7 Crucial Metrics for Measuring Your Content’s Success [With Infographic]

Customers are the lifeblood of any business.

While customer retention is vital to your success, it is equally important to attract new customers. Therefore, business owners should make customer acquisition a priority. The question is, then, how can you acquire new clients or customers in the literal and or virtual door?

Traditionally, sales teams contact potential customers by sending them emails, calling them, or talking to them in person, depending on the type of business you have. This approach can be effective but is it the best use of your employees’ time?

Many successful businesses have realized that customers would instead come to them vs. going to them. An inbound marketing approach coupled with a content marketing plan can help you achieve this.

This is an excellent path for most businesses. However, you need to see a return on investment when integrating a content marketing campaign into your overall strategy.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is an online marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing content online to increase awareness and generate interest in your company and products.

I mentioned earlier that salespeople interact with potential customers multiple times. Why? So your brand can be top-of-mind when your potential customer is ready to become a customer.

Content marketing aims to accomplish the same thing, but more efficiently. You can make your business the “go-to expert” in your field by creating content, whether it’s blogs, videos, or posts on social media — you become the brand that people think of when they have a problem to solve.

As important as this is, content marketing works in another vital way.

What do you do as a consumer when you have a problem with your product? You can ask Google to solve your issue if you’re like millions of others — the search engine will guide you to the correct answers, even though you may not know how to explain exactly what’s wrong.

Content marketing is a way to answer your potential customers’ questions about the problems they’re trying to solve.

Does this work? The Content Marketing Institute found that content marketing leaders see nearly eight times as much site traffic as non-leaders.

Do you need more proof? Demand Metric found that content marketing is 62% cheaper than outbound marketing and generates three times more leads. Check out the infographic at the end of this post for more data.

What are content marketing metrics?

Is content marketing is a viable strategy for your business? Probably. But it takes energy and time and energy to plan and the resources to execute. As with any strategy, you need to ensure that your efforts are rewarded with a healthy return-on-investment (ROI).

You will need to be familiar with content marketing metrics to do this. These numbers will enable you to assess whether your current approach is having an impact, if you need to change it, or if it isn’t working and you need to adopt another approach.

Content marketing success metrics

You can use many metrics to assess whether your content marketing efforts have made enough impact to justify the cost. However, only a few of them are truly essential. These numbers will help you gain a better understanding of your performance.

How to measure content success

1. Traffic Sources

It’s fantastic to discover that people are reading your content. But how did they find it? A truly successful content marketing plan will attract new potential customers by producing engaging content. It may also boost engagement with your current audience and customers on the fence by creating repeat business and helping you stay top-of-mind in your industry.

Either way, it’s vital to track how visitors make their way to your content. You can use platforms such as Google Analytics to find traffic sources for your website or blog.

2. Impressions

How is your content fairing? Does Google recognize that you are the “answer” to users’ problems? Google Search Console shows you how many impressions your content receives. More impressions = more people reached.

3. Click-through-rate (CTR)

While impressions or views are essential for your content, you need to monitor your click-through rate (CTR) to understand whether or not your content is effective.

Your content may be viewed or consumed by more people, but are they taking action as a result? For example, are they visiting your website? Are they checking out your products? You’ll gain insight by understanding your click-through rates.

Hopefully, you’re creating good content. But is it good enough for people to share with others? Your content’s true test is whether people find it interesting or valuable enough to share it with their own audience.

Another benefit is that the more you share your content, the more Google considers it a “solution” and shows it to more people. Shares are easy to determine if you post via a social media publishing platform. For blog content, you can use a tool such as BuzzSumo or Ahrefs.

Tracking these 7 crucial metrics can show you how well your content is performing in organic search results. Click To Tweet

5. Email opt-in rates

It is essential to measure click-through rates to determine if readers take action on your content by visiting your site. If they don’t purchase right away, are they signing up for your mailing list and allowing you to connect with them in the future?

If your content marketing is doing its job well, your readers will feel comfortable sharing their contact details with you. They may also be more likely to purchase your product or services in the future. Your email marketing platform tracks this metric.

6. Bounce rate

In an ideal world, when people land on your website, they’ll take some time to explore your content and buy from you. But, sometimes, you might see a high bounce rate if people navigate away right after landing there. This could be because of slow loading, poor user experience, or expecting different content than what’s there.

It’s important to understand your bounce rate and what’s causing it — this will help you avoid putting time and effort into creating quality content only to discover that your website is turning off potential customers.

7. Keyword rankings

Content marketing involves choosing the right keywords to reach your target audience. The fundamental question is, “What are your potential customers looking for on Google?” Once you have this information, you can leverage it to create your content and, hopefully, gain more customers.

Keywords change over time, so you need to ensure that your efforts are successful. You can review keyword rankings with SEMRush or Google Search Console and adjust your keywords or content when it isn’t performing well.

Use a content marketing dashboard

You can organize your data and metrics by creating a content marketing dashboard that displays the most current visuals of the key metrics your team should be tracking. Content marketers can better achieve and surpass their goals if they are clear about them.

Your content marketing goals will determine the ideal content marketing metrics to track. For example, you will use different metrics if you want to increase brand awareness than if your primary goal is to increase sales or turnout at your next event.



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