How to measure the results of content marketing? – measure results and improve them

The objective of content marketing is to provide the potential client with relevant information through the right channel. This could be done with videos, whitepapers or blogs for example. By offering useful information you can create a more committed target group. But how to measure the results of content marketing? There are many different approaches to measure the results of content marketing, of which three will be discussed.

1. Every project needs a goal
   If you want to measure performance, you will first need to set marketing and business goals. Then, content is created that serves those goals. The goals mentioned below are some of the goals most often seen in content marketing.
   
   • build customer relationships – like explained before, providing relevant and interesting information will help you create a committed target group. Moreover, your audience will trust you, because you show you know your topic.
   • driving sales – site traffic, conversion rate and lead volume can be increased by individual pieces of content.
   • develop new business ideas – by using content the media platforms to introduce something low-risk , you can find out what excites people and what ideas fizzle out.
   • search engines help you build you reputation – when the readers of your content find you valuable, search engines will find you valuable as well. However, this goal should best be implemented at last, so it will only be simple SEO optimization.
2. Use three tiers of metrics to track goals
   Many companies benefit more of tracking and combining results of individual projects instead of carrying out this same process for the entire marketing program at once. In this approach, three tiers of metrics are used to track content, and each tier represents a role in the business. Those tiers can be categorized by the different levels of metrics:
   
   • creator-level – the creators of the content for your company need to know what works best. In this way they will be able to efficiently improve content marketing results. Measuring can be done by the use of granular metrics, such as page views and unique visitors (traffic), visitor demographics (source) and shares and retweets (sharing).
   • manager-level – the manager of the content team is generally interested in a higher level of metrics. Higher-level metrics for a blog could include the generated lead volume and the quality of it, the conversion rate, and the market share. Important is that the creator creates and the manager manages and evaluates the content.
   • director-level – directors are normally not interested in creator-level metrics and manager-level metrics, because they are more interested in how content has improved the company’s revenue, return on investment (ROI) for example.
3. Increase customer loyalty
   Although attracting new customers needs to be done by every company, improving relationships with existing customers is the biggest growth potential. Create a richer experience for them by providing your customers with useful content that can be easily used to make the products and services offered by company work better.Although these three examples are only a very small selection of the many content marketing goals, it will probably help you to find the manner of how to measure the results of content marketing that suits you best.