening to the conversations around your brand. This includes social media conversations. This direct and unsolicited feedback can be invaluable to understanding if your content is reaching the correct audiences, how well it’s being received as well as what you can do in order to boost the value of your publishing efforts.

Through integrating a measurement strategy into your content marketing efforts, you will be able to generate visibility through data to assist with facilitating content delivery in a way which generates the largest number of high-quality leads and gives your sales team the opportunity to be able to effectively nurture them. Ultimately, data will equip you with power — the power to make and confirm the required marketing decisions, and the power to take advantage of market opportunities prior to your competitors even noticing them.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to become a content marketing expert? If you do then you need to do our Digital Copywriting and Content Marketing Course. Follow this link to learn more.