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Do you have a content marketing strategy in place? Your answer is most likely a ‘yes’ and that’s why you are here! But, how effective is your content marketing strategy? Are you tracking your content marketing performance? What is your content marketing ROI?
Although content marketing has been around for a long time, many companies do not have a process in place to track the content marketing metrics. Why? That’s because most of them do not have clear objectives for their content marketing campaigns!
So, how do you measure content marketing performance? Here are the steps for you to get started:
To measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns, you first need to ensure you have understood the overall business goals completely. The ultimate goal, of course, is to boost the ROI of your company and as someone who leads the marketing team, you would certainly know that. But, how about your team? Is everyone who’s involved in executing the content marketing strategy aware? Are all the content marketing activities aligned with the ultimate goal?
In many companies, this is how a typical conversation between the marketing manager and a CMO/Marketing head looks like:
CMO: “Hey! So, how are the content marketing campaigns coming along?”
Manager: “It’s going very well. We are churning out 20 blogs a month and promoting them too!”
In many cases, the CMOs assume the team is on track, until they see the numbers in the quarterly review meeting. But, is it going to help? By then, the yearly numbers will have already taken a hit.
Does this sound familiar to you? Well, it’s high time you set up a meeting with your entire team to ensure each one in your team understands the higher goals and align every content marketing activity with the same.
Tip: Running a bi-weekly sprint meeting to keep an eye on the metrics and the progress of work can help!
Before diving into the metrics, it’s essential to set clear and tangible high-level content marketing objectives and KPIs to compare your metrics against. Given below are the most common content marketing objectives:
Unless you have clear objective in how to measure content marketing, you’ll not be able to assess if your team is on track, even with all the metrics in hand. Once you set the objectives, make sure it's clearly communicated to everyone involved in the content marketing activities.
Once you and your team are clear about the goals and objectives, dig into the marketing metrics to see if you’re progressing in the right direction. Although there are several metrics to track and they vary depending on the objective of each campaign, here is a comprehensive post on the most important content marketing metrics.
Look at the percentage of each metric that leads to the next step along the marketing funnel and the average percentage of each metric that eventually leads to a sale. These numbers serve as the baseline that you need to pay attention to over the course of the year to ensure you stay on track to hit your ultimate goals.
Do the marketing metrics tell you the actual story of your content campaigns? Not really! The devil is in the details. You need to keep a close eye on the sales metrics to understand how your content marketing efforts directly impact your sales funnel and revenue. This will help you correlate your content marketing results with the ROI of your company. By doing so, you will know how much your team has contributed to the overall business goals.
Leads Generated: Decoding this metric will help you attribute new leads to content pieces. Integrating the tools in your marketing and sales tech stacks will tell you how many new leads you’ve gained that touched base with a particular piece of content and how they went on to interact with your brand, on which platforms.
Lead Quality: Generating leads is not the be-all-and-end-all of your content campaigns. The quality of the leads you generate is what will tell you the real story. There’s no point in churning out pieces of content that do not fetch you quality leads. You will just end up squandering your time and budget. That is why lead quality/score is an important metric to look at.
Existing leads nurtured: How many of the existing leads engaged with your content? This will help you understand how many times, on an average, your leads need to touch base with your brand before converting.
Funnel conversion rate: This will help you understand what type of content helps you push prospects further down your funnel to take an action.
Revenue generated: Eventually, see how much of your revenue comes from buyers that started their journey by touch basing with your content or have interacted with your content in any phase.
To track all the metrics (sales and marketing) of your content marketing initiatives that are available in disparate systems, you need to toggle between multiple tools and jump between spreadsheets. This process is going to be cumbersome. Besides, this would make the tracking process flawed, as it requires a lot of manual intervention in extracting the data.
Here’s where a tool like Dataflo comes as a saving grace. With Dataflo, you can connect all the applications in your GTMtech stack, visualize all the key metrics of your content marketing teams and collaborate in a single dashboard. Dataflo also provides actionable insights that help you make well-informed, data-driven decisions to make the most of your content marketing efforts.
What makes you wait? Start tracking your content marketing performance now and ensure you get the desired result!
As a rising leader, Anand is dedicated to helping his team succeed by inculcating a great culture of collaboration. His passion for technology that knows no bounds has helped elevate the company to new heights. He loves photography, listening to music, and watching thriller movies. He’s also into fitness—it keeps him feeling good and healthy!
