Measuring your success in content marketing

VIEW TRANSCRIPT While it may be tempting to focus on creating as much exciting content as possible, it’s important to regularly sit down and review your goals. This ensures the time you are spending on your content is time well spent. In this lesson we’ll explore tools and software that can help measure the success of your content marketing, as well as identify key metrics to help you improve your campaigns. Whether your target is to increase sales or spread the word about your business, if you don’t monitor your progress against your goals, it will be hard to know if what you’re doing works. To start, identify your goals and objectives, and make sure they’re measurable and trackable. For example, perhaps you wish to increase your YouTube channel subscribers by 200 people this quarter, or see a 10% increase in page views on your blog per month. Once you identify your content goals, it will be easier to track what you set out to achieve. Next, let’s explore specific metrics that could help improve your content marketing. Consider where your visitors are located, their age and gender demographics, how long they spend on a specific webpage and what they search for when they land on your site. Here’s how this would look for an actual business. The Dog Diner produces premium dog food. To help achieve their goal of increasing product sales, they write fun, engaging blog posts and share them on social media. Some of the metrics they could track are: - the number of page views the blog receives - the number of transactions made on the site - the number of visitors that come to their website from social media channels. Try comparing your metrics to previous results, such as last month’s blog posts or the number of online transactions made during the last quarter. Tracking against past results will give you a clearer indication of whether new strategies are truly successful. Now let’s explore some of the online tools available to help measure the success of a content marketing strategy. Many social media platforms provide detailed information about the people who follow or subscribe to business accounts. This includes gender, age, and location, as well as which posts receive the most engagement. Such data can give you an indication of which content is the most effective at meeting your goals, and which provides you with the best return on your investment. Now that The Dog Diner has executed their content marketing campaign and have identified the important metrics to track, they need to understand how to use this information. Here’s an example of how to draw insights from the metrics gathered: The Dog Diner team has published two blog posts - one on dog food ingredients and the second on dog walking. Their Google Analytics account revealed that the first post had 200 views with users spending an average of 30 seconds on the page. In comparison, the dog walking post acquired 1000 views with users spending an average of 90 seconds on the page. From this data, The Dog Diner understands that blogs about dog walking are more popular with their audience and can focus on that topic when developing content in the future. Analytics can also show them where their readers are coming from, such as from social media or a search engine, and how many of their readers made a purchase after reading a blog post. By looking at the data available, they could refine their content marketing strategy as they go, ensuring they meet the company goals and objectives. Take some time now to think about the analytics tools at your disposal, and consider which metrics could help you measure the success of your content marketing campaign.