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Did you know that 51% of buyers go through the content published by a company before making buying decisions? Take yourself for an example: Do you not judge a brand by the quality of its blogs? You already know the answer! Even for a small startup, the quality of content published has a vital role to play. Especially today when the consumers are literate enough to sieve out the superior from the inferior brands, small startups with fantastic content are becoming success stories overnight. Even if you lack the finance to market your brand extensively, all it takes is a reliable team to come up with an engaging and appealing content marketing strategy.
But building a content management strategy certainly isn’t enough. You also need to keep track of the various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ascertain whether the content is fulfilling its purpose and helping you achieve the business objectives.
Every business publishes content with three goals in mind – conversion, engagement and reputation. So let us have a look at the 10 metrics that you should be keeping track of to make sure that your content is taking your business forward.
From The Aspect Of Conversion
1. Lead Generation
For a small business, the ideal leads are the oxygen for your business. More the leads, the better are the chances for your small business to generate revenue through sales. By setting lead generation as a KPI, you can keep a close check on it to determine whether your content marketing strategy is aiding your small company and optimising its goals. While calculating lead generation, make sure that you consider email signups and form submissions too. Also, do track the number of leads generated by conversion of subscribers of your newsletters and followers of your blogs into buyers.
But how would you understand whether or not your content is being able to generate the targeted leads? The answer is SEO. If content is the king, SEO is the queen. So take help from an SEO analyst to make the content on your website search engine optimised.
2. Traffic Drive
Traffic and footfall indicate how useful your content is. So make sure that you track the source your traffic is coming from. Building and running a website is a matter of both time and money! There is no point in having a web presence if your site doesn’t get the targeted footfall. When you track the traffic on your site, you get valuable insight into facts like the types of content that attract a particular audience. Suppose you deal in fashion and fitness wear, a large part of your target audience are the youngsters. In that case, you must curate content that is relevant to their age group. If you publish content with a title like, “10 ways to look younger than your age”, the young generation will not find your blogs to be useful. So you need to understand your traffic and change your content accordingly.
The key to bringing in more traffic to your web content is KEYWORDS! You need to get your hands on the most relevant keywords and use them in your content. But beware of keyword stuffing as that may push you down in the search engine results.
3. Page Views
The page views depend primarily on the content that you have on your website. As a small startup that cannot afford extensive offline advertising, publishing relevant content is your only way out. The number of views that each page on your site gets reflects how well the content is being received by its readers. It is only when you get to understand how many visitors read your blogs and other content, that you know whether you are heading in the right direction or not. A high percentage of views would indicate that the content you are publishing on your site is engaging and informative, thus attracting the targeted audience.
More the page views, better the boost your business gets. But how to achieve that? I would suggest that you use a good SEO plugin like SmartCrawl Pro to boost your page rank with the help of its configuration tools. Make small but substantial changes on your site too to highlight your most popular content and interlink all your posts with these.
4. Customer Retention
This metric is important to track as it reflects the number of customers that you have been able to retain owing to their loyalty. Although it is essential to be able to attract new users, your primary focus should be on whether you can retain your old visitors too. A low retention rate would act as an indicator of irrelevant content, and you should take it as a sign to work on better quality content immediately. Measuring the KPI will help you in constructing a content campaign that works more in favour of your business.
If you are worried that your old customers are fading out then take the hint to take rectifying measures to bring in changes into your content structure to bring them back.
From The Aspect Of Engagement
5. Back-links and Inbound Links
The more the backlinks used for your content, the better it is for content engagement. A higher number of back-links would prove that more brands have found your content to be relevant and useful, thus using your blogs as a reference. This should be considered as an indispensable metric because it will translate whether your content is appealing and engaging enough to be used by others. You can use these steps to check for the number of back-links, and inbound links to your content – Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Links to Your Site.
An added tip:
Make sure that you use a plagiarism checker to determine that other companies are not using your content without giving you credit for it.
6. Bounce Rate
Higher the bounce rate, worse it is for every entrepreneur. A high bounce-off percentage on your website would fetch your website a lower search engine ranking, thus pushing you off from your users. Would you want that to happen? Keeping track of the bounce rate will help you improve the quality and relevancy of your content so that it has an enhanced search intent.
To avoid having a poor SERP for your content, you can check the rate of each page on your website to trace the problematic areas. The pages with a higher bounce rate would mean that they are the ones that are making your users hit the BACK button, so that you can make the alterations accordingly.
7. Session Duration
When users spend a lot of time on your site, you will know that your content is relevant and engaging for your users. Session duration is an essential KPI that you must measure periodically. A lower session duration would mean that visitors are not finding the content interesting, failing to make them stay on the page. Here, you can take the hint to bring in changes in your content strategies. However, session duration can be a conspicuous metric as it may not show the real picture. A higher session rate can also mean that the user has left the page open and gone to the washroom while a lower session duration can be due to a disrupted internet connection.
To make your users stay, it is important that you post relevant and informative content and not generic content. Also, you must make an effort to know what they really want and expect from you to deliver content that is useful to them.
8. Click-Through Rate
The Click-through rate tells you the impression that your published content has created on the visitors and whether it has got the final click-through or not. It is through CTR that you get an idea of the lead generated through your content. For a small startup, the CT rate is a key player that reflects a lot about your online advertisement. The lower the CTR, the more you have to work on your content strategy to make it a more robust one.
For a better CTR rate, you can try incorporating your brand name like the way it is placed in your website URL to get more clicks on your ad-word campaign.
From The Aspect Of Reputation
9. Comments and Mentions
The comments that are present below your blogs and other posts give you a clear understanding of whether your content is likeable or not. If the positive comments dominate the number of negative ones, you need to understand that you are going the right way. However, negative comments on your posts will give you the hint that you need to bring in changes in your content marketing strategy to make it more likeable for the users. So, you must keep track of the comments too.
To make it more engaging for your users, ask a question or take a poll so that they get the chance to give their feedback. Not only will this create a good impression, but also work like a survey for you.
10. Social Shares
With the number of people using social media crossing 3 billion, you must count in the various social media platforms as effective tools for propagating your content extensively. But it doesn’t end here. You must track your social shares to have an idea of the online presence your company has as a brand. The number of social shares would reflect how relevant and engaging your post was. Also, keep a close check on your number of followers and subscribers so that you can take rectifying measures when you see a decline in the numbers. The number of subscribers who have “unfollow”-ed you, will tell you to craft your content with more finesse.
The above metrics will show you whether your content is performing according to the desired plan or not. So, now that you know how to measure content marketing success, what are you waiting for? Get started today! All my best wishes are with you and your endeavour.
“The opinions expressed by BizWitty Contributors are their own, not those of BizCover and should not be relied upon in place of appropriate professional advice. Please read our full disclaimer."
