Measure Content Marketing Performance: 3 Expert Advice Included

Content marketing performance in simplicity is just how your content is performing. This can be good and bad, or somewhere in the middle. To acknowledge the functionality and whether your content is ‘working’, we look into content marketing performance.

If you’re an avid poster on Instagram, your Likes, Shares, and Comments are numerical indicators of content marketing performance.

If you’ve got a Share count going beyond a few thousand, it seems like your content is performing great and doing well in appearing relatable to not just yours, but to other audiences as well!

Like any other thing meant for measurement, content marketing performances are also measured numerically. There are certain key ‘Metrics’ pertaining to content marketing performances that any pro marketer must consider when assessing their efforts.

“Metric?! Sounds fancy!”

“Metrics? Is that like, something related to the Metric System?”

Confused? Found yourself questioning whether you fully understood what a metric with regards to content marketing might be? That’s alright, it’s not rocket science (not yet, at least).

Metrics in marketing are a quantifiable way to track performance and are an important marketing measurement tool for gauging a campaign’s effectiveness.

What your metrics do for you is measure the impact of your content across your audiences, and beyond. These marketing metrics eventually help you understand how your content is performing across your platforms, and enable you to enhance the content so it can perform as efficiently as possible!

Getting the hang of it? Here’s a list of key marketing performance metrics to help you absorb better:

Social Media Metrics: Engagement Rate, No. of Replies, No. of Subscribers

• Email Marketing Metrics: Opened emails, No. of Forwards, No. of Unsubscribes
• Website Metrics: Traffic, Returning Audiences, Time spent on site
• Content Metrics: No. of Shares or Downloads, Comments

“Right. So these metrics ARE important!”

Without a doubt! Right now, you agree they are important because of their presence on your content marketing channels.

However, for clarity, marketing metrics are important because they:

• Help determine the success of marketing campaigns
• Provide comprehension to optimize upcoming content
• Enable marketers to understand how campaigns accomplish marketing and business objectives

Apart from the very obvious of provoking content marketers to shape their content with the achievable, maximum efficiency, these metrics also serve as an early warning system if marketing campaigns aren’t performing as expected, and can help with effective decision making to adjust campaigns in real-time.

Now that you’ve grasped the functionality, you’ll understand why 89 percent of marketers ranked improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact as a top priority.

What’s There To Know About Content Marketing Performance Metrics?

Metrics in marketing are a quantifiable way to track performance and are an important marketing measurement tool for gauging a campaign’s effectiveness.

What your metrics do for you is measure the impact of your content across your audiences, and beyond. These marketing metrics eventually help you understand how your content is performing across your platforms, and enable you to enhance the content so it can perform as efficiently as possible!

Getting the hang of it? Here’s a list of key marketing performance metrics to help you absorb better:

Social Media Metrics: Engagement Rate, No. of Replies, No. of Subscribers

• Email Marketing Metrics: Opened emails, No. of Forwards, No. of Unsubscribes
• Website Metrics: Traffic, Returning Audiences, Time spent on site
• Content Metrics: No. of Shares or Downloads, Comments

“Right. So these metrics ARE important!”

Without a doubt! Right now, you agree they are important because of their presence on your content marketing channels.

However, for clarity, marketing metrics are important because they:

• Help determine the success of marketing campaigns
• Provide comprehension to optimize upcoming content
• Enable marketers to understand how campaigns accomplish marketing and business objectives

Apart from the very obvious of provoking content marketers to shape their content with the achievable, maximum efficiency, these metrics also serve as an early warning system if marketing campaigns aren’t performing as expected, and can help with effective decision making to adjust campaigns in real-time.

Now that you’ve grasped the functionality, you’ll understand why 89 percent of marketers ranked improving the ability to measure and analyze marketing impact as a top priority.

Getting Started With Metrics

For marketers, a handful of marketing metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the “key” when it comes to accomplishing your objectives. Utilizing the correct metrics and KPIs will assist you to distinguish poor-performing content that can be made better.

Moreover, doing so will enable you to pinpoint your best-performing content.

But, before you determine these metrics and indicators, don’t forget to:

Understand the reason behind the WHY you’re shortlisting the metrics

Remember that the content is being marketed for the purpose of creating noise

• Regularly monitor these metrics!

You select your performance indicators based on marketing metrics you choose to assess

After settling that, the second step is to understand what objectives you’re trying to achieve by analyzing these metrics. Some of which could be:

• Attracting traffic to the website
• Improve engagement and loyalty with the audience
• Promotion of products/ campaigns/ ideas

Improving your content marketing performance begins with acknowledging the purpose behind your businesses and brands.

So, after you’re fully aware of what your content exists for instead of hollow advertising it, you can market it better to your audiences!

Since people love to talk, and talking thrives in advertising, make sure your content is creating noise- the right kind! Apart from gaining popularity, your content is going to establish conversation around your content with plenty of perspectives.

“Great. So how do I know people are talking about my content?”

You’ll know they’re talking if you create custom hashtags around your content and use marketing metrics pertaining to Twitter to see just how much! And, if you think that’s going well, this may as well be your regularly administered KPI.

1. Conversions

Sure, you’ve got the next Margaret Atwood in you penning down compelling pieces for your website that people just love reading!

Or, you’re a design wonder kid who’s making brilliant visuals around your content. But, then what? People visit, read, praise, and then just leave?

Do they share? Comment on the details? Do they stalk through the entire page looking for more of the good stuff? Do they sign up for your newsletters?

All these actions can be considered conversions- conversions that go beyond your marketed content! It’s up to you what qualifies as one. In a few cases, the objective of your content could be to create a sale, whereas, in others, it could be to raise mindfulness of your brand.

“Yes! I want that! ……How do I know I’m getting that?”

Social shares and engagement metrics!

That’s what your focus should be on. If you’re still unsure about what qualifies as engagement metrics, here’s a list to help you:

• Users- Monthly, Weekly, Daily Active Users
• Time- Length of sessions
• Occurrence- Frequency of visits

“Is there a way to get better session lengths?”

Regardless of measuring your KPIs and analyzing your metrics, content marketing performance depends on the quality of your content and how well it’s optimized for a certain channel.

If you’re looking for better session lengths on your blog, Irina Weber, the Content Strategist at SE Ranking may have the wisdom you need:

“Right now, the actual measurable return of long-form articles is much higher than short-form content. Surely, it requires more time and effort on your part, but, on the whole, it will always perform better with your audience and in search engines.”

2. SEO Performance

Content marketing isn’t a game just meant for social media (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). You’ve got a website you’ve invested in up and running, and your audiences identify you best with the content present there.

However, using metrics like Google Analytics is not enough to measure your marketing performance when it comes to search engine results.

This is where SEO performance comes in, and there are a few metrics worthy of tracking here.

SERP- Search Engine Results Pages. This is your page’s position within the search engine results for a specific word or phrase.

When measuring through SERP, it’s crucial to know that rankings aren’t sedentary and tend to slightly change, but when you’re following your positioning over time, you need to anticipate it as either static (if you’re in top results) or making strides, which illustrates you’re picking up consumer trust and authority.

Enhanced SEO will lead to higher activity numbers, more leads, and ideally more sales and platform conversions!

“Right. So how can I get better conversions through SEO?”

Individuals click on your links within the SERPs but they don’t engage within your site and take off rapidly – that is squandered an opportunity to turn visitors into buyers. Omi Sido, SEO Manager of Canon Europe suggests:

“Optimize your content for your customers and not for the search engines. What do I mean by that? It’s so easy to find some high-volume keywords around your product and turn them into blog posts. I get it – everybody needs more visits.”

In short, invest in what your audience is looking for, not the entirety of the internet.

3. Brand Awareness

Measuring brand awareness around your brand is a compelling degree of the triumph of your content marketing.

When you’re putting out substance that generates curiosity, is pertinent, and value-adding for your audiences, you are boosting brand awareness, and consequently, the awareness results in better content marketing performance.

If within your relevant industry, your brand has become an authority, then it’s safe to say your Return on Investment (ROI) in content marketing is solid! You’re building, getting bigger, and checking off all your business objectives.

So, the question is:

“How do I measure my brand awareness?”

So, let’s shift our focus off social media for a second.

Although a lot of content marketing happens online, your website or blogs are still your OG platforms for marketing content, and that’s where you’ll know a plethora of things- from loyal consumers to popular segments within your content.

Speaking of OG methods that don’t involve an analytical report of engagement metrics or traffic stats, you can also quantify your brand awareness through surveys!

Surveys are an intimate category of data collection and marketing metrics- Your consumers and beyond are sharing their perceptions around your brand more intricately.

It doesn’t get any better than this! Next time you feel like you want more human-centric performance feedback, email blast a curated survey and see whose truly taking their time out!

(Just make sure that survey has everything to do with your brand and business objectives)

Award-winning personal branding specialist, Lauren Clemett, when speaking on using surveys for measuring brand awareness advises:

“The best way to measure brand awareness is to be clear about your strategy, set measures in place before launching a brand campaign, and measure during and after to track brand awareness. This is essential with rebranding, as we know there are many failures in this area.”

Collecting data, analyzing it frantically, and constantly digging deep within your content marketing performance metrics is a necessity, but it’s not the only thing.

Don’t be Alice and spiral down a rabbit hole of quantifiable success, completely ignoring the essence of your content!

This aspect of marketing is not a substitute for tackling a content-based crisis. Content still needs to keep coming in its usual flow off the calendar!

Use content marketing performance metrics as a continuous learning tool where you’re constantly improving on your advertising strategies to STAY ON TOP! (Including on the search engines!)