Content Marketing: Your Guide to Measuring Success

3 minute read
By: Joe Barron
Content Marketing, Marketing

Creating content is just the beginning of your data driven marketing strategy.

To achieve your goals with content marketing, it’s essential to measure and track everything you do. Then, use your findings to optimise and improve your content marketing in the future.

Whenever and wherever you publish a piece of content, you create B2B data. This data can be tracked and used to improve your content marketing game.

To find out more, we sat down with Emily Byford. Emily is the Content Marketing Manager at SaaStock, a global community of software as a service (SaaS) founders, executives, and investors. Earlier this year, Cognism was an exhibitor at the SaaStock flagship event in Dublin.

Emily shared her insights into measuring B2B content marketing success in three main areas. But before you can measure, you need to know what you are measuring for.

Set your content marketing goals

Before you start publishing content, think about what you want to achieve. If you don’t know what your goals are, how will you know if you’re being successful?

Ideas for goals could be improving numbers around:

B2B lead generation - names at the start of your sales funnel.
Brand awareness - making more people aware of who your company is and what you do.
Engagement - views, dwell time and shares for your content.
Lead nurturing - moving leads along your sales and marketing funnel.
Sales - turning leads into customers.
Customer retention - getting existing customers to buy from you again.
Subscription growth - adding numbers to your subscription service.

Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to decide which marketing metrics to track.

Emily showed us the metrics that matter across the three main content marketing channels.

Search engines

Many of your potential buyers will find your content through search engines such as Google. You need to make your content as easy to find as possible, driving more traffic to your website.

How do you go about doing this? By improving your SEO skills!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and science of getting your content to rank as highly as possible on search engine results for your chosen keywords. Google is clever enough that if you work out your keywords and write content that provides value to the reader, it will reward your content with a high ranking.

Be careful, though!

Emily’s advice is not to overstuff your content with keywords. It’s bad for the reader and bad for your ranking. Google’s algorithm will spot what you’re up to and penalise you by pushing your website down the list, making it harder for people to find!

Here are the three search engine metrics you need to track for your content marketing:

Impressions - The number of times your content was shown on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
Clicks - The number of times users chose to visit your content after seeing it show up in search results.
Site Visitors - The number of users that came to your site. They could be new users, reading your content for the first time, or returning users who are loyal to your content.

Your website

Once a visitor is on your website and engaging with your content, there are several opportunities to measure success.

Here are the three metrics Emily recommends that you track:

Unique page views - the number of times a page on your site has been visited by a user, excluding repeat visits.
Pages per visit - the average number of pages on your site a user visits when they come to your site. This is calculated by dividing total page views by the number of visitors.
Bounce rate - the proportion of users that leave your site after viewing only one page, expressed as a percentage.

Social media

For the modern B2B marketer, social media is where you promote your content. It’s also where readers who find value in your content may choose to share it with others. Of course, there are metrics you can track to evaluate your success here too.

Emily gave us these metrics to track:

Reach - the total number of social media profiles that see your content.
Engagement - the number of interactions your content receives. This can differ by social media platform. For example, on Facebook, you can receive likes, shares and new followers.
Audience Growth Rate - the change in your company’s number of followers across all social media platforms.

And finally...

Emily had one last bonus tip for us:

“The one thing you need to track across all your channels is your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the percentage of users who view your content, then go on to do what you want them to do. For example, if the goal of a piece of content is to drive subscribers to your newsletter, your conversion rate is the percentage of people who, after reading your content, click ‘subscribe’.”

“In this example, you would track conversions by setting up unique codes in the links inside your content, which tell your CRM where each subscription comes from.”

Get more insights from SaaStock

Thanks to Emily for participating with us for this blog. We hope you found her knowledge useful. There is a science behind content marketing; take Emily’s guidance away and see if it makes a difference to your outbound marketing endeavours!

If you enjoyed this article, make sure you visit the SaaStock blog! It’s fast becoming the go-to knowledge hub for the SaaS community. You’ll learn how to grow and scale your SaaS company from some of the best in the business. It’s well worth a look!