Do you feel like your business’s content isn’t progressing your growth? By tracking online data metrics like search engine performance and user engagement, you can define exactly what works best in your strategy. Here’s the top key content marketing metrics your business needs to be tracking.

Benefits of Data-Driven Content Marketing

Your data is the backbone to your content marketing strategy. As the world becomes more data centric, businesses are leveraging the information available to them to learn more about what content engages their audience the most. On top of being the future of marketing, other benefits of using data in your content strategy includes:

• Better Communicate Company Values
• Better Attribution for Spend Optimization
• Produce More Relevant Content

Key Metrics to Track:

Website Traffic

Your website’s traffic is what spins the gears in turning leads into customers. Without sufficient traffic, you will have trouble generating leads. With data driven analytics, you can see how much traffic your website is generating and how the traffic interacts with your site. You’ll quickly learn what content performs best to attract traffic with data that measures what people are looking at and how long they look at it for. The most common website analytics to track are:

• Pageviews
• Average time spent on page
• Entrances
• Bounce rate

Using Google Analytics, you can go a step further and see where your traffic came from, the geographical location of visitors, and the type of device they used to view your website.

Search Engine Performance

Search engine optimization (SEO) is your way of getting a closer look at the data regarding how your website is performing on various search engines like Bing and Google. Businesses utilize this key marketing metric to analyze their top performing keywords and topics. With this insight, you can better nurture prospects through the marketing funnel to become leads. Search engines are a major source of traffic for many businesses; utilizing SEO allows you to define the best performing content in your marketing strategy and capitalize on it at a low cost.

User Engagement

With all the content online, it can be hard to grab one’s attention. User engagement metrics tells you exactly what content gets the biggest response from viewers. Studying user engagement can benefit through:

• Increase in long-term customers
• A stronger emotional connection with customers
• Sustained attention from your audience

When you target the wrong users with your content, you will fail to engage users and it will reflect poorly on your business. This key metric will help you to identify what is and isn’t working in your content’s strategy. As trends change, it’s important to continue to produce content that performs well to engage users to keep your business relevant online and attract new customers.

Conversion Metrics

Defining what content improves your conversion rates is not as straight forward as collecting data on traffic or engagement, as many customers do not immediately buy a product even after reading an awesome piece of content. Customers are in what is known to be the “sales funnel” where content will gradually nurture them into leads. Conversion metrics give us insight as to how leads are generated throughout the sales funnel by using call to actions. That way, you can utilize the best performing call to actions in your content strategy and market them to the appropriate part of the sales funnel.

Brand Authority Metrics

Your brand’s authority is your company’s earned trust online. It’s important to build trust through your marketing strategy by producing content that is educational and serves your viewers. With high customer trust, you can lead your industry in being the expert in your products. To track brand authority, businesses leverage keyword research to find out what content will generate meaningful organic traffic. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes to determine what their interests and likes are, that way, your content can target relevant users and gain their trust.

ImageWorks, LLC: CT Digital Marketing Experts

Keeping up with trends in digital marketing can be exhausting, especially when you've got a company to run. That's why our team at ImageWorks stays up to date with the latest advancements in the marketing industry. Let us focus on turning your website into a lead generation machine so you can focus on your business!