Smarter Content Marketing

Key Performance Metrics

In order to gauge the success of your content marketing efforts, there are a few key performance metrics you should pay attention to.

Most marketers just look at their traffic logs to judge whether their content marketing is successful, but there’s so much more to it than that.

Let’s take a look at a few of the different metrics you should be paying attention to when deciding if your content marketing strategy is working as it should.

Traffic

Obviously traffic is your most important metric. Not only should you pay attention to your overall website traffic, but to a few other important traffic metrics, as well such as:

•    Traffic to individual articles – This will help you decide what your visitors are most interested in reading about, and whether or not you’ve been delivering that to them.

•    Where your traffic is coming from – If you’re getting very little traffic from certain sources and more from others, you can either choose to focus on those you’re successful with to get even more traffic from them, or focus more on those you’re getting very little from in an attempt to increase traffic from those sources.

•    How many people are sharing your content – It’s very important to find out how many people are liking and sharing your content, because this will tell you whether you’re truly reaching your audience or not. People won’t like and share content that didn’t interest them. 

•    Comments – Comments are always a good indicator of whether or not your content is living up to the standards people expect. If you receive very few comments, or people don’t have a lot of positive things to say, it might mean you’re not hitting the right points with your content.

•    Conversion rate – Pay close attention to your conversion rates to see if your content is doing its job. Your content is useless if all it’s doing is attracting traffic. That traffic must also convert into email subscribers, CPA leads, sales, etc.

Impact

The bottom line is making sure your content marketing efforts have a positive net effect on your business rather than a negative one.

There are several ways your content marketing can actually have a negative net impact on your business, and that’s something you want to avoid at all costs.

Negative impact can be caused by a number of things:

•    Poor quality content that leads people to believe that you are not an authority on the topic.  You need your readers to have faith in your comprehension of the topic, and look to you as a leader of informative and accurate information.

•    Content that doesn’t resonate with your audience will hurt your chances at encouraging repeat visitors while also showing a lack of understanding of your market.

•    Content that sells without informing is a common mistake that new marketer’s make. You want your content to provide useful information while also entertaining your audience.  

Creating engaging content will drive in traffic and ensure return visitors. Failing to do that will destroy your chances as converting leads into customers.

Positive impact happens when you create high quality content that truly connects and resonates with your target audience. 

This is why it’s so important to know your market (the niche) and your audience (the people) extremely well. You want to know exactly what they will connect with, what kind of content provokes a positive response, and how best to help or educate potential customers.

The more you have a pulse on your market, and the better you know your target audience’s deepest needs, hopes and desires, the easier it will be to create content that will drive in traffic and convert into sales.

In the next chapter, we’re going to talk about how you can figure out exactly what kind of content your audience wants to read so that you can build wildly successful content marketing campaigns!