Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As more companies move to embrace content strategies as part of their SEO efforts, we hear over and over again from all sources that the key to getting those content pieces found is about creating good content that users find engaging. Don’t worry about old school SEO tactics – write good content, and they will come. Not so easy, is it? Millions of items of content are generated online every day, and chances are not all of them serve the reader. And realistically, can we expect people to read blog content from every company they might purchase from? Would you, in your own personal time? Do you regularly read your own company’s blog?

In the absence of good strategy, content marketers sometimes end up using easy metrics to prove success, and those metrics don’t necessarily rely on the quality of the content. Using the wrong metrics to prove the value of content can result in false success reporting, and therefore masks the reality of wasted content efforts, and stops you from getting better....

According to AdAge, 93% of CMO’s (so…basically all of them) are under more pressure to deliver measurable ROI (Return On Investment).

Additionally, 81% of marketers would increase spending across channels if they could better track ROI.
 
At content marketing analyst Rebecca Lieb‘s Content Marketing World 2015 session: “Less-than-obvious Content Metrics You Need to Pay Attention To,” she argues that just using sales to justify ROI is measuring content marketing ROI far too narrowly. 

She says part of this is due to the fact that content marketing ROI analytics in the space are still incredibly nascent. There are no standards for measuring content marketing ROI and since over 50% of brands lack a defined content marketing strategy, it’s difficult to know what they’re trying to achieve and how to measure that success. 

As metrics and KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) evolve in tandem, the result is an excess of volume metrics (like, shares, traffic, etc.) that don’t reveal true business impact and content marketing ROI. According to Lieb, 43% of marketers feel they have unmet needs in measuring content ROI. Through careful and extensive research, she has formulated six tenets to developing a more holistic content marketing ROI measurement strategy....

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the information at our fingertips and get distracted by vanity metrics. Be honest, is page views really the most important thing for you to look at?)

So what should we be paying attention to? Which metrics matter more than others? And how do you measure the true business impact of your content?

Ultimately, it’s about the bottom line. All of the traffic in the world doesn’t mean much if you aren’t getting any new customers out of it.

Here’s a roundup of the core metrics that content marketers should keep an eye on if they want to know whether their content marketing is truly paying off....

Simply put, if you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.

In fact, if you’re whipping up blog posts and infographics without business objectives, you’re basically partaking in a very expensive version of arts and crafts.

Your job as a content marketer is to show your boss the money — not traffic, not links — mon-naay.

Let’s talk about how to get started effectively measuring your content marketing efforts....