Content marketing helps marketers showcase their brand’s value while also building trust with their target audience. The goal of any marketing effort is to eventually drive profitable customer action. Content marketing does so through the creation, curation, and distribution of useful content. This is done in order to increase website traffic, reach a wider audience, generate leads, and convert those leads into sales.
Content measurement or your content marketing success is the activity of collecting data on how effective your content campaigns have been and how each piece of content stacks up. By rating your success, you can more accurately determine the ROI of each effort. You will discover which pieces of content engage audiences most effectively and whether each one really serves its purpose. Measuring the success of your content marketing efforts will help you understand what your audience wants and highlight ways to improve future campaigns.
Here is how to rate your content marketing success as a manufacturer.
1. Brand awareness
While content marketing has implications at every stage of the customer journey, it is most effective at increasing brand awareness at the top of the sales funnel. Firms usually create content with brand awareness in mind since content marketing specializes in building brand recognition within the marketplace. But how can you be sure your content marketing efforts are having the right effect?
Keeping track of the following indicators can be helpful:
a. Pageviews
Individual page traffic on your website can reveal what kind of content works best for your company. The stats will help show you which topics and formats appeal to the most customers.
b. Unique visitors
The most basic measurement for the success of your content marketing efforts is the number of new visitors to your website over a specific time period.
c. Brand mentions
The frequency with which other websites or internet users mention your firm by name might be a good indicator of how popular your brand is. Awario and Mention, for example, are social listening platforms that can help you keep track of this metric.
d. Followers
How many people have subscribed to your blog? Your newsletter? How about your social media pages? Increases in these numbers indicate that your brand is becoming more popular.
2. Organic visibility
SEO metrics are great indicators of brand awareness if you’ve optimized your site and content for search engines. These metrics can help you fine-tune your SEO strategy because they lay plain your success rate in organic searches.
a. Organic traffic
Organic traffic refers to visitors who accessed your content using search engines. This is different from the pageviews stat, which tallies all traffic sources to a single page on your website. If the organic traffic number is too low, consider more popular keywords and run an SEO audit to reveal how better to optimize them.
b. Keyword rankings
Where does your content rank on the search engine results page when someone searches your target keyword? According to >Hubspot, only 25% of visitors navigate to the second page of search results. This implies that you get far more visibility if you make it into the top ten results. Use keyword research tools like Moz and Ahrefs to track your keyword rankings.
c. Backlinks
Like brand mentions, the number of backlinks your website gets from other sites can give you an idea of how popular you are. Your organic visibility also improves as you accumulate more backlinks; search engines use them as an indication that your site is an authoritative resource.
3. Engagement
You can reach a wider audience by increasing brand recognition. To attract members of your target audience, you must entice them with great content. Key engagement indicators can help you assess how well the content you publish resonates with your audience. These metrics show your ability to not only captivate your audience but also move them further through the sales funnel.
a. Engagement rate
User engagement takes into account how long and how frequently visitors engage with your website’s content. To be considered an engagement session in Google Analytics 4, a visitor must view your website for more than ten seconds, visit at least two different pages, or induce a conversion event.
b. Time on the page
The amount of time visitors spend on your website indicates how relevant or compelling they find your content. If your average session time is short, it could mean that your current content isn’t capturing their interest well enough.
c. Page/scroll depth
Do your viewers just lose interest after reading your titles, or do they read your entire article? By measuring page depth, you can estimate how intriguing and readable your content is. Page depth is how far down the page a visitor goes before clicking away.
d. Likes, shares, and comments
Highly captivating content does more than attract readers’ interest; it also encourages them to engage with it directly. When a customer likes, comments, or shares your blog or social media post, it puts your content in front of more eyes. Since you’re reaching a wider audience, you’ll eventually generate more leads.
4. Revenue
Content marketing is usually regarded as a top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy because of its capacity to increase brands’ visibility and organic reach. However, well-optimized content can also motivate customers to take action that is both logical and profitable. How do businesses assess the ROI of their content marketing efforts? Consider monitoring the following metrics to evaluate return on investment (ROI):
a. Leads
When a website visitor chooses to provide their contact details by subscribing to a newsletter, downloading gated content, or even contacting you directly, they become a lead. The total number of leads generated by your content marketing efforts indicates how well your content converts members of your target audience into prospects and eventually, loyal customers.
b. Conversion rate
Optimized content increases website traffic, but only a small percentage of visitors will become paying customers. In contrast to leads, which track the total number of prospects netted by your efforts, conversion rates reflect the proportion of visitors who take a certain step in the sales funnel after reading your content. A high conversion rate suggests that your content is reaching your target audience, and it often results in an increase in revenue.
c. Cost of acquisition
Your content marketing efforts can help you attract prospective customers, but along the way, you must also track the expense of doing so. You can quantify the average customer acquisition cost by dividing the cost of your marketing campaign by the number of customers it brings. If your average revenue per customer exceeds this amount, you’ve probably established a successful content marketing strategy.
d. Total revenue
Total revenue is the most basic measure of your content marketing ROI. A successful content marketing strategy will generate more money than it consumes. This more generalized ROI is measured by dividing net revenue by total expenditure. It’s important to note that content marketing takes longer than traditional marketing methods to deliver results. It takes time to build up a base of assets, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t notice changes overnight. Concentrate on producing consistent and compelling content, and the metrics will eventually reflect your efforts.
Effective social media marketing
It’s easy to get tunnel vision and focus only on making your content interesting. But the task of getting followers to share it is also critical to your content marketing efforts. Social media marketing makes your engineering content more visible and boosts awareness of your brand. You’ll effectively be advertising to new customers every day. Contact us today if you need help creating engineering content that will fit into your social sharing plan.
