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What every stakeholder wants to know is: Did the funds from the marketing budget actually lead to more revenue?
Not only should we have the answer, but we need to back it up with data by capturing the right metrics.
Content marketing is valuable to business, and yet, there’s no universal list of metrics that we marketers can collectively rely on to prove our point. There are 2 reasons we don’t have a standard “checklist” of marketing metrics.
- Firstly, no two B2Bs are the same, nor are their individual content marketing strategies. Your sales goals and target audiences will directly inform which metrics must be used to determine the effectiveness of your strategy.
- Secondly, and the more compelling reason: there isn’t a standard method for finding the correct metrics for your company. In this post, we’ll explore how to measure content success for your business.
How to Measure Content Marketing Performance
1. Use an interactive, measurable format
Using a format that is trackable and measurable is key! Many businesses use static content, such as PDFs, which have been around since 1993! The problem with PDFs and other static content is that it is impossible to track a user's actions with them. Once a user downloads a PDF, that is the last metric that can usually be captured — we don’t know their session duration, whether they shared the piece, or how many times they returned to engage with the PDF.
On the other hand, interactive content allows you to do so much more when it comes to measuring performance. Thinkdm2 uses a platform called Foleon to transform static PDFs, whitepapers, presentations, and more into an interactive publication that captures key metrics like clicks, bounce rates, returns, and session duration.
A Foleon Publication will allow you to gain detailed insights into your audience and how they interact with your content. For example, it will let you know how they spend their time with your content, unique visitors, and other metrics that were previously mentioned above.
Find out more about interactive web-based formats here.
2. Find out what resonates with your audiences
While interactive and on-demand content is usually preferred by B2B, it is important to know what type of content your audience specifically likes. For example, they might prefer content that has a lot of information, or maybe they like more visuals and examples. Maybe they like to explore your content on your website, or maybe they rather receive an e-newsletter. The content and how it is displayed must resonate with your audience in order to be successful. If the audience enjoys engaging with your content, then they are more likely to stay and learn more. If it bores them or is not what they are looking for, they are probably going to leave the site and find a different business.
3. Test and re-test to learn what metrics matter
Successful content is not usually a hit or miss, it undergoes tremendous testing and retesting to discover what topics and subjects matter most to each of your audiences. Stakeholders may be interested in measuring the KPIs of the campaign, and understanding how it led to achieving sales or marketing goals.
While you can’t track the average time on page or frequency of visits on static content, you can track metrics on interactive content and this will then provide some further data on your campaign assets.
Content Marketing Evaluation for Your Business
Once you have a good understating of what content is most successful for your business and what metrics best represent them, you should make a list to use for future references. You can use this list to reevaluate all marketing efforts and content that your business releases. This will help you find what is working the best for your business and allows you to continue achieving your revenue and growth goals. The data gathered will supply your business with more efficiency when it comes to your marketing efforts. To be successful, a business must understand who its customers are, what interests them, and what they want from the business. This data provides the business with meaningful insights that cover all of this.
Want to learn more about the barriers to creating interactive content at scale, and how B2B marketers can overcome them? Foleon explored these challenges in their whitepaper with CMI, The Experience Matters: Today’s Innovative B2B Marketers Overcome Content Creation Barriers.
Sources: Foleon.com
