Content marketing is a complex and somewhat abstract strategy to lead customers through the buying process entirely online. It’s complex because your content serves multiple functions in the process, and abstract because not every customer goes from discovering content to making a purchase.
If your content marketing isn’t getting the results you’d like, ask yourself these four questions:
Are you reusing ideas for content?
If you’re running out of ideas early on, it probably means you’re not fully engaged in your content marketing strategy. You need to be committed and enthused about content marketing in order to see results. Content ideas should come from your own inspiration and knowledge of your industry.
This can be hard if you have a third party creating your content, or if you’re in a particularly small niche that doesn’t have a breadth of subjects you think you can write about. However, you can get ideas from leading competitors that will help you expand the variety of content you produce.
Is your content engagement and/or CTR increasing?
One of the easiest ways to measure content marketing success is the content engagement and click-through-rate (CTR) metrics. If you don’t see a change in these metrics, you have work to do. You need to produce content regularly, and then promote it on various digital and social channels. Both your SEO and content marketing strategy should be geared towards increasing social engagement and improving the CTR.
Content marketing does take time, so if you don’t see results right away don’t panic. The longer you work on your content strategy, the better your engagement and click-through rates should be.
Do clicks equal leads?
Each click on your content means someone is interacting with your company. Each additional click after that means the consumer is getting closer to becoming a sales lead. You want to open the sales funnel by getting their email or having them like your page so you can continue to give them engaging content directly.
You can evaluate your leads by how they’ve interacted with your content, and by how much interest they show in potentially becoming a customer. Those who are more engaged might be ready to become a customer, while the rest should be provided with more engaging content, newsletters, and other online marketing materials.
Are you measuring ROI effectively?
On average, marketers are spending $44 billion on content marketing per year. Yes, this means content marketing is very expensive, but it is proven effective if you take the time and do it correctly. Many businesses lose sight of their goals because they don’t calculate the ROI of their efforts and realize that they are improving their marketing strategy.
There are different methods of calculating the ROI of your content marketing, depending on your revenue-based goals and which areas you wanted to see improvement in. If you’re looking for fast results, you won’t see the ROI you were expecting. Over time, however, content marketing can create a wealth of new and loyal customers that you don’t get from other online efforts.
