Welcome to Day 29 of the Crafting Your Content Marketing Strategy Challenge!
One of the ways to ensure that you are working effectively and not just doing busy work is to understand what your key performance indicators are, how often you’re going to track them, and how you’ll do it. This is important because the truth is, you can make a lot of mistakes and waste a lot of time if you don’t know what is working and what is not working in your content marketing efforts.
Check Your Site Traffic
It’s a good idea to check your site traffic before, during, and after every single campaign that you run. That way you can truly tell what affected the traffic and you won’t be guessing. The worst thing you can do today when it’s not necessary is to make a guess. Today you have access to real data to ensure your actions make an impact.
Look at Time Spent on the Site
Looking at the time your visitors spend on your site and what pages they’re looking at is a very helpful practice. If you know what makes your site sticky, then you’ll be able to do more of that type of content. For example, if you posted an article that got a lot of traffic, you can create more about that topic.
The Effectiveness of Your SEO Strategy
Study the keywords you’re using to determine if your pages are ranking in the search engine results for the terms that you’ve been choosing. This practice will also reveal additional keywords that you may not have considered using in your content development.
The Change in Engagement
When you start any type of social media campaign or engagement push, do you know if it’s working or not? If it is working, is the engagement helping drive sales? Remember to look for more than likes for engagement. You want conversation more than likes.
How Many Visitors are Returning?
Is your information sticky enough that your site visitors want to come back? If so, this is a great indication that your message is resonating. Check this number a few times a year so that you know you’re on the right track with your content creation.
How Sales are Affected
Naturally, you want views, clicks, and engagement, but you also ultimately need sales. Without sales, you’re not a business. Ensure that you’re using your content to make offers by always including a call to action.
Brand Awareness and Reputation
This can be a little harder to determine, but you can create content that helps with brand awareness and reputation that you share to help. Set up a Google Alert so that you know when your product or your name is mentioned so you can monitor the feelings of others. Also, you can create surveys and deliver them via a remarketing campaign through Facebook or Twitter.
Social Shares of Your Content
Are a lot of people sharing your content? If not, how can you improve it? Set up more calls to action and make it easy for them to share by including the right software on your site. Make sure you ask.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is conversions divided by visitors. It really is that simple. Know average conversion rates for your industry and type of product and try to optimize your marketing until you match the industry, at least.
To create an effective content marketing plan, be ready to track your efforts using software like Google Analytics as well as the software you use – such as email marketing software, landing page software, and social media software. When you track before, during, and after every campaign, you’ll be able to use the data collected to improve and save on your resources.
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