How 5 Influencers Measure Content Marketing Success

Published by Scripted Writers on Monday, May 18, 2015 in Industries, Blogs, Business.

Measuring content marketing ROI can be tough. Five influencers, including Joe Pulizzi and Lee Odden, tell us what's most important to them when they're looking at metrics.

Measuring the success of your content can be difficult -- any marketer knows the pain of trying to understand if the content is making an impact or not. In fact, according to Content Marketing Institute's 2015 benchmark report 49 percent of the marketers surveyed cited it as one of their top challenges.

Why is measuring content ROI so hard to do though? For one reason, it could be due to all the options we have to actually measure its success. It's not as simple as taking a look at one set of metrics and observing if it's increasing or decreasing. There is a lot to look at and they're not all indicative of the same trend or result. In the same CMI survey, marketers said these were the metrics that were most important to them:

My theory is that it truly varies from each company and their business goals for their content marketing strategy. It's helpful to see how other marketers are measuring content ROI though; there's always something to be learned. This is why I always ask the question -- "How do you measure the success of your content?" -- in an interview. Here is what some of the most influential people in the space have to say.

Name: Joe Pulizzi

Title: Founder

Organization: Content Marketing Institute

We have a number of objectives and KPIs that we look at, but our most important metric is the email subscriber. The goal of our blog is to get and keep a subscriber. That means we want current subscribers to stay loyal and new readers to become subscribers. Once someone is a subscriber, we work to get them involved in other types of content we offer (like podcasts, the magazine, etc.). We've found that if our readers consistently engage in three or more content types that we offer, they are much more likely to come to our event -- Content Marketing World -- where we derive most of our funds to support our training, research, and other offerings.

See also: Advice From CMI's Joe Pulizzi

Name: Lee Odden

Title: CEO

Organization: TopRank Marketing Online

It depends on why a marketer is creating the content, but all content should be accountable to how it's going to pull in an audience, the topics covered and media formats it's published in, and the calls to action. At TopRank we use a model of Attract, Engage and Convert to make sure the content we're creating is accountable.

Attract measures referring to traffic sources and where the audience discovers this kind of information. Engage is anything to do with the consumption of that content. How many people are looking and for how long? Are they interacting with the content? Are they making comments or socially sharing? Convert, of course, is really anything dealing with information capture through a form -- a subscription, a trial, an inquiry, or a sale.

Name: Christian Rudder

Title: Co-founder

Organization: OKCupid

Very few people signed up directly from the blog. It was much more like a billboard and it just made people think because online dating isn't relevant all the time for everyone. If you're married or you're dating somebody, you don't need it.

If you read the blog post while you're dating someone and you get dumped, and you're like, "Oh, man. What should I do? Oh yeah, I remember reading that. I think I'll give it [online dating] a shot. I think that happened a lot, but very few direct line-ups.

Name: Zach Kitschke

Title: Head of Communications

Organization: Canva

There are a number of metrics that matter to us: how many new users we have each week, the number of designs created, and the number of designs published. We want to create content that's valuable. If someone gets an email from us or spends five minutes of their time reading a blog post we want to make sure they'll take away something that they can apply themselves.

Name: Dayna Rothman

Title: Senior Content Marketer

Organization: Marketo

Content measurement can be tough, but marketers should look at page traffic, downloads, leads generated, social engagement/reach, and first-touch attribution.