The 4 Metrics for Measuring Your Company’s Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing strategies allow you to focus on creating and sharing valuable content with the goal of attracting your company’s target audience. While companies feel the need to share this content as fast as they can, it’s important to note that slow and steady will win this race. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reveals that over 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach their audience.

Types of content marketing include blogs, podcasts, e-books, emails, social media posts, infographics, videos, and more. This style of marketing can be integrated into other marketing campaigns — such as social media or public relations — as a way to enhance and strengthen the campaign. About 40% of marketers admit content marketing is a crucial part of their overall marketing strategy.

The key to distributing great content is to make it valuable enough for your audience to want to engage and share. It’s a promising way to build brand loyalty and increase sales. Here are the a few types of content marketing metrics you should be measuring to make sure you’re on track with your goals:

Consumption Metrics

The consumption metrics take into consideration viewership and/or access to your content. One way to view this key information is by using Google Analytics. It provides you with results on your website’s total unique visitors, number of times a page on your website is viewed and insight into average session duration. A session is a visit to your website – no matter how many pages a visitor has been on.

Other metrics of consumption include:

Pageviews- Understand how many pages were viewed on your website.
Downloads- Learn how many visitors filled out a form to access content on your website.
Video views- YouTube Analytics lets you view watch time, audience retention, demographics and more.

Engagement Metrics

Your engagement metrics tells you how appealing your content is to viewers and how often it gets shared. This helps to know where you stand with brand awareness and engagement. So, don’t forget, create content worth sharing! A tool you can use to track engagement is Sprout Social. It tells you how many likes per post and which posts got the greatest engagement and impressions.

Engagement metrics include:

Comments-Understand what type of content gets the most engagement. Social media algorithms reward this type of engagement.
Likes- Find out what has the greatest likes.
Tweets and pins- Learn what your Twitter audience finds appealing to them.
Inbound links- If you include inbound links in your blogs or social posts, how engaging was that CTA to get here?
Shares- See what posts or pages are getting forwarded and shared to friends, family or colleagues.
- Social shares
- Email forwards

Lead gen metrics

Lead generation (lead gen) is the process of creating consumer interest with the goal of turning it into a sale. These metrics help you with how often your content viewership results in a lead. With goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in place, planning and strategizing should be successful. Some lead gen goals may be to increase your marketing ROI or increase funnel conversion rates. A great tool to help you track these leads and detailed insights with HubSpot CRM.

Lead gen metrics include:

Form completion and downloads– Determine who converted for more content.
Subscription (emails or blogs)- Find our who’s interested. If your content is appealing enough, you can convert them into signing up for subscriptions that will provide them with more useful content.
Conversion rate- Pay attention to conversion rates. If your conversion rate for an individual piece of content is greater than your general conversion rate, you are doing something right.

Tip: Tie in your landing pages into social media posts and track them with a Bitly link.

Sales Metrics

Sales metrics and lead gen go hand in hand with measuring ROI. Like lead gen, sales metrics help you understand if you’re growing your business. While most content assets aren’t the last touchpoints before conversion, it takes an average of 24 touchpoints with a brand before someone decides to become a customer — and most of those are related to content.

These metrics include:

Online sales- Track your sale increase through e-commerce system.
Offline sales- Track your offline sales through CRM or URLS.

Along with sales metrics, make sure you track your customer retention. Customer retention is about meeting your customers’ needs by creating the best journey for them. You can measure this with metrics like repeat purchase ratio, loyal customer rate, time between purchases, product return rate, and other niche metrics.

Tracking these metrics of measurement for your content marketing strategies is the way to reaching your goals and converting your customers. Don’t worry about interpreting these metrics, let us help you with that! Appleton is an award-winning, full-service Orlando advertising agency that works with local, national and international clients to deliver impressive ad campaigns, branding, print, web, public relations, social media and video services — all in-house. At Appleton, we want to learn about your business, empower your marketing team and be your creative resource. Your advertising goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com.