There’s no shortage of articles and blogs that discuss the importance of content marketing as part of your digital strategy. It’s almost a given now that all businesses – regardless of their size or marketing spend – should be publishing content of some description.
Whether it’s straightforward copy or different forms of audio/visual media, this content needs to either engage, inform or entertain readers with a view to getting them to ‘convert’.
But as in any area of business, if you’re not getting anything from your investment, it’s difficult to justify your spend.
To ensure you’re making the most of your resources, you need to be measuring the effectiveness of every element of your marketing strategy, including the creation and optimisation of your content. Only by analysing your data can you identify areas of your campaign that need to be improved, then take steps to achieve the maximum ROI.
First of all – nail your engagement scoring model
There are a number of metrics you might use to assess how visitors engage with your content. Google Analytics (a Godsend for content strategists) will give you an idea of how users are interacting with your site; it’ll give you information on clicks, scrolls, social interactions, and how long your readers are actually spending on your site.
Your bounce rate – also easily viewable in Analytics – will quickly tell you if your content is failing to grab the attention of readers; as a general rule, if your bounce rate is coming in at over 50%, you’ve got a problem.
You can weight each of these interactions based on what is important to your business. At this stage, we would always recommend sitting down with your digital marketing or content management consultant to develop a bespoke engagement scoring model that is right for you.
Measure the velocity of your web pages
It all sounds very Formula 1, but in fact, content velocity has nothing to do with speed. It is all about measuring a web page’s ability to keep visitors on site and encouraging them to click through to more pages once they’ve consumed everything on offer from their first interaction.
As an example, you would expect the homepage on a website to have a high velocity. Well-crafted blog pages also serve to keep users engaged, and crucially, offer them something more at the end of the post.
We’ve all seen those spammy sites that have sensationalist click-baits – and while we might shake our heads, the sad reality is that these tactics do work; most of us are tempted into clicking from time to time. That’s high velocity in action. There are more subtle ways of achieving the same result without resorting to screaming headlines about celebrity scandals, however, and a content velocity report will show you which pages are doing it effectively, and which pages perhaps need to be reworked.
Analyse your conversion metrics
Those in the SEO business get very excited about web traffic. The more traffic, the more successful the campaign, right? Wrong.
The fact is, you can attract as many browsers to your online shop window as you like, but if they’re not spending money with you, they are very little use to your business!
To ensure you’re generating a decent ROI from your content efforts, you need to be achieving a good conversion rate. And the only way of doing this effectively is to understand your customers’ behaviour.
A key takeaway here is that different types of visitor will have different needs, and by matching your content accordingly, you will lead more of them into the sales funnel. For example, a first-time visitor who has been tempted in by a sales campaign will likely want more information on the product or service they’re interested in. You can satisfy their thirst for knowledge by linking them through to a blog post on the subject. Users who have searched using your brand name will know what they are looking for, and are more likely to be looking for product-specific data and prices.
If the idea of analysing the return on investment from your content is a real turn-off, let the experts do it for you. The consultants here at Indy will happily help you find new and much more effective ways of measuring the success of your content campaign.