An easy guide to assess your content marketing strategy
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around, does it make a noise? We have the same question about content marketing—what good is all of the time and effort you put into your content, if you don’t measure its success? Establishing credibility online and engaging with your readers, followers, and number one fans is part of doing business today, but if you don’t measure the performance of the blogs and social media posts, you won’t know what is most effective. The year is drawing to a close so it’s time to brush up on what’s working, what you might need to forego—like those adorable kitty cat posts but that just don’t align with your messaging
Today, we’re going to talk about why and how you should measure your business’s content marketing success from the past year.
Why measure your content marketing?
It’s a simple and pretty obvious reason, but sometimes we need to be told what to do, even when we might already know the answer. Measuring all aspects of your content marketing strategy isn’t the most glamorous and it can be cumbersome at times. However, the insights that you receive are priceless, and they quickly become your greatest tool for content generation moving forward.
Here are some things you can learn from your analysis:
- What platforms do you see the most engagement from? These are the social domains you want to place most of your focus on in 2016.
- What are your most popular blog posts? These are the subjects your audience is most interested in. You can now limit your content generation to these popular topics.
- What are your most neglected blog posts? These are possible topics to eliminate from your running order. Is it in the same realm of some of your most popular posts? Perhaps you just need to change the structure or flow of the post for easier readability.
- Does your target audience prefer graphics or pure copy status updates? This will help you understand if your audience is visually dependent. If so, perhaps a video is in the cards for 2016.
- What #hashtags are working to attract the audience you are looking for? This takes some attention to detail, but it’s beneficial to know which hashtags your target market follows on all social media platforms. Hashtags help you reach more than your first-degree network.
For more on measuring your content check out this post.
How to measure your content marketing?
Glad you asked. We’ve put together a special reporting template for 2015 (Download our MeasuringContentMarketing guide for free here). Work month-to-month or year-to-year. Our template is setup to track two back-to-back time periods, so you can compare what has worked and what you might need to work on. Get familiar with each social media site’s analytics section and populate the metrics we list in the reporting tools. Use website analytic tools to pull data from your blog posts.
Your report will provide a nice packet of information to help you summarize and understand the results of your content marketing initiatives, make changes and move forward with a successful strategy for 2016.
Yakkety Yak Tip: Make a point to implement a monthly check-in, using our template, as you make your way through 2016. Implement changes much sooner and adjust to your audience’s ever-expanding interests.
Need help with your social media and content strategy for 2016? Contact us to learn about our service offerings and how we can help you build your credibility online.