How Should You Be Evaluating Your Content Marketing Success?

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.

What Is Content Marketing ROI?

The term ‘content marketing ROI’ refers to a percentage which shows how much revenue you were able to gain from content marketing in relation to what you spent.

All marketers say that ROI is one of the most significant measures of successful content marketing as it’s directly linked to revenue. However, money can’t be your only measure of a successful content marketing strategy because if you’re not getting pageviews, shares – and if visitors aren’t engaging with your content – it’s highly unlikely that you’ll earn any revenue from it.

Once you’ve finished evaluating your content marketing programme, there’s one last thing which you need to do. Go back to the beginning. No, it is not necessarily for you to redo all the work, however you need to periodically revisit the strategic choices and then adjust based on the lessons which have been learned throughout the process. Only by handling content marketing as a cyclical and ever-evolving process are you able to truly keep your programme running at peak performance over the long term.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you want to become a content marketing expert then you need to do our Digital Copywriting and Content Marketing Course. For more information, please follow this link.