Did you know that over 80% of business-to-business (B2B) marketing teams have a content marketing strategy? But only 11% of those teams consider their content marketing strategy as an excellent one!
Content marketing is the hottest thing in marketing right now because it is one of the best ways to generate marketing ROI by building new and better relationships with potential customers.
But how do you create a strong content marketing program? And how do you measure its effectiveness?
Here is your comprehensive guide on everything your business needs to know about measuring content marketing.
Understanding Content Marketing
Content marketing is creating content that adds value to customers and prospects. It’s not a sales pitch. Content marketing pieces are not explicitly trying to sell them on a product or service.
Content marketing can be creating things like blog articles, thought leadership content, videos and vlogs, e-books, webinars, and more. It’s basically just any piece of content that brings either value, entertainment, or some other relevance for the customer or potential buyer.
Content marketing helps your brand to establish itself as a credible figure on whatever line of business you are in. It’s your chance to really prove that you are better than your competitors. This is because you are creating content that serves a purpose rather than just trying to sell them something.
Content marketing is also your way of showing customers and potential buyers that you understand their needs. You realize their pain points and challenges. Content marketing is a way to prove that you can help them solve these challenges on a deeper level.
But what is the most valuable part of content marketing? New customers? Time-savings? Both?
Businesses that have a content marketing strategy can generate up to three times more sales leads than traditional marketing.
But that’s not even the best part. Businesses get three times as many leads while spending 62% less than traditional marketing.
Challenges of Content Marketing Measurement
It’s been established that content marketing is extremely necessary for your business. It’s cost-effective, valuable to your customers, and valuable to your brand.
Yet, so many businesses are still faced with challenges that prevent them from taking the important step of creating a content marketing strategy.
One of these challenges is that business owners may not see the value in creating content that does not have immediate sales conversion. For example, writing blog articles or creating how-to videos with no obvious sales pitch or call-to-action at the end may seem like a waste of time.
Content marketing is a long-term game. Trust and value are not built overnight. You have to be willing to create a library of content over time before you start seeing awesome results.
A limited budget to spend on content marketing is another challenge business owners face. Many tend to think that it takes a lot of money to create high-quality content, especially when it comes to video production.
Marketing professionals and business owners should know that it does not take much money to create good content. You can start small by hiring freelance writers to create a few articles. You can work your way up to creating videos with better quality equipment.
And lastly, what nearly 40% of business owners say is the most difficult part of content marketing is measuring the overall return on investment. They feel as if content like videos, blogs, and more are too qualitative to accurately measure.
How to Track and Measure Content Marketing ROI
Content marketing is a great first step for your business to start being competitive in what can be a very crowded marketplace. But knowing how to calculate content marketing ROI will exponentially help increase not only your visibility, but your credibility, brand image, and your profits.
Understanding your content marketing results is a must if you want to convert all that time and effort into sales and profits. There are a variety of ways to do so.
Measuring email engagement is a popular method, as it’s very easy to track the number of opens, clicks, unsubscribes of your emails. You can quickly see the type of content that works and the type of content that does not.
Social media engagement is considered in the top three metrics for measuring ROI on content marketing. Measuring social media engagement allows you to keep a pulse on what is trending, what users care about, and more.
Social media is a great additional outlet where you can share your content, like blogs, videos, and podcasts besides your website.
Ask yourself these questions:
- How often are your followers interacting with your content?
- How many new followers are you receiving?
- How often is your content being shared?
Monitoring website traffic is another great way to track the ROI of your content marketing. Your content marketing strategy will rely on people being directed to your website. Having a sound SEO strategy will help drive traffic.
Importance of SEO When Measuring Content Marketing
Make sure the content you create is SEO-rich and SEO-native. This will help our content rank higher on search engine sites. Search engines know when content like blog articles and thought leadership pieces are being artificially stuffed with keywords.
Measuring content marketing ROI is all about knowing what type of content your audience is seeking out. If they find it valuable and relevant to their issues or pain points, they will be more likely to keep coming back for more content.
Once you have built a layer of trust that your content is relevant, they will more likely trust that your product or services can help them reach their business goals.
The Tools You Need to Start Measuring Content Marketing at Your Company
Content marketing measurement should not only be looked at through a qualitative lens. You need software tools that can analyze the data for you. These types of tools can help to shrink mountains of data into easy-to-read insights and stats.
The top tool needed for measuring content marketing strategies is analytics software. You need a tool that will tell you the nitty-gritty details of how viewers are interacting with your content.
A good analytics software tool will tell you exactly how many page views you get, how long people are spending on the page interacting with your content, and whether or not they continue to visit pages on your website after.
An analytics tool can help point out the content that is not being as engaged with as other pieces of content. It can highlight the top performing content. This lets you focus on building more of that kind of content.
Another type of tool that is helpful when measuring content marketing is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Almost 40 percent of marketers cite the importance of this tool.
CRM software can help track individual customer engagements. You can group customers based on the interactions they have and more effectively target those who are interested in the same types of content.
You want to be sure that you do not overload your business or marketing team with too many different platforms and software programs to use. Too many tools will overwhelm your marketing team and create data overload.
About one-third of marketers report using just one to two analytics tools to measure content marketing ROI. Another one-third of marketers report using between three and five tools to measure ROI.
Elevate Your Organization’s Content Marketing Strategy Today
Measuring content marketing can seem difficult, especially if you are first starting out and are unsure of what to look for. However, it’s critical that you do something to help you measure your ROI. This can be the most useful business skill to elevate your marketing strategy and increase your business’s profits and sales.
Reaching out to professionals to measure and track your content marketing’s ROI can help to convince your CEO or executive that it is worthwhile to invest in content marketing.
Here at the Marketing Insider Group, we can help you build a customized strategy that reaches more of your customers. By developing powerful, measurable content, we can help drive leads to your website and increase your revenue.
Reach out today to jumpstart your content marketing strategy.
Feature Photo by Rodolfo Clix from Pexels
The post B2B Marketers Struggle With Measuring Content Marketing appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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