Measuring the success of content marketing – key points to consider

Content marketing has been the talk of the town for a while now and is evolving as marketers’ go-to strategy. It has been producing sizeable results for companies, primarily by increasing awareness, driving engagement and generating leads through various content marketing activities. But the question is how many marketers know what actually it is or how to measure the success of content marketing beyond words? 

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategy to create, curate and amplify content for building advocacy and thought leadership which can directly result in achieving business and marketing objectives by influencing a set target audience. Content marketing is medium where we create and share the relevant information in the form of blogs, videos, images, articles, emails, etc. to promote a business or the services. 

After all, it doesn’t matter if the marketing campaign is innovative and out-of-box if it doesn’t bring business motives. Hence, it is imperative for brands and marketers to measure the effectiveness and identify the key performing areas of the marketing campaign. 

Here's a list of metrics and tools brands can keep handy to measure the success of any content marketing campaign: 

Website Traffic (Delta Change in Unique visitors) 

By the book, unique visitors are the distinct individuals requesting pages from the website during a given period, regardless of how often they visit the website. Mapping the total number of unique visitors is critical as it helps you understand the user journey from the content campaign. 

There are several analytical tools (like Google Analytics, Webtrends, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics) present in the market that help to ascertain this data and provide some additional information like page views, time spent on the website, bounce rate among others. This data is more than enough to calculate the required metrics and evaluate your marketing campaign. 

Social Media Metrics 

Social media holds a significant share in any marketing strategy because of the ease and freedom of reaching out to a greater audience. There are numerous softwares, like Meltwater, present in the market to calculate the relatable data like the online share of voice, reach and engagement. How well your content is performing can be measured by tools like Socialbaker, Trendspottr, Simply measured, Zoho social, Sprout Social, Social Mention. 

Feedbacks and Comments 

Every marketing campaign is aimed to engage and capture attention from the audience on a larger scale. A dream of every marketer is to have a flooded comments section and receive numerous feedbacks. So, considering the feedbacks in the comments section on your websites or other platforms is imperative to determine the success and relatability of your content marketing campaign. 

Lead Generation 

The business purpose of content marketing is to boost a brand’s visibility and to generate leads. Thereby, measuring the leads generated by your content marketing strategy is important to deduce the effectiveness of your content. According to a few case studies, 35 per cent of conversion done digitally is by writing and publishing quality white papers and educational blogs. 

Example: #ThankYoDoc is recently executed campaign for Bajaj Finserv. The campaign, as the name suggests, promoted and created awareness around the various loans provided by the country’s leading NBFC for doctors. The campaign generated more than 800 leads in two day, which resulted in expected business delivery of Rs 6.5 crore. 

Subscribers are the army of loyal followers who are responsible for taking your blog/ vlogs and other content pieces to heights. People don’t waste their time to subscribe a useless blog, so if someone has subscribed to a blog, it counts. And, you can easily measure the number of subscribers increased/ decreased after a content marketing strategy and infer the performance of your content. 

Closed-Loop Analytics 

When you go to your manager/ CEO and tell them about the success of your campaign, the question they ask is, by what percent have sales increased? Measuring sales and tracking every part of user’s buying journey is important and a tiring task. It takes up a lot of time and human resources until you are using content management tools like Hubspot, Marketo and Pardot. When you assess the closed loop analytics and sales generated by your content marketing campaign, you can give a verdict about how successful your campaign was. 

SEO Metrics 

How do you assess your content marketing efforts? In a simpler format, by evaluating the SEO results, a content marketing brand generates. If the content marketing efforts reflect on search engines like Google, MSN or Bing, it can be indicative of content marketing strategy's performance. If the campaign mention pops up in top two pages of search results, it can be considered as a good effort. However, if it lands anywhere beyond that, then it could be an indication that the brand's efforts are heading in the wrong direction. SEO is a strategy that helps you to top the search result and is essential for brand growth. SEO is also dependent on how good your content is and how many people are sharing, reading and clicking on your web pages, blogs or other content pieces. To measure the impact of SEO you can use tools like SEM Rush, Moz, SerpStat or GShift. 

Therefore, to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign, you can always analyse the SEO results. There are tools present in the market that enables monitoring performance and increase brand rankings. 

These are some ways that can help you measure the success of Content Marketing. Aside to this there are various content marketing tools for marketing automation, website analytics, social media management & analytics, funnel analytics, SEO analytics which can help you in driving business success via content marketing. 

People do not understand the importance of good quality content, and its impact on your business. Using above methods not only help in measuring success, but also what kind of content is best suited for a specific target audience. 

(Honey Singh is Co-Founder of #ARM Worldwide, and CEO - PR & Content Marketing. Singh has been a strategic counsellor and has delivered creative insight-driven consultancy for Fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups.)