In Part 1 of this blog, we defined goals to help us obtain positive ROI of our content marketing strategy. These goals included brand awareness, engaging customers, educating customers, thought leadership, need for traffic, generating leads, as well as converting leads and upselling. Once goals are defined and set, it is important to measure correctly for ROI. Measurement is the key to knowing what works and what doesn’t for your content marketing strategy.

How Long Does It Take To Measure Success?

Before you ever start measuring, you must first determine how frequently you’ll collect data. A good rule of thumb is to start with measuring marketing effectiveness once a month. This gives you enough time to see if your strategy is working, but not too much time that you have wasted time, effort and resources if it isn’t.

You also want to be careful not to look for results too fast. You can’t measure the success of anything 30 minutes after it has been posted, published or launched. You need to give it a little bit of time to be seen, shared and talked about.

Knowing whether email subject line A/B testing or social media channel followers growth should be measured after 1 week, 1 month or 1 quarter is just as important to determining ROI as the act of measuring at all.

So now that we know what our measurement timeline is, how do we apply that to the goals we have set?

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is one of the hardest things to track as a B2B marketer, but it’s not entirely impossible. In the age of digital metrics, print ads are losing market share because ROI is difficult to measure. If you are using print ads, one way to see if they are reaching their target audience is to create a survey. It could be something as simple as a quick pop-up on your website when someone enters the homepage asking, ‘did you see our ad?’ or ‘how did you hear about us?’ Or you can create a poll on social media, on your website or via email asking for input on the brand style or message you are conveying.

An indirect tactic to measure brand awareness is to search traffic for your company name or the specific name of your product/service. Obviously, people know the name of your company or what you are selling if they are searching for it by name.

Consistency is also extremely important when it comes to marketing your brand and creating brand awareness. It is important to have a consistent look and feel to all of your marketing materials. Consistency makes measuring easier because everyone is looking at the same thing. You don’t want to use an old logo and a new logo in the same campaign. You don’t want to use an old slogan and a new slogan in a campaign. Everything must be streamlined and consistent so that people recognize your brand.

It is also important to have a continued presence across multiple channels, including websites, online ads, social media posts, print ads, etc. A continued presence increases visibility, which in turn increases traffic and measurability.

Engaging Your Customers

Engagement is much easier to track in the digital world. Across all digital platforms, some metrics are available instantly. We are able to see instantaneously how many people ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ a content piece that we just posted.

Other ways to engage customers is through email, which can be easily tracked using platforms like Constant Contact and SharpSpring. These platforms let us see how many people opened an email, how many didn’t open it and how many emails bounced back.

Articles and blog posts that are posted to your company’s website can be tracked as well, using certain metrics in Google Analytics to see how many people have visited your site, a specific page and how long they stayed on the site or the page.

Educate Your Customers

Technical content that shares your deep knowledge about a topic educates your customers and builds trust. How do you measure trust? Through whitepapers, application notes, informative website content, educational social media posts, or how-to videos. And how do you measure who is viewing and downloading and sharing your information? Easy, you do this through gated content – content that can be accessed only after an individual visiting your site fills out a form with contact information, like name, company name and email address.  Once the form and the content is accessed, measurement is done through the number of downloads or video views. Another way to measure is the to look at the number of shares or returning users in your website traffic.

Thought Leadership

Nearly any piece of content can be considered a thought leadership piece, but especially those that are showcasing knowledge, such as analyzing a customer’s pain point and showing a path forward to a solution. This can be measured various ways depending on your ultimate goal:

• Do you just want people to read your articles? If so, then track web traffic.
• Do you want people to recommend your company as a resource? If you answer yes, track shares.
• Do you want people to open and click through your monthly emails? If that is the case, look at your email performance for repeat readers.
• Are you sought out by colleagues or industry publications to speak during a webinar presentation? Just being asked to participate can be a metric, let alone the attendance at the webinar itself.

You can earn thought leadership through blog articles helping to solve pain points, editorial articles in magazines that show you are an expert in your field, technical content that allows the customer to see your in-depth knowledge of a topic or product, webinars sharing information and your area of expertise and social media posts, illustrating you are up to date with the latest information in your field.

The Need for Traffic

Google Analytics makes tracking website traffic easy, but you still need to understand what the numbers are telling you. Most people understand ‘users’. These are the people visiting your site. It is nice to see this number increase and it is important, but it’s not the only thing to track. Do you need to increase new users to earn new business, or do you need to focus on returning users who are finding more valuable information on your site during their long sales cycle? These are the things you need to know and track so that you are measuring and interpreting the data correctly to be useful for your company.

It is also important to know what an acceptable ‘bounce rate’ and ‘time on site’ is for your company and your industry. Are people staying long enough to read your thought leadership content? Is your site structured properly to provide suggested pages to continue to learn more after a user reads one page? Are you finding strange traffic spikes in countries you don’t even do business in (maybe check on bot traffic or if your site is hacked)? Those metrics on a publication’s site are important as well for determining where to place your content or ads, as well as then determining how well your article page performance.

Generating Leads

Receiving the raw metrics from lead generating activities is as simple as knowing the number for how many people signed up. But knowing company and industry thresholds for what is expected is equally significant. It is important that you have a way to gauge quality, not just quantity. Choosing the right publication as your webinar host is just as important for lead quality as the presentation itself. If your audience doesn’t match your business model, the names you gather, whether 1 or 1001, are useless.

After the quantity is captured and the quality is assessed, you need to have a plan in place to nurture these leads. It is also important that there is follow-up done between marketing and sales to turn that lead into a customer. Having a platform like a CRM that lets you track which marketing tactics a lead has engaged with before becoming a customer can help put a true marketing dollar amount for customer acquisition.

Some great ways to garner leads are through webinars, gated whitepapers, gated datasheets, email sign-ups, as well as publication ads. All of these things are done with a purpose and are set-up to generate leads and a way to collect important information for you to gain customers and grow your business.

Converting Leads and Upselling

Now that you have gathered leads, what do you do with them? You begin to convert them into sales. By generating leads, then nurturing them (a process where you match the content sent to them with their known interests, such as which content pieces they downloaded or webpages visited on your site), you can begin to create trust with your relevant content which ultimately ends up in converting these leads into customers. It also helps to sell more to current customers.

A good way to convert leads and upselling is through directing these leads to related products on your website. For example, if they downloaded content on your website about a certain kind of electrical tester used in a certain type of application, send them an email saying we saw you downloaded information on this product, here is another product that we offer that can help you do XY and Z in this same application.

It is also important once you garner a lead that you send follow-up emails.  It can be something as simple as thanking the customer for coming to your site and letting them know they can reach out should they have any further questions. You always want to remain top-of-mind.

The Importance of Measurement and Interpretation

Measurement processes constantly evolve. It takes time to track, analyze and report on performance. Be patient, but also realize how important measurement and optimization is to content marketing success. As you build your measurement processes over time, you will begin to see the results you want.

Knowing which tactics are working and which are not helps you build a content marketing strategy that is strategic and adaptable to many situations so you can continuously adjust for positive ROI. But it all starts with knowing what, how and when to measure.