Whether you’re attentive or not, content marketing is the first strategy to mind when thinking about B2B digital marketing.
It is popular among B2B organizations. 91% of them use it to generate more leads, build customer loyalty, build a customer base and increase sales revenue. For most B2B marketers, the content marketing strategy helps them achieve top-of-the-funnel marketing goals.
Content marketing is pervasive. It is a strategy that includes everything that B2B companies do to attract and nurture leads. From white papers, email newsletters, videos, e-books, and webinars to stories, tweets, guides, and even case studies – the list goes on.
While 37% of marketers have a content marketing strategy, 38% are unlucky and do not document their efforts. Chances are, this percentage may fail to accurately measure their content marketing performance, making ROI challenging to track.
So you don’t end up in the same boat, here are the six most crucial content performance metrics you need to track to get an overall idea of your content success:
1. Web Traffic
It is a volume metric that is the easiest to measure. It involves watching the flow of traffic to each page of your website. Monitoring web traffic lets you know what content is popular among your audience. The most obvious way to measure this metric is by using analytics software.
Most people prefer Google Analytics, but you can explore other options. In measuring web traffic, analytics provides data that enables you to evaluate different traffic aspects. It includes:
- Entire web traffic
- Source of traffic (communication channel)
- View per page
- Average time spent on page
- Referral traffic
- Popular landing pages
- Unique session
This information is priceless when it comes to making content promotion decisions. For example, if the total traffic to your site is low, you need to focus more on promoting your content.
To do this effectively, use the source of traffic data to identify the communication channels that drive the highest traffic to the website. Use those channels in future content marketing campaigns.
While web traffic shows you how successful your content marketing efforts are, it has its limits. For example, traffic to your site may fluctuate due to changes in SEO trends, site updates, promotional offers, and holidays.
2. Conversion Rate
To an extent, the purpose of most campaigns is to get conversions from visitors. It can be a soft conversion (e.g., email subscription), hard conversion (e.g., product or service purchase), or something in between, such as interacting with a lead magnet.
It is only appropriate to track your organic conversion rate to see your visitor’s behavior, such as taking action towards a goal. Track your leads, email signups, analytics, and sales to determine your page’s conversion rate.
3. Retention Metrics
These metrics show your website’s ability to hold the attention and interest of your visitors. The primary metrics for evaluating retention are the percentage of visitors returning to your site and the individual pieces of content. You’ll also need to keep an eye on the frequency of returns, as this will give you a clear idea of the relationships you have developed with your customers and your position as a trusted authority. If your visitor returns to your website after their first visit, they are more likely to become regular visitors.
4. Social metrics
Social metrics are a big part of your content strategy. That’s why you must track likes, shares, and comments as well as other social metrics. More importantly, you must ensure that your social efforts drive traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, and contribute to conversion rates.
5. Your SERP ranking
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. Your ranking is where you appear when someone searches for something relevant to you.
While your SERP ranking isn’t really a metric you can calculate, it is one of the most prominent indicators of how well your content is performing.
If Google likes and references it heavily, you’re doing it right. Try searching a few different combinations to see which of your posts or pages are showing.
If your content is perfect, you can eventually distribute your content as a “#0 result” in Google SERPs as a snippet. As you test and optimize for search, the direct result should be an increase in your ranking.
6. Qualified leads
The main reason companies engage in content marketing is to generate more leads. Therefore, the success of content marketing efforts can be determined by looking at the number of qualified leads.
But, why does measurement happen? B2B companies engage in content marketing to retain and attract prospects. After that, they promote those leads to take actions that result in overall sales.
The sole purpose of measuring leads in content marketing is to answer two primary questions – are you attracting prospects? And, are those likely to buy from you? When you build your content marketing strategy around lead generation, you can generate three times as many leads at 60% less cost.
When measuring ROI, your focus generally should be on qualified leads. These are prospects who show interest in making a purchase decision. So, how do you measure qualified leads?
There are three primary ways to do this:
- Keep an eye on Call-to-Action (CTA). For example, looking at the number of white paper request forms completed
- Track the number of content downloads
- View completed purchases
7. Sales Metrics
Sales metrics will help you measure the number of sales that occur through the content, the revenue that comes through the content, and how the content influences people to buy the product. Sales metrics help measure a company’s revenue. It consists of the following terms:
Conversion Rate: It measures the number of site visitors who took a specific action from your website. It can be anything like clicking on your CTR, registering with their email, downloading content from their website, etc. It is the ratio of visitors to your website and the total number of clicks you get in any form.
Measuring this value will help you determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. If the value is too low, you can implement appropriate strategies to improve it.
Return on Investment: ROI measures the return you get based on the value you invest in marketing your content. It is essential to measure these metrics to gauge how well the strategies are working for your content. This value will help you analyze your marketing strategies and re-implement strategies that are not working properly.
Businesses focus on ROI and treat it as a key performance indicator that gives them a clear idea about their profitability.
Cost per acquisition: Cost per acquisition is another metric that helps you find out the cost you will incur to acquire a valuable customer. By knowing the interested customers, marketers can focus on those customers when creating a strategy. Customized strategies can help you impress customers and make them follow your business forever. When your marketing strategies aren’t working, you can consider investing more in creating effective marketing strategies.
Final Verdict
Measuring ROI is the perfect way to know how profitable and compelling your content marketing efforts really are.
Although your marketing campaigns generate high web traffic, it does not mean that they are generating revenue. You need to look beyond traffic and evaluate metrics like on-page engagement, quality of leads, and sales to know if campaigns are effective.
There are several other metrics you can find out, but the six metrics discussed above are most important when you want to know how well your campaigns are generating revenue for your company.