You know the old joke. 50% of your advertising is working. If only you knew which 50%. Content marketing has the same challenge – plus one more – what does ‘working’ really mean for content marketing? Curata recently interviewed 24 experts for their advice on the best content marketing metrics. We reviewed their top tips and drew upon our own experience to come up with our own top tips on how you can assess your content marketing performance and relevant metrics to monitor.
1. Business goal (AKA, revenue)
Rebecca Lieb, analyst at Altimeter, suggests you start by considering what performance indicators are the most important to your business.
For many businesses content performance ultimately comes down to customer acquisition, sales, revenue or profit. For content marketing, the best metric is probably going to be revenue generated. That was the top response in the Curata survey.
But as Lee Odden points out “content marketing can deliver results on a variety of objectives that create value for a business.” Thus you may be aiming to create awareness, adjust your brand positioning, create customer engagement or increase attractiveness to potential staff.
Which in our view means: yes, there should of course be a line between your content marketing effort and your revenue. Otherwise, why do it. Just don’t expect that road to be straight and to get there quickly. There are markers along the road that show you’re going in the right direction. Use those to help ensure you’re investing in the right activities. It can help to think about the customer acquisition and sales funnel to align measurements to that. Here are some four other considerations that came through in the survey:
