5 Ways To Tell If Your Content Is Working
B2B content marketers are sometimes graded by the amount of content they produce – but as we all know, about 60-70% of that content isn’t even used. How can you make sure you’re investing your time and resources in creating and repurposing the right content? To start, you need to move beyond the basic content performance metrics. Page views, session time, and PDF opens are great to understand surface-level engagement of your content, but remember: just because someone clicked into your content doesn’t mean they read or engaged with it.
It’s time to go beyond page views. Here are five ways to tell if your content strategy is working:
Are internal stakeholders using the content?
Most content use starts from the internal teams—usually customer-facing—who search through a company’s content library for relevant articles, blogs, or case studies that will help close a deal or solve a customer’s issue. Consider all the content you’ve created, and gauge which ones have the highest shareability stemming from your colleagues. If you have the resources, take it one step further and ask why these particularly content assets are the most useful. The qualitative feedback you’ll get from your team will be more useful than anything a basic web analytics tool can tell you.
Do your customers find the content useful?
It might seem obvious, but your customers should be consuming the content you create for them: at the end of the day we’re doing all this for the customer! You can use basic tracking for content, like page views and sessions, or you can take it one step further and serve up content recommendations for subsequent consumption (and see how long those visitors ‘binge’ it). On top of that, consider the metrics that regular analytics tools can’t tell you about your content — like what portion of your audience is known, what company they’re at, and how often members of that company’s buying committee come back to consume more of your content.
Was the original purpose for the content met?
Once you get the content out in the world, you might have to take a few steps back and remind yourself why you created this content in the first place. Was it for an event? Was it to create brand awareness among unknown visitors? Was it a guide on how to use a new feature or product? Make sure you include time in your analysis to see what the engagement was among your audience that you specifically targeted with the content. This will give you an idea of the content type you created for the audience works, but also if your strategy for reaching that target audience was successful as well.
Did the content influence the pipeline, help close a deal, or help accelerate the buyer journey?
Similar to the last point, it can be tricky if you don’t have a tool like PathFactory at your fingertips—but this is an important step in ensuring you’re getting the most out of your content! By framing your content’s success around how your audience goes through their buyer journey, you’re doing the one thing that many content marketers don’t know how to do: connecting your content with pipeline growth.
Did your content have positive ROI?
Content can be expensive. In fact, in last year’s Content Engagement Report we found that on average businesses were spending $2,791 on each piece of content! If you’re investing financial resources into content creation, you need to be sure it’s attributing to the bottom line. It’s difficult to measure the success of content assets without a tool, but you can gauge the success of it through basic web metrics like page views and session time, even though you won’t be able to attribute a dollar value to the influence.
Want to get more out of your content but not sure where to start? Reach out to us – we’d love to help!
