How to measure the results of your content marketing campaign

Many digital marketers have a hard time measuring the success of their digital marketing campaigns. What does success look like? There are literally hundreds of metrics you can use to measure your digital marketing strategy and there are some metrics that does provide clear results, but for some it still remains a mystery what real digital marketing success looks like and how to properly measure the success of their efforts online.

If you do a simple search for “how to measure the results of my digital marketing campaign” or even “measure the ROI of social media”, you will practically see hundreds of results consisting of videos, articles, white papers and even infographics explaining how to do this. Everyone has their own way of measuring digital marketing success and many even claim that you cannot measure the true ROI of social media which is actually very easy – if you know and understand what you want to measure.

It doesn’t matter if you are a startup or a big brand. One thing is certain, if you want measure digital marketing results, you need proper goals in your strategy. If you have solid goals in place, you can measure, analyse and monitor them.

With solid goals in place with your marketing campaign, you’ll be able to measure what’s important and the success of your efforts. Below is a couple of goals you can use to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your content marketing campaign.

Generating leads

With content marketing, you have an excellent opportunity to generate leads by publishing and sharing interesting and unique content that is relevant to your business, services and what you believe in. It’s all about offering information that outlines why people should buy or do business with you and providing value to your target audience.

To be successful with generating leads with content marketing you should focus on only producing and curating magnetic content and not just pushing out content like a sausage machine. The internet is filled with noise and pretty chaotic. Make your content awesome and answer questions your target market might have and offer solutions. Always add value so that your content stands out from the crowd.

Be the industry expert in your niche

With content marketing you can become the industry expert and thought leader in your niche. Even though many are using the term “thought leadership” without really understanding it’s true meaning, start communicating new and innovating ideas in an engaging way that is easy to understand and that can be shared along.

This might sound easier than it is, but it is actually something anyone can do. Use your knowledge and industry know how to your advantage and provide new ways and solutions that haven’t been used before in using your services or products.

If you have data available in your business, use it to generate new content ideas that can’t be found anywhere else. Ask your target audience questions and use this data to produce and share content that matters.

Build and expand your network

If you are using content marketing to build and expand your network, make sure your content is focused and to the point. Use your content to engage, educate and entertain your target audience and never only talk about yourself and what you do. This type of content is all about establishing and building good relationships with your community.

Customer services

With content marketing, you are not limited to content that primarily lives on your blog and shared via social media. If someone is looking for solutions or have a question, what do they do? They turn to the search engines looking for help. Use this to your advantage and optimise the content of your website to answer them with SEO. Create an FAQ page that lists all the common questions and answers about your services or products. Add a feedback form where users can submit their own questions and answers and include their questions on this page.

You are not restricted to only use text with your content. Images and video content is most of the time easier to consume. Always make a point of creating engaging content and make it sharable.

There are many goals you can setup to measure the results of your content marketing campaign. Measure what matters and how you can optimise your content to get the best results.