We keep hearing this phrase all over the phrase for the past couple of years; ‘Content is King’ and it’s going to continue to be that way. As of now, 88% of B2B marketers are making use of content marketing every day to reach out to their target audiences.
Content marketing makes wonders if purposed right, but on the contrary, if it’s not used properly, your business might be losing interested readers, and potential customers, facing decreased brand loyalty and recognition. If you want to make sure, you’re on the right track with your content marketing strategy, you should look into analyzing some specific metrics on a regular basis.
Let’s look into what these metrics are in more detail.
1. The Number of Social Shares: Social shares are one of the highly valued metrics because social media is definitely considered one of the most significant platforms, where people communicate so it’s critical for businesses to track them.
Almost all of the social media platforms have their own analytics tools, where you can obtain all the insights you need, but you can also purchase memberships from third-party tools such as Buffer, Social Bakers, or BuzzSumo to check your social activities.
You can use as many different tools as you like, but it’s always good to use two different ones just to cross-check the numbers to make sure. If you try using more than one tool, you will be wasting your valuable time and you won’t make effective use of the main tool you’re using.
2. Website Traffic: If you want to make progress on who is visiting your website, and who you’re retaining, or if you want to create a concrete traffic strategy, you need to look into how you’re getting your traffic in terms of sources. If you know what sources bring you the traffic you’re getting and what kind of content is useful for your business, you can make changes and strategize accordingly.
The best way to view your traffic sources is using Google Analytics, which is the most accurate tool out there that provides you with all the traffic data you need along with many details such as demographics, user behavior, and acquisitions.
3. Retention: It’s important to develop new business and acquire new customers, but it’s more important to retain your current visitors, customers, and readers. You can always look into all your content to see exactly which ones bring your readers along. If you know exactly what kind of content your visitors interact with, you can build your marketing campaigns accordingly to serve your interested readers and turn them into your returning customers, then into long-term partnerships.
The thought process is the same as social shares. You need to engage with your potential customers, reader, and visitors on a regular basis letting them comment, like, and ask them for feedback. Additionally, you can always have guest contributors create content for your blog, which is a great way to get more attraction from your readers.
4. Click-Through Rate: The most common way to track your blog’s or website’s impressions and clicks are to use Google Search Console ‘search analytics feature’. CTR plays the most important role in the PPC marketing campaigns that you’re setting and paying for. By tracking your PPC campaigns’ CTRs, you will know if and how many visitors actually clicked on your ads and if they belong to your target audience.
5. Engaging in Your Posts:
If a user or a visitor leaves a comment or likes or shares your posts, that means they find it useful, and trustworthy and it helps solve their problems. Monitoring your posts’ comments and feedback and taking action accordingly is a good way to track what your visitors are thinking of your business.
6. Number of Backlinks: Backlinks are one of the most important elements of a content marketing strategy. It’s not about having as many backlinks as possible, but to have as many high-quality backlinks as possible. The way you get and validate backlinks has changed drastically over the years, but if you can get high-quality backlinks from sources that are trusted and validated, that will serve your business well for SEO purposes. It’s always good to track what sites are linking with your content and see if they’re worth mentioning. 7. Time Spent on Page: Keeping your audience interested and entertained on your website, social media, and your landing pages, is hard to achieve, but the more time they spend reading your content, the more engaged they’re going to be. Examining how much time your readers spend on your website will help you build your content accordingly. You can always examine which pieces get the most attention and revise your content along the way.
If you can find a piece of content that has your readers interested, that means they’re spending more time than on a regular to read and understand what you wrote about. That will for sure help you guide into building your future content.
8. Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate might be a complicated term to understand and it’s also defined a bit differently for each business. In general, it means the number of people moving away from the website immediately after landing on it. It can be because of content, website speed, user experience or users can’t find what they’re looking for. It’s important to figure out the exact reason why your bounce rate is high and what you can do to reduce it.
There are more metrics we can look into but the ones we mentioned are most likely to be considered. Whatever you’re seeing in your analysis as results and whatever you would like to improve can take time, so be patient my fellow marketers :)
Keeping proper track of metrics is never a waste of time. They actually help you figure out what you need to revise, improve, add or remove on a factual basis. Tracking your metrics will help you build a concrete content strategy and increase your online brand awareness and recognition in the long run.
Look fwd to reading your thoughts in the comments :)
Cheers!
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