“How do you measure content marketing?” A marketing leader asked me this the other day. While there’s no perfect way to capture the value of content, here are some things I consider: 1. Qualified opps created. Depending on your sales cycle and close rate, it’s hard to track all the way to closed at first. Pipeline you can measure today. How: ask how customers heard about you as an open text field in product onboarding and demo request form. 2. Content consumption. Are people actually reading, listening to, and watching the content you’re creating? How: if web content, you can see this in Google Analytics. If “dark social,” you can get a sense based on quality and detail in the comments and DMs. 3. Content influenced. You can also think about this as the customer journey or lifecycle marketing. Which pieces of content influenced the buyer journey? How: Go to Google Analytics. Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path. This will show you the 3 steps customers took *before* converting. 4. Audience building In lead gen, or as I think about it “lead building,” it’s all about volume. But you’re better off optimizing for % of audience in your ICP, and how many of those people are actively engaged in the content. Building an audience is easy. Building a niche audience is hard. That’s why communities like Pavilion are so valuable. They optimized for one persona — leadership. Not just volume. How: On social, look at where your followers work. What are their titles? Is your ICP actually engaged in your content? With gated (events and content), it’s easy because you can enrich lists with titles and company name. How else do you measure content? #content #contentmarketing #marketing
It's so nice to see that you tackled the answer in this high-level way. I'm in a few marketing Slack groups, and whenever someone asks this question, most of the answers are about specific metrics. And then there's a whole debate about which metrics do and don't matter. The specific metrics that matter for your role will depend on a lot of different factors. But you should always be thinking about these big buckets of content consumption, lead generation and conversion.
This is such a great breakdown. Besides yourself, who's the best in content marketing on LinkedIn?
The most effective way is to use normalized ranking in journey analysis which includes content marketing. This creates a multidimensional view of it - individual content engagement, themed or contextual engagement, the effect and value of content marketing as a whole, and (most important) the effect of content marketing on the consumer journey. Ranking and normalizing the journey allows you to see the total value picture and also how to improve it.
1,2 & 4 have always been my go-tos. Always like to stick to consumption and engagement as the leading and then pipeline or revenue as the lagging #3 is a really good one though - I also think it’s valuable to look at website journey from different traffic sources (e.g. direct traffic then goes from solutions - case studies - contact us). Doesn’t show up nicely in a spreadsheet but still a good indicator of intent/quality and where any breakdowns might be
Those are the four big points!! I work mostly with service providers, and as myself and my clients talk to clients we often hear them talking about something they learned from our content that got their attention. When it comes straight from the lead, it tells you a lot!
Google analytics is huge - direct traffic should be growing, self attribution is big. I’d also look at the demographic breakdown of the audiences we are building as a valuable measurement tool
Content Strategy | Integrated Marketing | B2B SaaS
2yCamille these are great ideas! It's really hard to quantify the results of good creative and copy. Two questions for you if you have a chance to respond: 1. Do you measure content consumption as eyeballs (pageviews) or engagement (or both)? You can drive a lot of traffic with ads and get decent time on page, which is great for awareness, but assuming you'd also want to see what gets engaged with further down the funnel in terms of downloads, multiple page visits, etc.... 2. For audience building, if your ICP is an exec but most engagement comes from more junior staff, should you reassess ICP or leave as is since the exec will eventually make the call? In other words, should you go after the person who gets you into the consideration set, or direct to the exec?