Can we measure the effectiveness of content marketing?

Content marketing is a fully fledged marketing practice in its own right and many marketers and businesses have realised the benefits of content marketing activities. By providing content that doesn’t just sell your products but provides your potential target audience with content that they’re looking for or appreciate related to your products, this is a great to increase brand awareness, thought leadership, trust and rapport.

 

So you go off create some great blogs, whitepapers and web content but how do you measure the effectiveness of how well this content is received? According to a study by the Content Marketing Association (CMA), 52% are unsure whether a universal metric is realistic so how do you measure the effectiveness and whether this really is a valuable marketing tactic. 29% of marketers are worried that if a definitive way of measuring content marketing hasn’t been sorted then budgets will move away from this kind of activity.

 

In order to measure the effectiveness of content marketing you need to define your goals and objectives for each piece of content, as they all serve a different purpose. Engagement could be defined as the amount of comments on a blog post, the amount of social shares, time spent reading a web page or how many people downloaded your whitepaper. Yet, having some universal metrics would really benefit the industry as a whole.

 

There are a range of metrics that can be used to measure content and the two predominant metrics according to the CMA report are action at 44% and interaction at 41%. In a report by content management firm Acquia, marketers measure the effects of content marketing through repeat visits and transactions (45%), 44% track brand awareness and 41% audience share. Scroll time and time on page are also ways to establish how long someone has spent reading your content and a good way to work out if they’ve engaged with it.

 

Creating great content is crucial for a businesses success, in fact, companies that blog receive 66% more leads than those that don’t. If you need help with your blogging and content creation, contact 10 Digital to see how we can move your business forward and improve your brand awareness.