As marketers continue to invest in content marketing, many are met with the task of proving content's impact on their business's bottom line.
These marketers are left asking themselves one question: how do I measure the effectiveness of my content marketing efforts?
While some rely on vanity metrics such as page views and social shares to answer this question, it is important to dig deeper and take a look at how content is impacting marketing and sales pipeline.
Thankfully, there are now definite content marketing metrics to track content's impact on each level of the funnel and several technologies to compute the return on your content marketing investment.
At Curata, we recently published The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics, which provides a detailed guide to proving the effectiveness of content through various metrics.
To give you a high-level roadmap, I pulled out 29 of the most essential metrics for the following infographic. Use this as a guide if you're looking to expand your level of measurement or if you're just getting started. Keep reading for a summary of each class of metrics.
To zoom in, click here or simply click on the image.
Want to learn more about each class of metrics? Here are the questions that each will answer about your content.
- What is the number of people who are consuming your content?
- Which channels are these people using?
- How frequently and how in-depth is their consumption?
- How effective are you at holding your audience's attention beyond the first point of contact?
- Sharing Metrics:
- Which of your content pieces are being shared?
- Who is sharing this content?
- How/where they are sharing?
- How does the intersection of your consumption and sharing metrics translate into "engagement?"
- Does your content inspire users to take some kind of action?
- What kind of action are these users taking?
- How frequently and consistently are they taking action?
- How is content supporting demand generation in terms of lead generation and lead nurturing? (middle-of-the-funnel)
- How is your content influencing bottom-of-the-funnel results?
- How is your content filling the pipeline?
- How is your content driving revenue?
- How is your team performing against editorial calendar deadlines and goals?
- How long does it take your team to turn a content idea into a published piece of content?
- How many pieces of content do you regularly publish in a given period of time?
- What are your overall content marketing costs?
- What are your costs per piece? Per creative resource?