Month: June 2017

Measure the Effectiveness of Content Marketing | Steven Krohn

Krohn Media 4 Comments

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Content Marketing Strategy

Measure the effectiveness of content marketing with the right statistics, analytics, and assessment of your strategy. It’s easy to write articles, share posts, use hashtags on Twitter, etc. but are you making a difference?

Content marketing includes creating a strategy, writing content, conducting consistent assessment and repositioning your strategy as needed. If you overlook any of these steps, you’ll fail to determine if you are reaching your target audience. Learn how to tell if your content marketing is working.

Changing Behavior in Your Customer

Your content marketing strategy is working if customers modify behaviors. That can be measured through conversion rates, sales, as well as new and repeat customers. When using a content marketing campaign, expect your online traffic to increase significantly resulting in appreciable sales growth.

When analytics are incorporated on your website, conversions are tracked on your behalf. Be sure to define a conversion properly. A conversion can be defined as a sale, download, click to your page, sign up, or any other metric you determine.

Question to Ask: Is customer behavior changing as a result of my content?

Always Ensure That Your Goal Was Achieved

Measurable goals should always be established in any content marketing campaign. Do you want to increase traffic to your site? Do you want to generate a specific number of sales or revenue? Are you creating brand awareness?

Always take time to measure your goal and determine whether it has been attained. Too often, people lose sight of the predetermined goal. Never lose sight of your goal!

If you own a law firm and are running a Facebook campaign, your goal might be to increase the volume of new clients. Facebook will track spending on campaigns as well as conversions. At that point, you can effectively analyze the value of the client versus the cost of the campaign.

Question to Ask: Am I maintaining focus on the original goal?

Check the Analytics of Your Content

Your content, analytics, etc. can effectively be tracked on free and/or paid platforms. An excellent tool to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing is BuzzSumo. It identifies which content is shared the most according to a set keyword or the domain of a site. Countless services are available that will determine your exact online ranking.

Question to Ask: Is my content getting shared or is it ranking by keyword?

Fall Back on Your Important Analytics

Make technology work for you. Track the analytics of your content marketing campaign. Hundreds of tools are available that provide you with analytics. How do you determine the most appropriate tool to measure your content marketing? We recommend tracking these metrics:

· Blogs: Total page views and engagement time. Blog posts are not always about driving sales. The purpose of this content is to communicate with your customer, creating a voice behind the brand. It’s also effectively used to share relevant information.

When someone spends a significant amount of time on your blog post, you are doing well. As your page views noticeably increase, be confident that your campaign is working effectively.

· Landing Pages: Buy in and conversion rates. A majority of companies use content on landing pages to stimulate conversions. Conversions provide email addresses, white paper downloads, informative brochures, etc. A high number of conversions indicate that your content marketing is quite effective.

· Social Media Posts: Click through rates, shares, and likes. Social media is vital in communicating with your clients and creating “noise”. When your content receives “likes”, “clicks” or “shares”, your posts will naturally appear in your follower’s feeds. The added exposure will result in exponential growth in likes, clicks and shares. Make it a habit to keep tabs on likes, clicks and shares as you track your social media content.

· Noteworthy Numbers: Cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA). When spending money on content marketing, these are two numbers you should concentrate on. Each industry, and marketing channel, is different when it comes to CPC and CPA. Continuously research industry averages to accurately measure your effectiveness.

Question to Ask: Am I considering the appropriate analytics for a specific content marketing channel? If the answer is yes, then am I satisfied with the results?

Conclusion

Importantly, don’t fall into the trap that content marketing is a silver bullet that leads to instant success. Your strategy will likely take a lot of time, effort and patience. That said, you will succeed with persistence and ambition. Use metrics advantageously, unceasingly know your goal and recognize customer behavior changes.

A content marketing strategy, centered on effectiveness, will produce excellent results. Utilize the above tips to measure the performance of your content marketing. By doing so, you will be putting your business on the path to a lasting success.

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Contact Steve (682) 593-3430, email steven.krohn@att.net or LinkedIn message.