Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

According to the recently released "Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends" report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 28 percent of B2B marketers don't measure the ROI of their content marketing.

Failing to do so is a mistake, because tracking metrics — the right ones — enables you to concentrate on the content marketing activities that most benefit your bottom line.

To prove your content marketing effectiveness and see which content initiatives are worth your time and money, focus on these metrics....

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....

Content creation is not cheap. As content marketers, we may have brilliant ideas for content that meets the needs of customers and prospective customers, but ideas alone don’t convince stakeholders to invest. We need to back up our ideas with data. We need to show that our suggestions align with the needs of our target audience segments.

To make this effort easier, I have created a tool that does this aligning literally – across rows in a spreadsheet. I call it the multichannel content marketing planner. This planner provides an easy-to-use, easy-to-share place to capture the data and data-related insights that lead to a strategically solid content marketing plan....

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....

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....

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....

Are you obsessed with web traffic? Maybe there are better online marketing metrics for your business!So what does matter? There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but here are the four metrics that I pay attention to, measurements that indicate I am growing a loyal audience who will eventually buy stuff:...

Are you using Pinterest yet? Discovered new Pinterest Analytics yet?

If not, you should give it a whirl — especially if your target audience includes women who make up a full 80% of Pinterest users. Last month, Pinterest became an even more awesome social media tool by introducing analytics....