The phrase, “content is king,” is a quote often cited in the world of online marketing, search engine marketing and content marketing. The quote originates from an essay written in 1996 by Microsoft founder, Bill Gates. Gates describes the future of the Internet as a marketplace for content. While the phrase is not new, it is ever more relevant in today’s content-heavy world.
The success of websites and other marketing collateral depends on the quality of the content. Each piece of content must offer at least one of the following aspects: information, entertainment, unique ideas, provides value, personalized and optimized–first people need to find your content in order to read/listen/watch!
Digging into what makes content “quality” is a larger conversation, but the beginnings of this conversation can start here: The Power of Storytelling. In this blog, we will cover measurement techniques and metrics to use when determining if the content is quality. So, ready to learn the metrics to measure which of your content reigns king?
1. Website Traffic
Measure website traffic on a regular basis with Google Analytics. This platform allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers, build a better picture by evaluating your top top-visited pages and dive into the nitty, gritty details using features like analytics intelligence, detailed reporting and more.
Factors to consider: Carefully slice the data by timeframe to consider factors like seasonality. If you are an ice cream brand, your top-visited months will most likely be in the summer.
2. Subscriber Growth
Track the growth (and the inevitable unsubscribes) of your email subscriber list. Monitor the list monthly, at the very least, to attribute campaigns that worked, didn’t work or caused major spikes in unsubscribes.
Subscriber tracking formula: New subscribers – loss (unsubscribes) divided by the total number of the email list.
3. Search Rankings (SEO)
Google’s algorithm (PageRank) uses bots to assess your website to determine your authority and relevance on a search subject. The goal is to organically increase your page rank to make it onto the coveted first page.
Tools to consider: Moz, SEMRush and Ahrefs are paid plug-in tools available to monitor your website’s rankings. Here are five free tools to measure and boost your SEO.
4. Time
Google Analytics will help you examine how individual pages are performing using the “Average Time on Page” report. While an average of five minutes spent on a 1,500-word blog post is considered fantastic, what about 90 seconds on a short infographic? Are you taking the content on each page into consideration when determining a page’s success?
Factors to consider: More than half of website visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website. (source)
5. Social Media Followers
Clients frequently inquire about how to increase their social media following. The secret is content relevancy. Your social media followers choose to follow you because they find your content relevant to their interests. Consider implementing a social media audit and if necessary, an overhaul to align your content with your company’s message, values and the followers will come. If you need a boost, consider a paid search campaign!
Tools to consider: Social media management tools such as Hootsuite will monitor your followers and help you aggregate follower data easily and efficiently. Consider this – if you were interested in and following a dog toy brand, would you engage with a post (or ad!) about hamster or rabbit toys? Probably not.
6. Social Media Shares
As the saying goes, “sharing is caring.” Followers who resonate with your social content will share with their followers, who hopefully have similar interests and will build your brand’s followers and ultimately website page views, lead funnel, sales, etc. We achieve this through relevancy, relevancy, relevancy!
Tools to consider: Buzzsumo is a powerful tool that will reveal social media share counts.
7. Links and Authority
An inbound link is an indicator that you created strong, relevant content to that reader and will add another clear metric for SEO. As mentioned above, it is also helpful to watch your domain authority, which tracks your link popularity and search ranking potential.
Tools to consider: Free tools from companies like Moz enable you to monitor the domain authority of any website.
8. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
The CTR is the one metric that rules them all. The CTR rate should be measured across all online platforms, SEO, social and email marketing.
Tools to consider to find the CTRs: SEO use Google Analytics, email use reports provided by your email platform (we use and recommend HubSpot) and social media use analytics provided by the individual platforms or an aggregator such as HootSuite.
9. Leads
The first question to consider is what constitutes a lead for your business. Is it event registration, demo request, consultation, free trial, coupon download, other metrics? Once determined by you and agreed upon by your team and management, the process to build a lead pipeline and appropriately measure success will be clear to all. Nothing is worse than varying measurements of success.
Tools to consider: Marketing automation platforms, such as HubSpot, are ideal for gathering lead metrics. However, Google Analytics can also be used as a free data source to track landing page conversions.
10. Feedback
Feedback is part of the improvement process. This can be achieved by asking customers, team members and even friends for their honest feedback which will help increase the quality of your content, ultimately optimizing its effectiveness.
Things to consider: Feedback can also come from social media updates and shares, direct messages (DMs), blog comments, email responses, phone calls, contact form submissions, reviews and more.
Collecting and curating analytics sounds like a daunting task. However, as you move through the months and incorporate data pulls into your routine, evaluating your content marketing efforts will be a breeze. Creating good, relevant content makes your job easier and successful.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to info at upraisepr dot com to get started!