Top 3 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success

Companies of all sizes have committed resources to content marketing, but not all of them understand how they should be measuring their efforts. Jesse Noyes, VP of Product Marketing, Content and Communications, at Kapost, says that there are three things content marketers should be measuring to ensure success and relevancy to their business.

Production

We all produce lots of content, but do you know what it really takes to get it done? Are you keeping track of how long it takes to produce each content piece, from a single blog post to a full campaign surrounding an ebook? If content is the thing that fuels your pipeline, then you need to measure that pipeline. You need to establish benchmarks around production and make sure your team is meeting deadlines. If every project becomes a slog and takes time away from other activities, that should weigh into the cost-benefit analysis of your content. Oh wait, that's what marketers call ROI.

Reach

This is the easiest part for many marketers because all the sharing tools give you these numbers. Yes, it may be all manual and siloed, but it is relatively easy to determine which social channels drive traffic to your content. This helps you understand where your prospects and customers are and which ones are helping to amplify your content across their networks. The engagement around your content is what you are looking for. These are retweets, shares, clicks, comments, hearts, stars or whatever other symbol your audience's favorite platform uses to indicate audience engagement. By understanding the reach of your content, you understand how to drive more people to the top of your funnel.

Conversion

Conversion is the most important metric to consider when measuring content success and most marketers do not go deep enough into this whole category. You can start by understanding how many people clicked on the offer and completed the form for a download, but you should not stop there. Do these leads become qualified, either by a marketing lead scoring model or by a salesperson? And the next step of the process is to understand how your content contributes to closed deals, cross sales and upsells. Finally, are you supporting customer retention efforts with your content and how does that convert? Every piece of content has multiple conversions along each stage of the buyer journey, or funnel, pick your marketing metaphor, and the more informed you are about this, the more relevant your content will be in the future.

Get started in developing a content strategy that supports your business by downloading the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Content Marketing.