How do you know if your content marketing efforts are paying off? Marketing is so much more than just creating and promoting interesting and good-looking pieces of content. Planning, designing and sharing marketing collateral is only half of a marketer’s job. The other half is monitoring the performance of shared content, by looking at key metrics, and then adjusting a marketing strategy with the findings. Here are five of the most important metrics to keep an eye on when executing content marketing campaigns:
Social reactions
Like, love, angry face, laughing face. How are your social followers reacting to the content you’re sharing with them? By mixing up the types of posts you share, as well as the frequency with which you’re sharing them, you’re bound to receive a mixed bag of reactions. If you track these post interactions carefully, over time you’ll get a clear picture of what types of posts your audience prefers – and which ones you should consider canning from your content marketing strategy.
Social shares
Social sharing is, like reactions to posts, an engagement metric every content marketer utilising social media marketing should be tracking. This is the holy grail of content marketing, because by sharing your post the reader trusts you enough as a professional thought-leader that they are willing to publically associate themselves with your content. When a follower shares your content, they award you access to their network of social connections, which greatly increases your content’s reach.