Content Marketing is huge. If you haven’t read much about it, there are lots of articles about the value of content marketing and these days, SEO is actually all about content marketing. Content marketing provides great ROI and content marketing will generate leads. Pretty much every B2B has some sort of content marketing strategy. All the cool kids are doing it.
But...
How Do You Know if You’re On the Right Track with Your Content Marketing?
Are you just wasting your time and money?
There are lots of factors to consider with your content marketing. First and foremost, think about your business objectives. Any great marketing strategy starts with the overall business goals. What are you trying to achieve as an organization? Your marketing goals need to work hand in hand with those overall goals. You should always have SMART marketing goals that are working directly towards achieving your business goals.
Those goals should guide your measures of success within your entire marketing program and especially within your content marketing strategy.
Maybe it’s difficult to get those goal solidified. If you feel like you’re struggling with your overall content strategy, you’re not alone. According to Altimeter, 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy. The Accenture Digital Content Survey reports that 81% of marketers say that their organization is producing moderate or enormous amounts of digital content and assets, but less than 1 in 5 marketing leaders think they are managing content well.
Simple Content Marketing Success Measurement
OwnerFuel offers a simple measurement for content marketing success.
“I have 317,000+ followers on Twitter. When I tweet a link there, I get fewer than 20 clicks. I have 36,000 newsletter subscribers. If I put a link in the newsletter, THOUSANDS of people click. Where should I spend my time, do you think, based on the above?”
Now, if those clicks are all equal, obviously email is the better platform. But, consider your goals. And consider what those users are doing. I would much rather have 20 sales qualified leads than thousands of garbage website visitors.
Bottom Line – Is Your Content Marketing Increasing Revenue?
That’s the magic ticket, right? Everyone wants to go to that bottom line metric and draw straight lines from every marketing initiative to that bottom line revenue. In an ideal world, that would be possible. But, since we live in our actual reality and not the ideal, we have to work with the messiness of attribution.
Is Your Digital Marketing Working? Find out with our 2016 Digital Marketing Checklist.
To measure the effectiveness of your content, you need to take a good, hard look at each stage of the sales funnel. How much traffic is being pulled in by your top of funnel content? Look across all channels, not just your website. How much social reach does your content get? Is it liked, retweeted, shared, commented on? These are all metrics you should measure for the effectiveness of your content.
Look at the middle of the funnel. Is your content generating leads? Are your users opting in to receive your content? Most industries see around a 30% conversion rate from traffic to leads. In other words, if you get 1000 visitors to your website each month, 300 of those should convert to leads or subscribers. These aren’t your marketing or sales qualified leads, these are just the basic lead subscribers. Maybe they’ve signed up for your newsletter, maybe they’ve subscribed to your blog. They’re just basic leads.
At the bottom of your sales funnel, you’re looking for conversions from lead (ideally, you’ve established lead scoring and your conversions come from your sales qualified leads) to customers. Is your content encouraging conversions at the very bottom of the funnel. This can be very difficult to track.
How Do You Track Content Conversion Attribution?
If you’re using an automated marketing system, such as HubSpot, you’ll be able to easily see exactly what content each customer interacted with through their sales journey. Over time, the data will help you easily see which content is most effective at each stage of the funnel. You’ll see your customer journeys and be able to quickly tell which pieces of content are most effective for driving your potential customers through the sales funnel.
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