How to Measure Content Marketing Success?

Did you know on average internet users spend 145 minutes per day using social media? And during this whole time, they watch hundreds of ads and content from various companies.

There are Google ads, social media posts, and blog posts from various businesses. They generate content to target their customers. Content creation helps in lead generation, conversion and building brand awareness, etc. Unique contents with clear messages impress customers faster.

It’s all about targeting them with relevant and engaging content at the right time through the right channel. Also, the content should fulfill their pain points at every stage of the buyer’s journey. 

But without the knowledge of content marketing measurement metrics, it is not easy to to monitor the performance of your content strategy and optimize for the future. So, more than 80% of companies use metrics to review their content marketing success.  

Determine What You Need to Measure

Before you decide on a content marketing metric, you must learn what you need to measure. Just because your competitor is using a metric, you need not use the same.

Every company works differently. So you need to research well and find out which metrics are suitable for your content marketing strategy.

If you feel lost, we recommend hiring a consultant to select the most relevant content marketing metrics for your business. If you don’t wish to do that, here is a framework you may follow to choose the right parameters.

Define Content Marketing Success

Think about the goal of your content marketing strategy. You must understand what do you mean by content marketing success? For example, your goal might be to sell a product to at least 100 customers in a month.

Alternatively, your goal might be to have a better brand visibility in social media or more. You need to understand your goals and then find out the right content measurement tools to measure them. 

Once you understand what are the requirements, you have to share the details with the marketing team. It will turn into your objective. Later, find out various content marketing measurement techniques to evaluate your goal.

Choose the Right Priorities

There are several things in your content marketing campaign which you may measure. The trick is to identify the significant performing areas according to the goal. Along with that, you also have to do content marketing measurement of other things.

Your metrics and KPIs must align with your content marketing goals. For example, your goal might be to get better brand visibility. However, you might want better brand visibility on Facebook. Perhaps, Facebook is the place where you will find all your target customers. 

So, you need to measure how your target audience is understanding your brand. One of the best metrics to understand this is to go through the comment section. Your target audience may leave a few comments after viewing a post about your brand. 

You have to find out whether their understanding of the brand aligns with your brand identity. In this way, you have to prioritize Facebook and find whether it is helping you achieve your ultimate goal.

Identify Benchmarks for Comparison

To learn whether you are going in the right direction, COMPARE! 

One of the easiest ways is to go for comparison is comparing content marketing measurements with the competitor. For example, you can select the posts where your competitor and your brand are promoting the same product or service. 

You may check the number of likes, comments, shares and views (if it’s a video) to measure the competitor’s marketing success. 

However, you need to ensure that there are a few similarities between the two companies. For example, if your competitor provides content marketing services like you, then it’s all right.

Define the Budget

Are you heading the digital marketing team? Then you should know the marketing budget by heart. In the future, this investment amount will show whether you got a better ROI.

After basics, you may focus on selecting suitable content marketing measurement methods. You may choose from basics to highly technical metrics. For example, for basics you may study the reviews, and for technical metrics you need to calculate the ROI.  However, we recommend a mix of both to get a better picture.

Now let’s look at some of the content marketing metrics.

Lead Generation

You must be wondering that sales or revenue is the most important metric, right?

But this isn’t the case for most content marketers. 

According to HubSpot, 63% of marketers consider lead generation a top priority.

Lead generation explains whether the company can generate enough sales and revenue. It will also show if it is following the Sales funnel properly to attract customers.

Having engaging contents on various platforms will work as lead magnets for your potential customers or leads. However, only having good content won’t do the trick, you have to use a few content marketing strategies to ensure that your content gets enough visibility. 

As more and more people learn about your content they will start engaging with your brand. However, it is essential that you use exact targeting so your content attracts the right people. You don’t want ladies interacting with a men’s perfume post. 

Lead generation metric will help you understand whether your contents are working or not. Engaging content will grab attention of the leads right at the awareness stage and build interest. 

Investment on Leads

Most companies go for marketing campaigns to capture potential leads. Marketing campaigns online or offline require some investment. So, a little calculation is necessary to find out how much it is spending per lead.

Are you spending way too much on a lead?

Then you need to re-evaluate the cost. In this way, the cost per lead needs adjustment all through the marketing campaign.

For calculation, check the investment on Facebook Ads. Divide the investment with the total leads obtained.

Whatever result you are getting will tell you about your ROI. It is always best if you are spending least to get more leads.

Image via Facebook Ads

The content also needs adjustment to get more leads.

The stellar way to judge the performance of the content is through the A/B method. In this, you select two pieces of content and present them to an audience. You choose whichever shows better results.

Reviews: Positive or Negative?

Getting an idea from the reviews of your content is also a content marketing measurement metric. The reviews and testimonials are what your leads think of your products or services.

Want to get more positive reviews? You need to have high-quality content. Having quality content increases engagement. The more people interact, the better are the chances of getting valuable reviews. 

User-generated content is essential for any brand. It shows the other users that the brand is trustable. If your content has positive reviews, it’s good. Nowadays, most people check the reviews before they purchase any good. So, positive reviews are an indicator of more revenue.

You can understand whether your positive testimonials are working by checking the number of views, profile clicks and lead generation. 

The number of views tell how many people interacted with your content. When they like the content, they will click on the profile to find more contents. And then they may turn into your leads. 

There are several tools that help in analyzing your reviews. For example, Spectoos testimonial platform manages the performance of reviews of your content. You can view the same in the dashboard. 

You may connect popular social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn etc. which usually gets higher reviews. After connection, it will start showing the performance of the reviews on posts and products. 

Image via SocialMediaToday

Even if there are a few negative reviews, take care of them. Here are a few things you may do to manage negative online reviews:

• Respond immediately
• Talk politely and professionally
• Take the issue in personal inbox
• Make a call if required
• If it’s a misleading review, request the user to remove them.

So, try to engage with people and let them create content or reviews. The more user-generated content you will have, the better for your business.

Website and Referral Traffic

Use Google Analytics to keep a look at the traffic on your website. It is one of the content marketing measurement tools that will determine how many potential leads are interested in your offers.

The higher the website visits, the better chances of converting them to customers. So, you need to have a daily look at the analytics.

Image via Google Analytics

If the number of website visitors is lowering, it will massively impact your content marketing strategy. So, keep on tweaking the content that is bringing leads to your websites.

Similarly, the number of likes, followers, and subscribers on your social media pages also impact the marketing campaign. These are the referral traffic. It includes Google Ads, Facebook Ads, posts on social media, backlinks from other websites, and more.

If your content and ads are working well, it will generate more leads. So, you shouldn’t miss this content marketing measurement tool as well.

Number of Email Subscribers

According to Content Marketing Institute, 87% of marketers invest in email marketing to share their content with their potential leads. So it is also one of the significant content marketing measurement metrics.

Moreover, the number of email users may rise over 376.4 billion by 2025, according to Statista. So, we can’t ignore email marketing. 

After content distribution through social media and ads, comes email marketing.

Potential leads subscribe to receive content from the company. So, click rates on links, opening rates, and more become essential metrics to judge content marketing success. You will find a number of email analytics software in the market

Mailgun Technologies is a popular free email marketing tool that helps in analyzing the email marketing metrics. Its free tools help you learn when someone clicks on the email and reads it. It also provides engaging and attractive templates. 

Return on Investment (ROI)

You can’t consider your content marketing campaign successful without calculating the ROI. This content marketing measurement tool helps you calculate the profit.

Here is the formula,

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Instead of the cost of acquiring a lead, you calculate the cost to acquire a customer in CAC. So, this is similar to the cost per lead metric. It is one of the most popular content marketing measurement metrics used around the world.

It determines whether the investment to get a customer is fruitful or not!

To obtain the customer acquisition cost, you need to divide the total investment by the number of customers acquired within a time frame.

It is a comparatively better content marketing measurement metric because it represents how much investment is necessary to get a customer on board.

Brand Signals

Brand popularity is another content marketing measurement metric. When a potential lead engages with any content you shared, he or she may google it.

So, track keywords that show your company’s information in Google. You may use portals like Ubersuggest to find out the volume of these keywords. The higher the keyword volume, the better is your brand visibility.

It will show that your content is improving your brand and adding towards the revenue. You may use Google Trends to keep track of the number of mentions over time.

Image via Google Trends

For example, after you publish content on a particular date, you may go to Google Trends and search a few keywords to check. It will show whether people are searching for your content.

Another popular content analyzer is BuzzSumo. You need to type your content’s or brand’s name. You may also try your brand’s hashtag. It will start showing all the contents with the key term in the search bar. 

In the view content section, you will also find out how many shares it has received in various social media channels. You can adjust the time period to get an exact idea of how your content is performing. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

1. How to track content marketing success?

Several free online tools help in tracking content marketing campaigns. In social media, you may take a look at the insights. For example, Instagram for business provides insights with every post.

Moreover, there are many paid website analytic software, email marketing software, and more. For example, HubSpot has an amazing marketing software to calculate metrics.

2. Which is the best content marketing measurement tool?

Content Marketing ROI formula is the best way to get an idea of your campaign’s success. It will show how much profit you have made over time. At the same time, you may rely on keyword research, competitor analysis and website analytics tools to get a clear picture. 

3. How to measure content quality?

After you share content, check how people are reacting to it. For example, in LinkedIn, after you publish an article, see the insights. Check if anyone is liking or writing comments.

If not, then the content quality is not good enough. However, it will work if you have a good number of followers.

At the same time, you can depend on your website analytics. Google Analytics is a good way to go. However, ensure that your website is connected with Google Analytics. In this way, you can check whether your content is working or not. 

4. Why do we need to measure content marketing success?

Not all content marketing campaigns work out. Every business has to deal with failures. Measuring the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) will show which places need improvement.

It helps the business learn to fix their problem areas. So, they do not face the same problems in the future.

5. How do you find out what people want to see?

By conducting free surveys, you can understand what customers want. Moreover, this will also educate them about your company. You may also try out Twitter Polls, Facebook live sessions and AMAs to learn more. 

Ready to Use Content Marketing Measurement Methods?

There is no ‘best KPI calculator’ in the industry. What works for one may not work out for the other. So, try to look at your company’s way of working to finalize the perfect metric. As mentioned, there are several content marketing measurement tools.

Measuring them will give you a better idea of how to do things in the future. Comparison with competitors will open doors to many new ideas. Therefore, keep a look at the insights every time you post something.

Do you use other metrics and tools to measure content marketing success? Let us know about them in the comment section.