How to Measure Content Marketing Efforts? Finding the Right KPIs

Information has become the key prerequisite to most purchase decisions and a good way to provide such information to your target audience is through content marketing. Irrespective of whether you are operating in a B2B or B2C environment, your target audience is likely to be influenced by top quality, interesting, relevant and meaningful content. Hard sell tactics may still be applicable in certain domains, but it’s difficult to imagine making any significant progress without first backing it up with content marketing campaigns. Content marketing is also important from the perspective of search engines that determine the visibility of your product or service.

Content marketing begins with ideation and strategy, moving on to implementation and measurement. The measurement phase is a report card of your entire content marketing efforts, which lets you know if your campaign has succeeded or failed to achieve the desired results. You may think you have created the best content and have the best execution strategies, but if the target audience doesn’t seem interested, it would essentially be a wasteful endeavor. Measuring content marketing efforts allows you to learn from your mistakes and prompts you to come up with new ideas and strategies that might prove useful in your next campaign. Here are some of the KPIs that can be used to measure content marketing efforts.

Web analytics: KPIs to look for would include number of page views, bounce rate, relevancy of keywords used, demographics, devices, etc. You can use Google Analytics or choose other third-party web analytics tools depending on specific needs of your campaign.

Social media interactions: KPIs for measuring content marketing efforts would include the number of likes, shares and conversations. It will tell you if your content has been successful in creating the desired buzz.

Lead generation: The KPI would be the total number of sales-qualified leads that can be attributed to content marketing efforts.

Actual wins (sales): This would be the most relevant KPI to measure content marketing efforts if your primary target is revenue generation. Web analytics and social media interactions have their importance in terms of brand building, but if your content marketing is meant for improving revenue, you have to measure the total sales that can be attributed to your content marketing campaigns.

When measuring content marketing efforts, there’s often a tendency for knee-jerk reactions. For example, if a campaign does not do well during the first week, the team gets frustrated and starts making changes to the campaign. This approach may not be appropriate, as it may take some time for the campaign to gain traction. It is advisable that content marketing campaigns be provided adequate time to flourish before changes are introduced.