How to Measure the Performance of Your Content Marketing Strategy
The Customer journey way
There’s currently a ton of material (articles, videos, podcasts, pdf, eBooks and a 2hour movie) on how to create and implement a content strategy, come up with keywords, topics, and produce great shareable content, but measuring the success of that same content seems to be one of the dodgy areas of content marketing.
Just a few years back, content marketers were comfortable with measuring the success of their content with page views. Well in their defense, at the time, there was little that could be measured.
But now, thanks to the technological advances in marketing analytics, we can measure and analyze just about everything in marketing, trace every dollar spent and attribute every dollar earned to a specific marketing effort. Here is a good article about attribution models.
This means that the goal for us as content marketers is not to just be good at only telling stories but to use content to drive business results that is why more than ever, you need a content strategy capable of improving your business’s bottom line performance.
Using marketing analytics, marketers are able to create informed content strategies, perform real-time optimization and improvements to these strategies like improving content message, proposed value, and marketing channels so that at any one moment, their content strategy is generating real business value to the company.
Unfortunately, even with the increased adoption of content marketing and the technology to measure it, 67% of marketer sight performance measurement as one of the most challenging areas.
In this article, I will be showing you in detail how you can measure the true performance and impact of your content marketing strategy.
How Marketers are measuring content strategy performance
Currently, what most marketers do when it comes to performance measurement is look at their ROI and call it a day.
Sure, a positive return on investment is an indication of a financial gain for your marketing efforts which really important for the long-term survival of a business but how is that content meeting your customer needs?
In all the smart content marketing guides, videos, pdf, found online, experts talk about creating content at all stages of the funnel in order to provide the customer with all the relevant answers to their questions as they move along the marketing funnel to improve conversions.
With the funnel model, you create content that attracts user and builds brand awareness, you also create content that activates this user into a qualified lead and lastly, you create content that facilitates the business conversion of this qualified lead.
This shows that every content created serves a different purpose even though ultimately it’s all to generate more conversions for the business.
By the funnel model, therefore, content created at the top of the funnel should have metrics of measurement different from content created at the middle or the bottom of the funnel.
Every piece of content has to have a specific goal to accomplish or at least it should.
Some marketers create content with no goal in mind while others continue to create content with at least five goals in mind expecting the same piece of content to attract, convince and convert new visitors into paying customers.
This is the reason you are now finding websites with pop-ups everywhere that you even fail to read their articles.
Popups about joining an email list you have no idea about, popups to start a free trial of a software you’ve just discovered, pop-ups of discounts to products you are not interested in.
It’s a mess.
What happens is that these companies after a surface analysis of their content marketing, they may discover that they generate a good traffic volume but their conversion rate is low.
In an effort to improve conversion rates, they head to SUMO, get free popup plugins installed all over their sites without consideration of the purpose of their content or the stage of their customer journey their current visitor is in.
And when this doesn’t work (obviously), they conclude that content marketing doesn’t work.
How other companies are doing it?
Have you visited blogs for websites like Hubspot.com, these are the smart marketers. Every article, template, pdf or EBook has a specific goal, and a specific conversion for visitors to make that matches the topic of the content. Deeper Hubspot analysis.
Hubspot’s ToFu articles address pain points of their target customers to provide the initial value before asking for visitor’s email addresses and even when they ask for your email, it’s in exchange for a valuable piece of content like social media templates, content strategy pdf.
Their MoFu content provides more brand-specific solutions to target user’s problems through case studies, webinars, and EBooks. BoFu content is about making a sale that why you will be finding testimonies, discounts and other offers here.
The idea is that when measuring the performance, ROI and bounce rate are not the only metrics you look at but also how best that content is meeting customer needs for that stage of their journey.
You may say that of course, Hubspot has to do all that but there are many other companies are focusing on creating content for all stages of their customer’s journey and using audience need satisfaction as a measurement of content success.
For example, Look at Groove’s ToFu content created in form of a “Startup Journey” series of articles designed to provide visitors with valuable startup growth information (a behind the scenes’ view)like how they achieved product-market fit, how they promoted their content.
All these articles have one simple CTA “Enter email to receive more content” to receive more of that content.
These articles don’t mention anything about Groove’s software offers, features or case studies because they are meant to attract users and build brand awareness, therefore, determining their performance should not only be based on sale conversions but on the number of potential leads generated.
Supporting metrics to measure could be traffic and audience engagement.
Another good example is Autopilot’s MoFu content inform of “Flight School” a series of lesson/articles about a number of solutions Autopilot can provide to the problems faced by the target audience.
These articles go into detail to explain how you can use Autopilot features to improve your lead nurturing process. The performance of this content should be measured with a consideration of how many qualified leads it’s generating or sales for BoFu content.
A big problem is that many content marketers are still measuring success in terms of page views and social shares. Neither of those is bad things, but they also aren’t the true measure of the content’s business value. A blog post that generates a ton of page views and social shares isn’t necessarily “effective” nor does it mean that it will have any impact on revenue.
Why should the customer journey be considered when measuring the performance of your content strategy?
The mistake companies make is getting into producing and promoting new content without a clear understanding of how content marketing works and how they can effectively apply that to achieve their company goals.
According to Salesforce, it takes a customer 6–8 touchpoint before making a purchase, so if you are measuring the performance of your content why not consider the value and information you provide to your customers at all these 6 to 8 touch points.
These 6 to 8 touch points are a representation of the customer’s journey through the funnel and an effective Content marketing strategy should be designed to provide all the necessary information for a prospect to move from the awareness stage to evaluation and then conversion stage.
Less than this, your content strategy may generate some impressive results especially if some of your content makes it to Google’s first page but they will never be enough to impact your business’s revenue potential.
That is all a complete content strategy is and is supposed to be, if your reason for content marketing is different from providing relevant information for users at all stages of their journey then you should try other marketing channels probably your ROI will be better.
Content marketing works because, at any one moment in a business cycle, there is always a group of people unaware of the problem your product can solve, there is another group aware of the problem but are evaluating product solutions from competitors and a group ready to buy a product providing the solution they are looking for.
Which means, at any one time, your business has the potential to attract three type of customers for every one of its target personas.
If your content manages to generate a reasonable number of people in each of these stages, then you have a full content strategy that can impact business revenue.
Without taking your customer journey into consideration when designing your content strategy, the measurement of your strategy’s performance will not give you the big picture view necessary to optimize and improve.
Performance measurement along the stages of your customer journey.
The main goal of a customer journey is to understand how your prospects move from being completely unaware of their problem or opportunity to the point where they will be able to make an informed purchase decision.
There are mainly three stages:
A. Top of the funnel (Attract)
Also known as the awareness stage. In this stage, visitors may not even be aware of the problems they have. They aren’t aware of your brand, and they certainly aren’t aware of the solution you have available to them. They are just looking for answers, resources, education, research data, opinions, and insights, with no special goal in mind.
The content created here is designed to be problem-solving to facilitate awareness. This content takes any form depending on what your audience prefers and your capacity to produce that form of content like articles, podcasts, and videos.
The goal of this content is to communicate the solutions, rewards and the end benefits to your visitors and if this is successfully achieved, then the visitor will be a potential lead.
The only metric to track here that has an impact on the business’ bottom line is the number of potential leads generated through content upgrades and other lead magnets to acquire visitors’ email addresses who then put through a lead nurturing system.
With a single goal in focus, you can easily measure the performance of this content by looking at the number of potential leads generated where content that generated the highest number of potential is ranked best ToFu content.
There is an urge for some to gauge this content’s performance solely on sale revenue/ conversions but that’s a clear sign of a lack of focus, it means that you are being sale-ly with your ToFu content (which is a big no-no if you are generating a good number of potentials leads).
But if the sales conversions attributed to this content is significant, then you should consider categorizing it in the BoFu content batch since the goal has changed.
Other supporting metrics to track include:
· Traffic generated
· Bounce rate
· Conversion rate into a potential lead
· Time on page
· Brand awareness
· Engagement
B. Middle of the Funnel (Engage)
Also known as the consideration/evaluation stage. In this stage, all content visitors are considered as potential leads who are evaluating various choices available to them, including your competitors. This is usually the time of user research on whether or not your product is a good fit.
Because the prospect’s awareness and expectations have changed, at this stage, the user has a specific set of questions and providing them with answers to these questions will increase your conversion rate.
Here you aim to create content that facilitates evaluation and builds trust using carefully researched content to demonstrate your expertise in the industry.
Content in this stage can be guarded where registration is required before gaining access. A good example is Marketo’s Lead guides.
Content can also be unguarded like Autopilot’s Flight School series of articles.
The key at the evaluation stage is to provide problem-specific content that shows how your product can be used as a solution.
The goal of most types of websites and businesses is to acquire qualified leads who are aware of your product but are not ready to make a purchase.
The performance metric to track is the number of qualified leads generated whereby content with the highest the number of qualified leads generated is ranked highest.
Other metrics to track include;
· Traffic generated
· Offer conversion rate
· Nurture email opens and click-through rate
Those that move through the evaluation stage are now presented with the ultimate decision.
C. Bottom Of the Funnel (Convert)
This is the final step in of the journey is to figure out what content your leads need to make an informed purchase decision.
As the journey cycle of your prospect changes, your content should change too. As such the content produced here should facilitate conversions.
It is at this stage that you need to help your qualified leads decide between you and your competitors by demonstrating how your product or service can be a better deal for them.
Content created here include comparison sheets, Demos, Product pages, Customer stories, Testimonials, and Webinars.
The ultimate goals here is to convert qualified leads into paying customers and if the content you create can effectively facilitate this by answering all the lead’s questions, then you have a complete funnel.
The performance metric to track is the number of conversions generated whereby content with the highest the number of conversions generated is ranked highest.
Other metrics to measure include.
· Number of sales to qualified leads
· Offer conversion rate
· Promo email opens and click-through rate.
If your content marketing strategy facilitates the creation and promotion of content across all three stages of the funnel, then you can effectively measure the performance of your content marketing strategy.
But if you are not creating and promoting content across all stages, how can you then effectively ascertain the performance of an incomplete strategy.
Every stage in the funnel requires for specific content to provide your leads with relevant information.
No size fits all.
Unfortunately, many companies often begin and stop their marketing efforts by producing content only for the first stage of the marketing funnel. As a result of this an incomplete strategy, they miss out on the better business conversions.
How to optimize the performance of the content.
When you understand the key metrics on which your content strategy runs across the customer journey, you will have a clear view of how you can optimize and improve the content strategy.
There are three major metrics to measure, optimize and improve. They form the growth model of your content marketing.
1. Potential Leads
With ToFu content, the number and quality of potential leads generated will affect your entire content strategy. Businesses, especially in the B2B space with a good conversion rate, often find themselves with a low number of potential leads, therefore an improvement of the content marketing strategy would be producing and promoting more ToFu content to feed the lead nurturing machine.
2. Qualified Leads
At the MoFu stage, the number of qualified is brought to focus. Similarly, when a business has a low number of qualified leads indicate a low performance of MoFu content and your lead nurturing system. The appropriate optimization would be producing and promoting better quality MoFu content.
3. Conversions
Lastly, at the BoFu stage, for businesses that generate a good number of leads like an e-commerce site, optimization of the content strategy would involve improving the number of conversions generated by producing and promoting better quality BoFu content.
One thing you should always remember, avoid turning these stages into completely separate silos because the outcome of the first stage is the input of the next stage. If not, you might end up with an uncoordinated content strategy that generates poor/ low-quality potential leads, followed by poor quality qualified leads and consequently low business conversions.
No matter how creative, memorable, or popular your content may become, every content you create and promote will ultimately be judged by the impact it makes on your business’ bottom line.
Content marketing is just like any other marketing channels these days, the customer comes first, in the creation, promotion, and measurement.
Never settle, your comfort zone is your worst enemy because what drive results today may not be relevant tomorrow.
Yesterday all marketers had to do was to create awesome content, today, Casey Winters is talking of content loops as the best way to achieve success with content marketing.
Don’t be afraid to start small by measuring your content performance. Start tracking what is important AND easy to find and build from there.
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