One of the best ways for your brand to establish authority and better connect with audiences is through content marketing. You’ll not only build a reputation but also increase your brand awareness and successfully boost revenue. 

The key point to all this is understanding what metrics you need to track and why, this in turn, will help you figure out whether or not your strategy is effective.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of content marketing strategy, so that you can rest assured that your content marketing efforts are using data-driven insights that lead to results. 

What is content marketing and why is it important?

Let’s take this step to fully understand what content marketing is all about. 

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First off, content is made up of many different formats which include email marketing, video, ebooks, social media, and blog posts, to list a few.

Marketing content involves many moving parts that all connect and help to do one thing, get your brand’s message out there clearly and engagingly. 

Content marketing as a whole leans more toward the “educational” and brand awareness side of the marketing funnel and is more about opening the room up to have a conversation instead of going straight for conversion. With that in mind, it’s the initial part of the funnel and must be executed properly for everything else to work seamlessly.

Set Goals for Your Content 

If you want to know how to measure the effectiveness of content marketing strategy then your first port of call is to set some goals for your content. 

You should always have a strategy in place for your content marketing, as it will help you measure your ROI. Do you want to drive sales, generate more leads, enhance brand awareness, or create more brand trust and social-proof? Your goals will determine what metrics you need to focus on and measure.

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For example, if one of your main goals is to generate leads then you’ll want to measure email sign-ups or form submissions, whereas if your goal is to enhance your brand’s overall awareness then you’d be better off focusing on data such as follower growth and engagement.

Most brands will have multiple goals for their content marketing, but the important part is to understand which ones are your priority. This part is vital to creating a content marketing strategy that is effective and drives results.

Identify Your Target Audience

The next step is to identify your target audience. Understanding who you targeting will help you better craft your content and speak directly to them, instead of hitting “publish” and hoping for the best. 

The best way to identify your target audience is to analyze social media and website analytics and use data-driven research to form a user persona. By focusing on the data you can gain important insights into your audience’s interests, behaviors, location, and even preferences. 

It’s important to remember that your audience can evolve and shift, especially if your brand is going through a transitional period. Even pop culture and trends can alter your audience! This means that you’ll want to take time to assess the data routinely and adapt your content marketing strategy so that it continues to generate results.

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Choose the Right Metrics

Now that you have a clear idea of your goals and target audience, it’s time to choose the right metrics. Your choice of metrics should reflect your strategy goals and will be the key determinator as to whether or not your content efforts are successful. 

There are four key types of metrics you can measure for content marketing:

• Consumption metrics: This data shows how your audience is consuming content. Examples include time on the page, unique visitors, website traffic, page views, and bounce rate.
• Engagement metrics: This data is routinely measured on social media as it encompasses how people are interacting with your content in the form of shares, clicks, likes, and comments.
• Retention metrics: This data shows you who out of your audience is returning to consume your content. 
• Conversion metrics: This data gives you insight into what actions your audience is taking after consuming your content in the form of revenue, leads, and sales.

Analyze Your Competitors 

A great way to gather insight on what strategy tactics work well in your industry is to research your competitors, or in other words, undertake a competitive content analysis. This can help look at the competitors in your industry and see what content they’re delivering and how people are responding to it. You’ll also gain insight into your competitor’s pros and cons and see where your company stacks up and how you can provide a better service that outshines them.

In short, it’s much easier to look around and see what things are working for your competitors and what aren’t because it allows you to learn fast and gain important insight into what you need to spend more time and energy on in the short term.

Track Your Progress 

Next, you’ll want to schedule routine blocks in your calendar where you can analyze your content marketing data. You can do this either weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. 

This step will help you understand how your content is performing and identify patterns. There are a variety of tools that you can use to analyze this data, and you can do so in the form of reports, graphs, and charts. 

It’s important to focus on the metrics that are aligned with your original content goals.

Adjust & Optimize Your Strategy

Lastly, you’ll want to use the insights gained from analyzing your content marketing data to optimize and adjust your strategy. By undertaking data-driven research you should be able to identify what’s working and what isn’t, thus letting you know what needs to be improved. 

You can also do A/B split testing to see what your audience responds best to. For instance, you can experiment with different headlines, channels, keywords, content topic formats, etc. The best thing you can do is to keep testing, learning, and measuring to improve your content marketing results over time.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to measure the effectiveness of content marketing strategy you can track your content performance and make sure you’re maximizing your ROI. 

By doing so, you’ll be able to identify which type of content is working and resonating positively with your audience, and at the same time, it will give you a really clear picture as to what pieces are flopping.

The most important takeaway is to make data-driven decisions. By doing so you’ll fast be on your way to achieving your content marketing strategy goals.