How Can Content Marketing Get Closer To Accountable Results?

As the globe slips into a severe recession, brands and their stakeholders are looking to trim the fat wherever possible. One of the first things to get the chop is that alleged nice-to-have in the marketing mix: content marketing. Why is it difficult to measure content marketing success, and are there a few ways that digital marketing managers can track the performance of content marketing campaigns? This article answers both of these questions, and gives you a chance to get formally qualified in the content marketing field:

Why It’s Hard To Track Content Marketing

• You Can’t Make Predictions About Performance
  

  Because of content marketing’s freshness, it is difficult to predict just how the readership is going to respond to the content. An added challenge is the lack of standardised success measurements that vary quite starkly from industry to industry.

   

• Content Marketing Doesn’t Succeed Overnight

Some marketing agencies advise clients that top-funnel metrics can only hope to see improvement after at least six months and that bottom-funnel output takes at least a year. Decision-makers don’t like seeing stagnation, and often kill campaigns before enough data can be collected.

How To Hold Content Marketing Accountable

What you can do is set a digital goal for your content marketing campaign, like acquiring sign-ups for a monthly mailer initiative. If you set up a quality landing page on the company’s website, driving traffic to it could be the goal through which you judge the success or failure of your campaign.

1. Social Engagement
   

   Excellent content is sharable content, and one place countless brands disseminate their content is on social media. The way followers interact with the content when exposed to it (like love, comment, share) will say a lot about if the content is resonating with the audience at large.

    

2. Website Traffic
   

   In the monthly mailer example from before, a company could put out a blog article and give readers the option to receive regular industry updates by clicking through to the landing page. Google Analytics can then be used to track these website visits should the content have been compelling enough.

    

3. Attribution
   

   Staying on Google Analytics, a business can see how online visitors interact with the website. It can tell where the visitors clicked after reading the blog article; whether or not they found out more about the company on the “about us” page; if they looked at the products and services pages; if they made an online purchase.

Used in almost every variation of content marketing is copywriting, and you don’t have to be talented with the pen to get into it!

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

This fundamental content marketing proficiency can be yours with our accredited National Diploma in Copywriting. You’ll learn, among other topics, creative writing for advertising, writing techniques, lateral thinking, and the principals of persuasive copy.