Picture this scenario: Natalie, a B2B marketing manager at a company in Atlanta, is having a great year. She has been tasked with building a content marketing program and she and her team dove right into coming up with all kinds of creative ideas for educational blog posts, white papers and infographics. The marketing team is constantly creating content that her prospects and customers love. Just a few months in, everyone at the 
company agrees that this content marketing thing is really great. The sales team tells her that the inbound leads are coming in more qualified and the support team says that their customers are happier and understand the product better than ever before thanks to all the great content her team is producing. Natalie is elated—this is a content marketing success story for the books!
That is, until she begins prepping for her quarterly update with the executive team and realizes she didn’t have much in the way of concrete metrics and results to show for all of her great content.
Natalie’s story rings a bell with a majority of marketing departments across all industries. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 33% of B2B marketers and 41% of B2C marketers named the inability to measure as a significant challenge in their content strategy. Many content marketers can publish great content but have a hard time providing the results of their content marketing efforts. And while content may be king, business leaders want to see real, measurable results from their efforts and resources spent on content marketing.
But how can companies properly measure their content marketing programs? How can they know that the resources they’re putting into it are actually worth it? There are three best practices to implement for a successful marketing strategy:
- Get specific with your goals Often, marketers will bypass goals in order to dive right into creating content. But without first setting strong, attainable goals, there is no way to measure the success of your content marketing program. Marketers must ensure that the goals they set are not only specific and measurable, but also within reach for the timeframe they have. Beware of setting goals that are too vague—goals like “more awareness” or “more website traffic” won’t lead to robust measurements. Marketers need to set goals around specific events you want to see, like eBook downloads, blog post shares or free trial signups. It’s important to make sure that the goals set are challenging, but attainable! There is no need for marketers to set the bar unreasonably high—that will only lead to discouragement and unmet expectations.
- Be sure you’re using the right tools to measure your KPIs As soon as the marketing team has their goals in place, it’s crucial that they implement the right tools to properly track the specific metrics they’re after. Looking for more trial signups from your website? Setting conversion goals in Google Analytics is a great way to start tracking metrics like online free trial signups. Landing page builders like Unbounce or Leadpages can help to promote and track content downloads like whitepapers and eBooks. Email marketing tools like MailChimp or ConvertKit have the ability to help you build both your email list and create automation campaigns that will help to nurture your leads into sales. With so many amazing tools available, marketers need to set time aside to research and figure out which tools are the right fit for their company and the goals they’ve set.
Once they have figured out which tools they plan to use, Marketers need to make sure they have a central dashboard that allows them to see all of their important metrics in one place. There is no need to waste precious time visiting and logging into various websites to analyze your results—dashboards are amazing tools that provide an immediate summary of all the data that busy, metric-driven marketers need to report on.
- Don’t be afraid to iterate when needed When it comes to content marketing, every marketer has their own strategy. Successful content marketing strategies should flow in a manner similar to this: Create – Publish – Measure – Report – Adapt – Improve. The last two elements, adapting and improving, are possibly the most important for a successful content marketing program. Measuring the effectiveness of your efforts in order to report quality results is important. However, it’s even more crucial for that information to be put to work. Marketers need to gather feedback from their customers and coworkers and iterate where needed. Don’t let bad metrics get you down too much—simply look at them as feedback on how to adapt and improve.
In order to succeed and create great content marketing strategies, marketing teams need to work together to set goals, implement the proper tools to reach those goals and iterate where needed. This will foster content that is not only meaningful and relevant to customers but also provide the metrics needed to prove success.
Lindsay Trinkle is digital marketer at Write2Market. She can be reached at [email protected].
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