Picture this: you've invested time, effort, and creative energy into crafting a stellar content piece. You've hit the publish button, and now you're eagerly waiting to see the fruits of your labor. But how do you know if your content is truly making a difference?
But not all content is created equal.
The way you measure the ROI of your content marketing initiatives needs to adapt at each phase of your customer journey to successfully woo and convert your target users. There are three content measurements you should be using to track user engagement and intent at three pivotal stages: introduce, educate, and convert.
Introduce
Leverage the power of organic to put money back in your pocket
Imagine you're at a bustling marketplace, and instead of shouting about your products, you're standing there with the answers to all the questions your customers have. That's the essence of content marketing. Unlike traditional advertising methods that require paying for digital ads, social media promotions, or print space, content marketing takes a more subtle approach. It attracts views organically by providing value and answers to the audience's key questions.
Every view your blog post receives is like a small deposit into your marketing bank. What would you have paid on social media or in Google Ads to reach the same amount of people? That’s money back in your pocket to reinvest in your business.
How to track content ROI at the introduce stage?
At the top of the funnel, your content should be focused on introducing you and your brand to your target audience. The goal here is to attract the right audience to your channels and start to build some name recognition. The metrics you should be looking at in your cross-channel dashboards are:
Reach (how many people saw the content)
Impressions (how many times the content was viewed)
Sessions (how many times people visited your content)
Pageviews (how many times your content was viewed)
These metrics tell you if your headline was catchy enough, your channel distribution plan reached the right audience, and whether the topic was relevant enough for your audience.
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Educate
Hand out the answers your customers want like candy at Halloween
But eyeballs alone won't suffice—you want engagement. You need to keep your audience on your page long enough and provide enough value for them to want to explore, like, and subscribe. The best way to keep your audiences hooked is to educate them about problems and solutions in their niche. For free.
When you were Trick-or-Treatinga kid, did you want to stop at the house that passed out gum or the one that had king-size candy bars?
Free resources, toolkits, white papers, and trend analyses are like full-size candy bars. They help your audience understand and solve their own problems on their own time without having to pay for your service or talk to a sales person. Be the house with full-size candy bars.
Once they know the content they get from you is high-value and high-quality, they'll keep coming back for more.
How to track content ROI at the educate stage?
There are three key metrics that show you whether your content is engaging and educational enough to hook your audience and keep them flowing down their buyer's journey:
Average time on page
Pages per session
Bounce rate
Average time on page
While the average time on page is 52 seconds, you'll want to compare your time on page metric to the read time for your content. My rule of thumb is the time on page metric should equal the time it takes to get to your first CTA. So if your CTA is a quarter of the way down the page and it takes 4 minutes to read your blog, I would set the time on page goal at 60 seconds. The longer the "average time on page" metric gets, the more engaged your audience is going to be.
Pages per session
Engagement on one piece of content is great, but we're trying to drive your readers down a content funnel. We need them to dig into your site and build trust that (1) you know what you're doing and (2) they know what they're getting. Anything over a 2.0 is a great start. It shows that your readers like the content you provided and crave more. Don't expect this number to skyrocket, but, if it remains close to 1.0, it's probably time to take a closer look at what's going on.
Bounce rate
Another key indicator of success in the educate stage of your buyer's journey is bounce rate. This is the percentage of users who entered your site (from Google, social media, email, and other distribution channels) and left before visiting another page. Bounce rate varies wildly by industry, audience, and content type. This number is also going to fluctuate a lot, but should be a gague for whether the content meets the expectations you set from your distribution channels.
Convert
You built the trust, now capitalize on it
Let's talk about that moment when you transition from engaging storytelling to a direct call-to-action. Every piece of content should have a clear, compelling direct CTA. This is your chance to guide your readers toward a specific action you want them to take—namely to buy from or work with you.
In the last third of your blog post, your direct CTA takes center stage. It's the finale, the grand crescendo that prompts readers to take action once they've soaked in your wisdom. But avoid the sales whiplash. Your CTA shouldn't feel like a sales pitch. It should seamlessly align with the content's value and be a natural progression for your readers.
How to track content ROI at the convert stage?
These are the metrics that make executives giddy. You're looking for click-through-rates on offers and direct CTAs. There's two ways to track conversions depending on how your site and business is structured:
Button clicks
Marketing qualified leads
Sales qualified leads
Button clicks
If you're running an ecommerce, direct download, or other non-form-based offer, you are going to live and die by button clicks. Use Google Tag Manager to track how many times users click on your offer button to determine if your content successfully warmed your reader into a prospect or customer.
Marketing qualified leads
These conversions usually come from form fills. If you're using a generic, three to seven question form, you're not able to capture enough information to qualify a lead in the form itself. But it's still a good metric to track the success of your content. The submissions mean that your readers want what you have to offer. The more the merrier when it comes to tracking this metric. While this number varies business by buisness, a good goal for convert content pieces is 30% of sessions.
Sales qualified leads
Once the leads are handed over to your sales team (if you have one), they'll be vetted to make sure they're the right kind of lead (business size, industry, location, etc.) for your business. This number will tell you how well your content attracts the audience you want to convert. The lower the percentage of SQLs v MQLs, the more you'll want to focus on building target personas and training your sales and marketing teams together on messaging.
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