Content marketing is a great instrument to attract new customers and convert them into leads, which should be high on every company’s list of business goals. To understand how successful your content is at achieving this goal, you need to track metrics. But what metrics should you choose to measure content marketing effectiveness? This article will help you better understand your objectives, filter out irrelevant metrics, and reach your goals.
Measuring Content Marketing Effectiveness Starts with SMART Goal Setting and a Thorough Content Audit
Before you start choosing content performance metrics, you need to determine your marketing and business goals. Remember that a good goal is a SMART one – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. The idea was originally coined by Peter Drucker in the early 80s, but it‘s still relevant today. Have a successful website is an excellent example of a non-SMART goal. Convert 50 leads into purchases by the end of the quarter, on the other hand, is an example of a SMART goal. See the difference? The second one helps you map out what exactly you’ll do to accomplish this task.
Now that you’ve decided on a goal, it’s time to conduct a content audit. This will help you create a library where you can organize all of your content by category, like buyer’s journey stage, type of content, format, number of words, date of publication, keywords, title, meta description, and h1.
Then you need to organize the process of measuring content marketing effectiveness. First, you need to decide how often you will gather data. A monthly audit is often ideal. You should also consider keeping all of your data in one place, like a shared spreadsheet. This document should include your marketing goals tied to the content marketing plan and chosen metrics. Consider using Google Analytics or Salesforce to automate this process and save you time and energy.
It’s not a secret that each type of content correlates with different metrics. For example, for promotional videos, it’s important to know the average time views, comments, and YouTube CTA. Blog posts require unique visitors, average time spent on a page, and bounce rate.
Next, Measure Content Marketing Effectiveness All the Way Down the Content Marketing Funnel
Say you have a team of talented copywriters who regularly publish excellent content but have no customers or purchases. What’s wrong?
You might just need to improve how you’re using content. You can have a fascinating piece of content, but if it’s not correlated with the right stage of the buyer’s journey, it probably won’t work. People behave differently and have different expectationsdifferent stages of the buyer’s journey.
For example, it’s a bad idea to give a product overview with a CTA to buy an expensive app to a person who’s hearing about your company for the first time. To avoid such situations, you need to divide and bridge all your content with a concrete stage of the buyer’s journey. This is all about the content marketing funnel – a system that guides your audience from the first contact with your product till the customer makes a purchase.
The content marketing funnel consists of three stages:
- top of the funnel (TOFU)
- middle of the funnel (MOFU)
- bottom of the funnel (BOFU)
Customers have different intentions at each level of the funnel, so we need to take different content approaches to each one, too. Let’s look step by step.
Measuring Content Performance at the TOFU
The buyer’s journey starts with the first stage: the top of the funnel (TOFU). This is when the customer is first hearing about your company. They might not know who you are, but they share some of the same interests as you. So, the main goal at the TOFU stage is to pique the interest of the audience and introduce your IT service unobtrusively.
This can be achieved by light, easy-to-understand, and visually attractive content for the customer. The main target here is to create an attachment with your brand.
You should present your product to potential customers clearly and succinctly. For example, if you are selling time tracking apps for HR management, you should write about the difficulties of manual timesheets and then quickly transition into discussing how apps can help automate this process. This way, they will know that there is a technology solution to their problem.
The best content formats at the TOFU stage are
- how-to guides
- landing pages
- infographics
- checklists
- e-books
With the help of this content, your target audience should clearly understand who you are and how you can help them. You can tie these pieces of content to your landing page to help potential customers learn more about you.
You should consider the following metrics for content at this stage: number of visitors, page views, average time on page, traffic sources, and bounce rate. If the average time spent by the customer on your page is high, your content effectively attracts the attention of potential buyers.
You also need to make sure that your content fits the audience. If your content has a lot of views and shares by targeted audiences and converts, then your content strategy is successful for the TOFU. And always be sure to remember: first impressions matter.
Metrics to Track at the MOFU Stage
Let’s move further, to the middle of the funnel (MOFU). This stage is critically important for lead generation, because it is a link between first contact and final purchase. This stage attracts fewer people than the TOFU. It can be really hard to maintain the audience’s attention enough to help them get involved with your company. But people at the MOFU already want to know about you and how your product can help them solve their business problems; they’re just not necessarily ready to buy.
At this stage of the funnel, your content should be specific and detailed. Your goal should be to thoroughly educate your target audience. That’s why you should provide content with solutions and more specific branding.
Success stories, product overviews, case studies, and customer reviews will help the audience to engage in your brand. How-to guides are also beneficial at this stage. The content should convince the reader of the benefits of the product and describe how to use your product in different ways. The middle stage is also great for adding interlinks and calls-to-action, which can be effective in increasing sign-ups. For example, you can tell would-be customers to request a demo of your product by filling a form on the landing page of your website.
At the MOFU stage, it’s better to track the number of leads and conversion rates. These metrics will show you if your target audience is still interested in you, what kind of problems they have, and what they are searching for. It will also show when they recommend and share that information with others.
How to Track Content Performance Metrics at the BOFU
The final stage is the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), which has a concrete target: to convert your leads into purchases. At this stage, the goal is to ensure that your customer trusts you enough to buy from you.
Content at this stage should be more specific and more detailed to persuade your customer. This is an opportunity to emphasize the benefits of your product in comparison with competitors. Product overviews, customer reviews, success stories, use cases, and landing pages suit this stage particularly well.
The main metrics to be tracked here are conversion rate, number of payments, and return on investment (ROI).
You’ll see the success of your content marketing strategy in constant traffic growth and increasing sales.
In this final stage, it’s vitally important to choose valuable metrics that show what segments of your content marketing strategy can be improved. That’s why it’s better to figure out which metrics show valuable results and which can be misleading.
Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics
We’ve talked about which metrics to use at each stage, but what about the metrics to avoid? Some measures just pull the wool over your eyes and don’t show real results. Useful ones are called actionable metrics, and we refer to misleading ones as vanity metrics. Let’s talk about how to tell the difference.
First of all, a valuable metric supports your business goal. Second, it should help you to improve your content process. Each metric should help you clearly understand how that result was achieved. Third, your metric should show how to recreate successful results. A good rule of thumb for determining if something is an actionable metric is asking yourself: do you understand what to do after looking at the data?
Actionable metrics show how repeatable actions lead to results, so you can improve or fix your process. To make a metric actionable, you should tie it to concrete users.
According to Lars Lofgren, actionable metrics should answer the questions:
- How do you gain or lose revenue?
- How do you gain or lose customers?
- What are the key functions and benefits that people are coming to you for?
Examples of actionable metrics include: revenue, account sign-ups, conversion rates, A/B tests, funnels, cohorts, and marketing campaigns. At the start, you may want to pick 1-5 metrics that correlate with your business goals.
Vanity metrics make us feel good but in fact make no sense at all. They are unpredictable, so you can’t use this data effectively for developing your content marketing strategy. Focusing on this type of metric is just a waste of time. The most common examples of vanity metrics are page views, running total of customers, running totals of purchases or downloads, and number of social media followers.
You can buy thousands of followers for your Instagram account – but does this number of followers affect the number of purchases? Nope! Bots don’t buy products.
You may notice a spike in the traffic on your blog or website, but frankly, what does it give you except the feeling of self-satisfaction? Just because there are more eyeballs on your content doesn’t mean that there are more dollars in your pocket.
Let’s take page views as an example. A high number of page views can’t tell you anything about who your visitors are, where they come from, and whether they convert their visits into sales. Instead of tracking page views, you can follow bounce rate, sessions, unique users, and so on.
If you try the Google Analytics tool with the default settings, it will provide you a wide range of vanity metrics. So be accurate and set it up for your requirements.
Final Notes
One of the biggest challenges for marketers is pushing leads down the funnel and converting them into actual purchases. Appropriate metrics, like conversion rate and ROI, can be tracked at each stage of the buyer’s journey to help you understand the successes and failures of your content marketing strategy and make consistent appropriate improvements to it.
One of the biggest challenges for marketers is how to push leads down to the funnel. To solve that problem content creators use keyword research and competitor analysis. You also need to figure out the sources your leads came from.
To measure the general effectiveness of the content marketing funnel, the conversion rate, several payments and ROI can be tracked during each stage of the buyer’s journey. According to a Semrush survey, email marketing could be a useful tool to keep your audience engaged while moving in the tunnel.
Remember, the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy can’t be measured in a moment. Usually it takes from 6 months to a year to understand the results. Customers are visiting dozens of web pages and making dozens of clicks before they make a purchase. Don’t expect changes to come in a week.
Be flexible with the changes that your metrics suggest and be ready to edit your content strategy if necessary.
You may also want to track what your competitors are doing with their content and make a competitive content marketing analysis.
Conclusion
To summarize, your plan on how to measure content effectiveness should consist of the following steps:
- Clarify your goals
- Perform a content audit
- Optimize your content plan for each content marketing funnel stage
- Pick the most actionable metrics you will track every month
- Create a spreadsheet to collect your data
- Glean insights
