Content marketing is commonly accepted as being highly effective, but there may come a point when your boss demands to see what the return on investment is. With a light-touch approach like content marketing, it can be difficult to define success, but there are ways you can gauge effectiveness.
Set clear goals from the outset
You will need clear goals, because it’s impossible to know if you’re achieving them if you don’t have any. This may sound obvious, yet many people start out by generating content for the sake of content.
Think about what you expect to achieve. Do you want to just attract more organic traffic to your website? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want content to generate new sales leads? These are just examples, and the goals that are relevant to your business may be entirely different.
Benchmark your success
An even-handed consideration of some metrics can help gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing. Your goals will largely determine which metrics you should consider.
For example, if your aim is to increase brand awareness, you can look at metrics like how much content is being shared through social media and how many new visitors your content is attracting.
Alternatively, if you want to attract organic traffic to your website news feed or other website content, you can look at the total number of views, but you can also assess what visitors are doing. Are they spending more time on the page? Are they watching videos and for how long?
Looking at these metrics will also help you to refine your approach.
Get your pitch right
In your elevator pitch, you will want to highlight the role that content marketing is playing in the business. If one in five sales leads resulted from your content last quarter, make sure you stress it. When something is adding concrete value to a business, it’s hard to argue against it.
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