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If You Make One Content Resolution This Year, It Should Be...
Cheers to rocking content marketing in 2016!
If you make one content resolution this year, it should be tracking content metrics. Data makes the marketing world go 'round, and content marketing is no exception to this rule. Executive buy-in is often dependent on effectiveness measurements, but the Content Marketing Institute found 57 percent of B2B marketers struggled with measuring content marketing performance. You need to track the right content metrics to understand whether your campaigns are meeting your goals, and providing a positive ROI, and what successful content looks like for your company.
See also: 10 Qualities That Make Your Blog Posts Shareable
You Need These Metrics in Your Content Marketing Life In 2016
Content marketing metrics vary based on your industry and whether you're a B2C or B2B company, but you encounter some metrics that are applicable to almost every campaign. Your analytics application gives you the hard data you need to prove content effectiveness and optimize your campaigns, instead of guessing how it's performing or only using limited data points.
Website Traffic
Some content marketers focus primarily on the traffic generated by content marketing campaigns, with 63 percent of the LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community citing this as their top metric. Traffic numbers can indicate a strong search engine ranking for the content, inbound links from social media and external websites, and its popularity among visitors on your website.
Social Media Sharing
Convince and Convert places social media shares as its second most important content marketing metric. Shares are easy to track, which makes them an attractive option for companies lacking complete marketing analytics tools, and indicate user engagement and viral popularity.
Lead Quality
Content marketing provides valuable education and lead nurturing opportunities in the marketing funnel. If your content marketing efforts are effective, these prospects are well educated and well on their way to making a purchase decision. Looking at the sales lead quality metric shows you whether your content efforts make a noticeable improvement on the leads going to sales, such as more qualified leads. The Content Marketing Institute reports 31 percent of B2B marketers look at this metric as the most important for content effectiveness measurement.
Conversion/Sales
Determining the potential ROI of content marketing efforts is difficult when you don't have an exact dollar amount to work with. You can estimate based on potential deal sizes and similar numbers, but this isn't as accurate as when you can attribute conversion and sales numbers to specific content pieces. Your customer relationship management tool should track exactly which content pieces a converted customer interacted with. You can use these numbers as part of your content marketing ROI calculation.
More New Year's Content Marketing Resolutions
Confident in your ability to add effective data analytics to your content marketing campaigns in 2016? If you have room on your New Year's resolutions list, there's another important content marketing trend to include: create less crappy content, and more quality content.
It seems counterintuitive to most content marketing advice, especially when most marketers are increasing their investment. However, Track Maven reports content engagement dropped 60 percent and many pieces received little to no shares. Focusing on content quality over content quantity helps capture your audience's attention and makes the most out of your content marketing resources.
Some New Year's resolutions don't even last until January 2, but tracking your content marketing metrics should be a commitment you keep. Start small with the metric easiest for you to track, such as using Google Analytics for your website traffic, and build up to more extensive tracking. Your content marketing campaigns and your customers will thank you.
What are your focusing on in 2016? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
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