Content Marketing Strategy
Setting a content marketing strategy in motion takes a lot of careful planning. Not only do you need to do your research, specify your niche, and produce valuable content, but you’ll also need to measure your progress. Below are five key things you need to measure to ensure your content marketing strategy is a success.
Traffic
The importance of measuring your traffic cannot be underestimated. Without it, you won’t be producing any revenue — pure and simple. If you’re new to analysing your web traffic, tools like Google Analytics are really useful. The areas you’ll want to monitor especially are:
- Users: The total number of visitors to your page.
- Page Views: The total number of times a page has been viewed on your site.
- Unique Pageviews: This is calculated when a user visits one of your pages multiple times.
Other things to monitor are where your users are coming from and how your traffic is growing over time. Again, Google Analytics is a great tool for this.
Conversions
Conversions make up the other activities on your site, such as signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase. If your site is attracting lots of users, but they’re not doing anything but reading, then you may need to change your site’s content. If you’re a B2B business, you’ll want to track your customer’s sales journey and any stops they make along the way, such as registering on your email list.
SEO Success
Measuring your SEO is important for finding out how you rank on search engine results pages. Why? Because the higher you rank, the more likely it is that potential customers will find you when they search for keywords. While some of your traffic will originate from social media, you’ll want to ensure that you can be found on Google, too.
Google Console is a fantastic tool for tracking your SEO metrics. It allows you to identify the terms you’re ranking for and enables you to track this progress over time. Other things you’ll want to check when it comes to SEO is:
- Whether you’re appearing in answer boxes for relevant terms
- How high your domain authority is
- Whether you’re getting inbound links from other sources
Authority
Another element you need to measure is your authority. While this isn’t as easy to measure like the other things on this list, you can use tools like Small SEO Tools to check the score of your site. While these can be objective, generally, anything above 40 is considered high authority. If you’re way below that, you’ll need to work on creating high-quality, shareable content and generating a link-building strategy so that you’re connected with other sites.
Engagement
The success of your content marketing strategy isn’t just about attracting users; it’s also about maintaining them. The last thing you want is for someone to visit your site and never return, especially if you provide a key service. One of the easiest ways to measure engagement is to look at your bounce rate. This shows how often a user is visiting your site and then leaving without engaging with the content. Ultimately, you should aim for a bounce rate of less than 40%.
Another area to monitor when it comes to engagement is your performance on social media. Most platforms have inbuilt analytics that you can use to track your engagement and how often your content is being shared. BuzzSumo is also a great tool for tracking social media shares.
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