Content marketing has become very important for businesses in recent years. It is agreat way to attract an audience for your products and services. In order to get the full benefit of this medium, you need to evaluate your content marketing strategy with the right set of key performance indicators.
In this article, we speak to some of the biggest and most successful Content Marketing Agencies and ask them about tips to optimize the same. If you are a brand, a blogger, or even a digital marketing company, you should pay attention to the contents of the article.
Critical Metrics to Define Content Marketing Strategy
We look at 8 important metrics that should be focused on the success of the business content marketing strategy in 2020.
Website Traffic
Your website traffic is one of the most important ways to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. A large number of visitor traffic on your website means thatthree things are happening.
- Your website is getting enough visibility on search engines and elsewhere
- Your messaging is appealing enough that people click to visit your website
- The content is useful enough that users revisit your website for information
High website traffic is important to build brand awareness. It allows you to market products and services to potential customers. Getting consistently high traffic shows that there are people out there who want to consume the content you produce.
Rising website traffic indicates the success of your content marketing strategy while falling traffic suggests you should take action.
A number of tools can be used to track your site visitors, including their location and average time on the page. You can also track their entrance, bounce, and exit rates to improve your digital strategy.
Conversion Ratio
Although high traffic is great for improving brand awareness, it doesn’t actually put anything in your pocket. Conversion rate analysis shows how many of your visitors actually turn into paying customers that buy your products and services.
Businesses have different definitions of conversion ratio. For some, a completed transaction on the website may be considered a conversion. For others, getting an email address or subscription can be considered a conversion.
For example, consider the case of B2B businesses that rely on getting new leads for selling their products. Getting an email address that gives them a lead to a potential business partner can be much more useful than a single purchase at their website.
Generally, a conversion ratio of 2% – 5% of website traffic is considered adequate and achievable. Making 20 to 50 sales for every thousand visits on your website is not bad. A higher ratio is possible but unrealistic. A lower ratio can work as well, but only if your margins are healthy enough to cover costs.
Social Media Network Size
Social media has become an important element in digital marketing strategy. On average, users spend 2 to 5 hours on social networking platforms every day to communicate with friends, family, and acquaintances.
Many businesses have created social media pages on multiple platforms to help them reach a bigger audience. The number of followers, friends, subscribers or connections you have in your social network is an indicator of your potential business reach.
Every time you launch a new product or expand your geographical area of operations, you can share this information on your social network. It is a great way to promote your business and brand at a relatively low cost.
Active businesses on social media tend to have anywhere from 50,000 to 1,000,000 users in their network. The more people you have in your network, the better.
Engagement and Social Shares
Creating an account on social media isn’t enough. You have to consistently update your page with new content such as articles, images and videos.
Remember that this is a full-time responsibility. You may need to hire an article writing service and/or assign a social media handler to create and distribute content on your pages across different social platforms.
Most social media websites allow their users the option to share information and content that they find useful. They can even share information about products and services that they like. Posts can go viral with the help of influencers in a matter of hours, and reach millions of potential customers.
This is something that active businesses have learned to use. You can also use blogs, infographics, images, memes and video,s etc., on your social pages to engage with your network.
You should keep track of the total social shares on your networks to determine the level of traction your content is getting. It will give you an understanding of how well you are taking advantage of this medium.
Inbound Links
Search engines rank your website’s credibility based on links placed on other sites that lead back to yours. The more natural links you have spread out there, the more visibility your brand will get.
Links should be placed on trusted sources or high-domain authority websites. Links from websites that share similar content relevant to your own will be given more weight by search engines.
Content Quality Measures
The quality of content you share on your website is also taken into consideration for ranking. For example, blogs and articles stuffed with keywords are easy to tell apart from the naturally written content. Your website audience will immediately notice this and they will be put off by these tactics.
More dangerously, Google’s search algorithm can also tell when you are trying to stuff your website with useless content in hopes of improving your search engine ranking.
There are two key metrics for evaluating your content quality.
Content Creation Time
It is important to measure the time it takes for you to create interesting content for your audience. If you can come up with interesting content quickly and regularly, without getting distracted from your core business operations, you should do it yourself.
If your content quality isn’t great or it takes too much time to come up with good stuff, you can use a blog and article writing service that creates content for you while you focus on business operations.
Content Performance over Time
The second measure of content quality is its lifespan. When you share new content on your website or social media, it may get thousands of likes in the first couple of days. But what is its performance after a month? Is it still getting shares and likes?
Good quality content remains relevant for quite some time. While the number of social shares may decline from the initial upload time due to social media and search engine algorithm, it remains relevant for a long time.
CTA and Click through Rate
CTAs are distinct buttons or links that you place in your blogs, articles or webpages. They help convert your visitors and social connections into sales through landing or product pages.
Good CTAs build a compelling case for your visitors to buy what you have to offer. If people are not clicking on your CTAs, it could indicate weaknesses in your content or sales closing strategy.
Measuring the CTA rate will help you identify weaknesses in content marketing strategy and help you build better sales funnels.
Time Spent on Page
You should have a fairly good idea of how long it takes to read the content on your web pages and social profiles. Evaluate the time visitors spend on each page to determine how your content is being received by the audience.
When you understand how much time your visitors spend on each page, you can improve your content marketing strategy accordingly.
For example, suppose you put out two different articles with different writing styles; one informative and the other humorous. If visitors spend more time on the informative article page and bounce quicker on the humorous article page, then it can tell you the type of content style your potential users prefer.
Conclusion
Content marketing strategy is an evolving field, and businesses are still testing out ideas to see what works and what doesn’t. The good thing about content marketing is that you have hundreds of tools and techniques to try out and evaluate what works for you.
In this blog, we covered 8 critical measures that businesses should evaluate to improve their content marketing strategy in 2020. Keeping track of these important factors can be helpful in achieving your business goals.
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