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Many businesses are investing more time and resources in content marketing because of its effectiveness. With that increased investment, marketers are challenged to prove their worth in the form of a content marketing ROI.
Fortunately, with the growth of digital marketing, we have a variety of tools at our disposal to create benchmarks and measure the success of our content marketing efforts. Here are some of the best:
Social Media Performance Data
Social media platforms offer valuable data relative to post performance, which can help accurately measure your visibility, engagement, and brand awareness within each community. (Note: You will need to be an admin to access the data.) Here’s the rundown:
Facebook: Log into your FB page, choose the “Insights,” then “Posts” to see the reach and engagement for each post. By clicking the “Export” option at the top, you can even export comprehensive “Insights” data at the page or post level.
LinkedIn: Once on your company page, click the “Analytics” option at the top. Here you will be able to access a broad range of metrics for each of your company updates, including visitor types by professional level, impressions, clicks, and interactions.
Twitter: Access your Twitter profile and sign up for either Twitter Analytics or Twitter Ads to view performance data, including favorites, retweets, and replies.
Google+: Go to your company page, click on the apps icon in the top right, then the “My Business” app. From there, “View Insights” to see visibility, engagement, and audience data.
Social Sharing Metrics
This data covers the broader network, focusing on the volume of social shares, and can indicate broader levels of engagement and thought leadership. Try SharedCount to aggregate information across all of your social media platforms so you can see the bigger picture.
Tracking Website Content and Blog Post Metrics
In addition to tracking your social media efforts, it is important to find and track some key performance indicator (KPI) metrics for your website and blog content to help determine customer engagement and conversion rates. Here are some examples of KPIs you might measure:
So where can you access this information? The three tools below give you the ability to track all aspects of your content marketing campaigns, including social media, traffic to specific content pages, blog traffic, email campaigns, and more. Here is a basic overview of each:
Google Analytics—GA’s web page referral reports can help you pinpoint specific traffic sources. In the navigation, go to “Behavior,” then “Site Content,” then “All Pages.” Next, filter by “Source” to find out what domains are sending traffic to any given page. To see what pages and blog posts are most popular with your audience, go to “Behavior” in the navigation and check out the categories under “Site Content.” You can also see the behavior flow and other helpful information in this section.
Access audience information by clicking on “Audience” in the navigation to see the breakdown by gender, age, interests, and geography.
Google Webmaster Tools—Google’s Webmaster Tools help marketers gauge brand awareness and analyse keyword information to circumvent the illusive keyword “not provided” data in Google Analytics. After creating your Google Webmaster Tools account and adding your site, choose “Search Queries” to see queries, average position, impressions, CTR rate, and number of clicks by page or by query in organic search results. You can also export data for benchmarking purposes.
Additionally, you can get inbound link reports containing valuable data to establish the link between your content and third party attribution. These link references give insight into the content that is resonating with your target audience and other industry leaders in your niche. To do this, click on “Search Traffic,” then “Links to Your Site.”
Bing Webmaster Tools—Bing offers data similar to Google relative to its search engine results. Once you register your site, choose “Reports & Data,” then “Page Traffic” to see your metrics. To view inbound link information, select “Reports & Data,” then “Inbound Links.”
Use these tools to set benchmarks and export the data to track metrics on a regular basis. Adjust your content strategy as needed based on your metrics to increase targeted engagement, attract quality leads, build brand awareness, and establish thought leadership.
BusinessFluid provides content planning, content creation, and content marketing tailored to your business goals. Contact us today to learn more.
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