A Guide on Measuring and Analyzing Your Content

 

If you’re a content marketer, you know that your results are one of the most important things to consider when analyzing and/or altering your content strategy. This blog will discuss how measuring and analyzing your content can help your company grow in brand awareness, customers, and more.

The importance of measuring and analyzing your content

What do you need to do to draw in new customers and keep old ones coming back? The answers are in the analytics of your previously-created content. Here’s three reasons to evaluate your company’s content performance:

  1. To find out if your marketing efforts are driving sales

  2. To discover insights and determine next steps

  3. To document and report on progress to use in the future

Make sure you set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, and Time-bound). Are your advancing towards these goals in a timely manner? Are you behind or ahead of your goals? Do you need to adjust your content plan due to this? Ask yourself what insights you’ve gained so you can better prepare for your future content efforts.

 
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How to collect and interpret your data

There are six areas that should be at the center of your attention:

  1. Brand awareness

  2. Engagement

  3. Lead generation

  4. Customer conversion and sales

  5. Customer loyalty and retention

  6. Website performance

Let’s take a closer look at each.

Brand Awareness

This can put your company at the top of the search engine ranks as well as the top of potential customer’s minds. Decide which metrics and channels are important to your company specifically and be consistent with them. Stick to your SMART goals and track things that make sense for you specifically, for example, social media followers, reviews online, or mentions in the press.


Engagement

Who is interacting with your content? How many people is it reaching? This information provides you with the knowledge of which types of content are the most popular for your consumer base.


Lead Generation

This is an extremely important area! See how many leads you generated and where they are in your content marketing funnel. Note your ratio of marketing-qualified leads (MQL’s) to sales-qualified leads (SQL’s). You’ll want create a URL with UTM parameters, which track your campaigns, for every inbound link you want to track. Here are four areas to consider when building this type of URL:

  1. The website URL—where the consumer will land

  2. Campaign source—where your visitors are coming from (ex: social media)

  3. Campaign medium—reflects the type of content (ex: email)

  4. Campaign—unique content or promotion you’re using


Customer Conversion and Sales

Ask yourself:

  1. What is the ROI of your total content marketing efforts?

  2. What is the cost acquisition of a new customer?

  3. What is the ratio of leads to customers?

  4. Are you providing a smooth path for new prospects?


Customer Loyalty and Retention

Obviously, the goal is to get customers to learn of your brand, become a customer, and stick with you over time. Consider what the lifetime value of a customer is. Are they recommending your company to others?


Website Performance

Make sure your website is as user-friendly as possible. Look at your traffic—is it doing as well as you want it to? Make sure it is growing over time, and pay attention to visits arriving from organic searches to individual pages. Which pages are people flocking to most? You want your website content to be thorough, complete, and cover a topic comprehensively.

 
 

What to do with your data after collecting it

  1. Look at your results—did you meet your goals?

  2. Note any trends in content theme, format, promotion channels, and persona

  3. Group your content into categories and draw conclusions

  4. Identify your audience

  5. Have a conversation with stakeholders before you run a campaign—get a set of metrics for each stakeholder and build a dashboard that tracks each metric

  6. Have frequent meeting with your marketing team to review your campaign’s performance and make any necessary alterations

With keeping your content in conjunction with your buyer personas, the positive results you yield should only grow and continue as you move along your content marketing strategy over time. Again, always remember that your goal is to create valuable content for your audience. Analyzing your results will help you meet their wants and needs better each time.

 
Guest User