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How Effective is Your Content Marketing Strategy?
Wondering whether the money you put into the content marketing is helping the company? Is the strategy achieving what you thought it will? Are you a part of the group of people who believe you can’t gauge the results from content marketing? This article will help you understand better the…
Wondering whether the money you put into the content marketing is helping the company? Is the strategy achieving what you thought it will? Are you a part of the group of people who believe you can’t gauge the results from content marketing? This article will help you understand better the methods of assessing the content marketing strategy you put into place. Analysing the content marketing strategies, by going through the individual aspects of what it entails, will help you to understand better about the content strategies and how they can be gauged. 
Image Source: Wordstream[/caption] The issue faced by many business owners/decision makers is that there is no direct measure for how efficiently their content strategy is serving the various purposes they might be using it for. It seems like a problem with no head or tail as there are many factors that affects brand awareness and engagement, lead generation and sales. These problems if not identified and rectified can lead to fall in ROI as the costs of applying content marketing strategies to business practices isn’t cheap. It requires a planner, a content creator, and then people to analyse the data for every goal you want to achieve. For such problems, we have tools like Google Analytics which helps us to understand what factor affected the company in what way and when. After getting this data from these tools, it is a step-by-step process of analysing the individual factors. And then we can figure out what’s working in favour of company’s growth and what requires modification. This forms the basis on which we measure the effectiveness of any content marketing strategy. 
Image Source: Contentmart[/caption] Content marketing has several benefits and is certainly evolved as bigger reckoning force than what meets the eye. A good content marketing strategy not only helps you to build better brand awareness and affinity, but it also helps bridge the gaps between you and the relevant stakeholders for your brand. A unique proposition that content marketing provides is the fact that you can devise content in various formats, which can be further targeted to different audiences over the several mediums available today. By doing so, a brand can make sure that its content gets read, shared or liked by unique set of customers time to time. Another benefit that content marketing provides is the longevity aspect. Brands can produce timeless content to get repetitive customers over time by following the best SEO practices. This increases the readership of your content which in turn helps in generating leads. [caption id="attachment_5377" align="aligncenter" width="719"]
Image Source: Contentmart[/caption] Another benefit that content marketing brings to the table is of establishing authority. They say content is king, and good content is shared. However, if everyone is looking up to your piece of content, then it consolidates your position as the ultimate authority on that niche/product category. Another aspect to note here is the social measurement, which helps you to gauge the readership of your content. Social engagement is derived from accumulating the total number of engagement (likes, shares, video views, comments etc.), which further indicates the number of people talking about your content. The more people talking about your content, the more it trends and spreads in viewership. Content marketing is also successful in rolling out a specific call-to-action act. If your content is relatable and relevant, it would successfully entice consumers to share valuable data points like their contact number, or email ids. This, in turn, can help your sales team to follow up with the interested audience over a call/email and dole out interesting offers. Alternatively, this helps to build up website hits and duration of stay on the website. This is the lead generation measurement, i.e. how many viewers were converted into leads. Lastly, great content also helps in customer retention. As these are the people who will get the new viewers to see the content and go through the entire process. This can only happen if the existing customers are happy and are willing to consider a repurchase. For further information on collecting the data refer to this article 
Image Source: Licdn[/caption] If you had set up your content marketing strategy to get more brand awareness, then the main things you will have to look at is the consumption measurement and the shares measurement to get people talking about your brand or company. This will get the conversation going for whatever you had planned for the future after the execution of your content strategy. If the goal set was to increase brand engagement, the shares measurement will form an important part of your evaluation as brand engagement would entail comments, likes, shares, mentions and inbound links from other blogs/websites. With lead generation as your main goal, the lead generation measurement is what will give you an idea about how successful the strategy was. This will take into consideration the forms filled, the number of visitors on the website, the sections visited by the visitors. More the traffic more is the number of leads generated for your company to target. With a sales-oriented strategy, a lot more factors like ROI are taken into account to see if there is any profit from the strategy. If not, you will know at which stage the campaign fails and will be able to tweak your strategy to get a positive ROI and be successful with your content marketing strategy. For a goal of customer retention, you can check the sales for the number of renewal rates by existing customers to see what size of your existing customer base is loyal to your brand and you can target them to become advocates of your company.
Problems faced while following a content marketing strategy
[caption id="attachment_5372" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Wordstream[/caption] The issue faced by many business owners/decision makers is that there is no direct measure for how efficiently their content strategy is serving the various purposes they might be using it for. It seems like a problem with no head or tail as there are many factors that affects brand awareness and engagement, lead generation and sales. These problems if not identified and rectified can lead to fall in ROI as the costs of applying content marketing strategies to business practices isn’t cheap. It requires a planner, a content creator, and then people to analyse the data for every goal you want to achieve. For such problems, we have tools like Google Analytics which helps us to understand what factor affected the company in what way and when. After getting this data from these tools, it is a step-by-step process of analysing the individual factors. And then we can figure out what’s working in favour of company’s growth and what requires modification. This forms the basis on which we measure the effectiveness of any content marketing strategy. Major benefits of Content Marketing
[caption id="attachment_5374" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Contentmart[/caption] Content marketing has several benefits and is certainly evolved as bigger reckoning force than what meets the eye. A good content marketing strategy not only helps you to build better brand awareness and affinity, but it also helps bridge the gaps between you and the relevant stakeholders for your brand. A unique proposition that content marketing provides is the fact that you can devise content in various formats, which can be further targeted to different audiences over the several mediums available today. By doing so, a brand can make sure that its content gets read, shared or liked by unique set of customers time to time. Another benefit that content marketing provides is the longevity aspect. Brands can produce timeless content to get repetitive customers over time by following the best SEO practices. This increases the readership of your content which in turn helps in generating leads. [caption id="attachment_5377" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Contentmart[/caption] Another benefit that content marketing brings to the table is of establishing authority. They say content is king, and good content is shared. However, if everyone is looking up to your piece of content, then it consolidates your position as the ultimate authority on that niche/product category. Another aspect to note here is the social measurement, which helps you to gauge the readership of your content. Social engagement is derived from accumulating the total number of engagement (likes, shares, video views, comments etc.), which further indicates the number of people talking about your content. The more people talking about your content, the more it trends and spreads in viewership. Content marketing is also successful in rolling out a specific call-to-action act. If your content is relatable and relevant, it would successfully entice consumers to share valuable data points like their contact number, or email ids. This, in turn, can help your sales team to follow up with the interested audience over a call/email and dole out interesting offers. Alternatively, this helps to build up website hits and duration of stay on the website. This is the lead generation measurement, i.e. how many viewers were converted into leads. Lastly, great content also helps in customer retention. As these are the people who will get the new viewers to see the content and go through the entire process. This can only happen if the existing customers are happy and are willing to consider a repurchase. For further information on collecting the data refer to this article The main takeaways from the content strategy
[caption id="attachment_5375" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Licdn[/caption] If you had set up your content marketing strategy to get more brand awareness, then the main things you will have to look at is the consumption measurement and the shares measurement to get people talking about your brand or company. This will get the conversation going for whatever you had planned for the future after the execution of your content strategy. If the goal set was to increase brand engagement, the shares measurement will form an important part of your evaluation as brand engagement would entail comments, likes, shares, mentions and inbound links from other blogs/websites. With lead generation as your main goal, the lead generation measurement is what will give you an idea about how successful the strategy was. This will take into consideration the forms filled, the number of visitors on the website, the sections visited by the visitors. More the traffic more is the number of leads generated for your company to target. With a sales-oriented strategy, a lot more factors like ROI are taken into account to see if there is any profit from the strategy. If not, you will know at which stage the campaign fails and will be able to tweak your strategy to get a positive ROI and be successful with your content marketing strategy. For a goal of customer retention, you can check the sales for the number of renewal rates by existing customers to see what size of your existing customer base is loyal to your brand and you can target them to become advocates of your company. 
