How To Measure Content Marketing the Right Way

Gartner’s research on “How to Measure Content Marketing in 3 Steps” [1] highlights that only 42% of B2C and 41% of B2B marketers have documented their content marketing strategies. If you're a digital marketing leader or manager who needs to better establish and demonstrate your content marketing plans’ value, you should avoid one mistake that most businesses make.

While focusing on improving their marketing efforts and proving their value to company stakeholders, marketers often miss out on analyzing valuable insights that can help achieve business goals. To avoid this mistake, you can learn how to track your content marketing efforts better. 

In this article, you'll learn content marketing and how to measure your content marketing efforts. We'll also provide a three-step process that you can use to measure your actions the right way.

What is content marketing? What is measuring content marketing?

Gartner’s research states that content marketing is “the process and practice of creating, curating and cultivating text, video, images, graphics, e-books, white papers and other content assets that are distributed through paid, owned and earned media. These assets are used to tell stories that help brands build and nurture relationships with customers, prospects, and other audiences to drive awareness, generate demand, influence preference, and build loyalty.”

Content marketing lets your expertise shine through, but you can only be sure how well it works once you measure its results with a well-framed strategy. Here are some terms to help you understand how to measure your content marketing efforts.

• Content marketing program: This is your overarching strategy, including all your content marketing efforts, campaigns, assets, and channels. Having a detailed strategy to plan, execute and track your marketing efforts will help you achieve targeted results.

• Content marketing campaign: A campaign is a discrete, objective-based set of efforts where content serves a set purpose, including lead generation, improving website traffic, and enhancing brand awareness, among others. While framing your content marketing campaign, you can use trial methods, such as split testing, to curate result-driven content. For example, you can test creating a landing page if you are aiming to increase your click-through rate.

• Marketing channels: Your business’s content marketing efforts may be distributed across various channels, including your website, social media, and email. As each channel may have a different target audience, tracking the respective engagement rate is important. For example, a short video performing great on TikTok may not gain traction on YouTube.

• Content assets: These include blog posts, social media posts, videos, webinars, white papers, and case studies that can be used in your marketing channels. Tracking the performance of your content assets can help you improve your marketing strategy.

Before you learn how to measure content marketing, it is important to know why you should do so. Content plays a crucial role throughout the customer journey. It guides and influences potential customers in their decision-making process. 

Without measuring your content marketing efforts, you won’t know which content is working for you, which isn’t content doesn't, and why. Hence, measuring content marketing allows businesses to track and evaluate key success metrics that will provide valuable and actionable insights to optimize their content strategy.

How to measure content marketing the right way in 3 steps

Now that we know the key elements involved in measuring content marketing let's look at the steps you can take to identify the metrics that matter the most to your business, track your progress toward business goals, and prove the value of content marketing to your organization.

Step 1: Map content to your customer journey

To measure the impact of your content marketing efforts, you need to know how prospects and customers consume your content. You can track your consumers’ engagement by mapping your content to the various stages of their journey.

There are many ways to break down the stages of the customer journey. For understanding purposes, we will use three main stages—buy, own, and advocate. Each stage can be subdivided into more stages to help you create targeted content at specific steps in the journey.

Buy

The first stage of mapping your content is buying a product or service that suits the customers’ needs. The steps leading up to this purchase can be segmented into the following stages:

• Need: The initial realization or recognition of a customer's requirement or desire for a product or service.

• Discover: The stage where customers actively seek information to meet their needs.

• Aware: The point at which a customer becomes aware of a product or service that can meet their needs.

• Evaluate: The process of assessing and comparing different options or solutions to determine the best fit for the customers’ needs.

• Select: The decision-making stage where a customer chooses a particular product or service from available options.

Own

The own stage begins the moment a customer takes possession of a product or starts using a service. They might not know much about the purchased product/service initially, but that knowledge will grow with time, and this growth can be categorized into the following stages:

• Receive: The customer receives the purchased product or gains access to their chosen service.

• Onboard: The process of familiarizing and getting started with a new product or service.

• Use: The stage where the customer actively uses and engages with the product or service.

• Deepen: The ongoing experience of building a deeper connection and understanding of the product or service over time.

Advocate

Once a customer knows your product or service well and is satisfied with it, they could become one of its biggest supporters. This is the advocate stage which can be divided into further stages:

• Rate: Providing feedback or reviews based on the customer's experience with the product or service.

• Share: Sharing positive experiences or recommendations about the product or service.

• Recommend: Actively suggesting or endorsing the product or service to others based on personal satisfaction.

• Demonstrate: Showing or illustrating the value and benefits of the product or service to others.

• Defend: Supporting and protecting the reputation or quality of the product or service when faced with criticism or challenges.

To map your content to each of these three stages, you’ll have to identify each content asset's purpose, type, and topic. 

By mapping content to your customer journey, you can identify how to position it content to deliver value to both your customers and your business.

Step 2: Identify the response you want from customers and prospects

During the customer journey, every prospect's interaction with your content creates an opportunity for your business. The way to measure the results of your content marketing efforts will depend on how you want prospects and customers to respond to your content.

Here are three ways customers respond to content:

By monitoring action

Customers’ actions, such as completing and submitting a lead form, can be directly linked to a business outcome. It is important to monitor actions to measure your content marketing efforts. 

An action metric has two parts: the action taken and the business outcome. The business outcome is often easy to define as it’s linked to goals and typically involves a conversion. However, not all the actions you want to measure will be typical, and measuring content's direct impact on the business may not be exact. In such cases, you may have to use attribution analysis to measure your entire program or campaign's effectiveness.

By engaging with content

These responses can be measured but aren’t tied directly to a business outcome. Metrics for engagement include video views, social shares, click-through rate, and scroll depth. Much content marketing is focused on engagement because it shows consumers’ interest in a product/service. 

Assigning value to engagement is different for every content asset because your business may want different results from each asset. You'll need to evaluate engagement metrics based on your content marketing goals. For example, you may post the same video to two different social networks, but the engagement on one platform might be higher. In those cases, it helps to weigh engagement according to people's interests.

By giving feedback on your brand

This type of response can influence future actions and can be measured indirectly with surveys or social listening tools. Most of the time, perception will be measured at the program or campaign level. It's not likely to measure perception metrics to evaluate each content asset.

A typical use of perception metrics is to measure how engaged prospects are in the earlier stages of the customer journey to determine how they perceive your brand. Surveys are often used to measure the brand lift resulting from new marketing campaigns. Other metrics, such as website traffic, online reviews and ratings, social mentions, and search engine click-through rates, are often used to measure customer engagement.

Step 3: Communicate business values in the form of KPIs that align with your organization's strategic business goals

For this step, you should analyze customer responses generated in Step 2 and apply that knowledge to modify your program or campaign. Based on metrics, you should develop your approach to content measurement and manage key stakeholder expectations. You can start by aligning metrics with your stakeholders. 

Use data that shows content's direct and indirect impact on critical business goals. Your team should connect content marketing metrics with strategic metrics that matter most to you and the executive team. Here are some examples:

• Content specialists use views, rankings, and time on the website for content optimization.

• The marketing team can use sales and conversion metrics for marketing planning.

Next steps

Content marketing is an important part of any business's marketing plan and must be measured accurately to determine its effectiveness. To improve the impact of your content marketing efforts, you should align your business goals with your key performance indicators and track important engagement metrics (including engagement rates, conversion rates, and customer feedback) to assess the scope for improvement. 

Lastly, you should demonstrate how your content marketing activities contribute to your organization's overall success to help secure stakeholder support and investment. 

For more in-depth information on content marketing, we recommend exploring the following resources: