How to Measure The Effectiveness of Your Content Marketing Strategy

There are variety of ways to measure how your content marketing is performing. but before anything else, you need to put the first priority in place, which is setting up the content marketing goals.

Measuring up the effectiveness of a content marketing strategy is no easy task, but you should get the direction by reading this post.

Website Analytics

You can analyse this metric by using Google Analytics. The best thing is you have complete measurement to track website activities.

Here are main metrics that you shouldn’t miss:

Visitors
Page views
Time on site
User explorer
Traffic Sources
Bounce Rate
Content
Location

Social Media Metrics

Social media has became increasingly important for marketing. Social media allows you to reach wider people, communicate and engage with them. It is tied with search engine as well. That’s why, you can’t leave this out of your marketing plan.

But using social media without knowing how they perform, is simply useless too. You absolutely need to know how your content works and how people engage with it.

You need to track down these metrics to evaluate your social media marketing:

Followers growth rate
New follower rate
Following ratio
Comments per post
Likes per post
Shares per post
Clicks per post

Email Campaign Metrics

Email is one form of marketing you can’t ignore. It is an effective tool to directly get in touch with your audience.

The content in email needs to be more specific to your business. Don’t put too much content in the email and don’t get too general in term of topic. The subscribers to your email won’t read those articles in email. So, instead of putting them all in the email, just put 3-5 titles with short description and links.

Now, what should you track after sending out those emails?

Delivery rate
Bounce rate
Email open rate
Click-through rate
Sharing rate
List growth rate
Conversion rate
Unsubscribe rate

Qualitative Social Data

In general, what do people get to say about your business and brand? Is it all over the internet? Good or bad?

This is one metric that you need to track as well to know what is happening to your brand and what’s wrong with your marketing strategy. Listen to the community and analyse their discussion to come out with solutions to the problems.

Metrics to track are:

Brand strength
Brand sentiment (positive or negative)
Reach
Engagement

You can measure this by using free tool such as Social Mention or a paid one like Mention.

Leads Generation & Conversion Data

By the end of the day, there is going to be voices shouting “Show Me The ROI!”

The final purpose of content marketing strategy is to increase brand awareness, generate leads and increase conversion. In order to succeed, your marketing department needs to combined all the above strategy, analyse them and improve the performance.

So, as a marketer, you need to really be able to generate leads and convert them to revenues or sales.

Collecting all of the above metrics and data and analyse them are not going to be easy. You need to relate each marketing channel and integrate them in an easy to read data and visual graphics.

And spreadsheets are not powerful enough to make your work easier.

It is recommended for your marketing department to use an integrated marketing software like HubSpot Marketing. It is an all-in-one marketing software that centralise your entire marketing funnel. It will simplify your job a lot and make it very easy to track the process.

How do you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing? Do you have other metrics that you’d like to add? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.