Insanely Clever Marketing

Is My Content Strategy Working? Know Your Metrics

Posted by Penelope Herbert on June 28, 2017 · 1 Comment 

Content Strategy: If you have a small to medium sized business, then you should have some form of content marketing.

It’s no longer a fun novelty, your content strategy is a crucial building block in creating long lasting and meaningful relationships with your existing customers. A functional content strategy will ensure customers remain loyal to your brand instead of wandering into the arms of your competitors.

It also allows you to cast your net far and wide in finding new customers, generating leads and incentivising your customers to introduce their friends and families to your brand.

Key Elements of a Content Strategy

Content marketing can come in the form of blog posts, social media posts, videos / vlogs, tweets or email shoots. You may choose to do it all yourself, dedicate a team to it, or outsource it to a specialist like Digital Logic.

Whatever approach you choose to creating a content marketing strategy, it’s vitally important that you know your metrics and adjust your strategy proactively in response to them.

What are my metrics and how useful are they?

If you think that user engagement is measured solely in hits then this could lead to some disastrous management decisions for your content strategy.

There are many ways in which users can interface with your content. Checking these metrics is relatively easy. Gleaning their effectiveness is less straightforward. Let’s look at some of the key metrics and the extent to which they accurately measure engagement.

Reach- This is the number of people who see your content. Your stats here will probably be reassuringly high but don’t get too smug. There’s no guarantee that these users have meaningfully engaged with our content or even read it.

Because so many disreputable sources manipulate it with clickbait-style headlines that rarely (if ever) result in meaningful engagement it’s really not helpful for much except ego boosting.

Think of your content as a store on a digital road. Just because thousands of cars drive past doesn’t mean that you have as lot of people stopping to browse. What you do with that traffic is far more important.

Incorporate a compelling call to action (such as a newsletter sign up for exclusive content) and this will give you a far more useful stat to work with… Conversions!

Time on page- This is exactly what it says on the box. It shows you how long users have spent on your pages and is a more useful metric than reach. Although a user spending a minute on your page doesn’t mean they’ve spent a minute reading it.

Maybe the user had multiple tabs open. Maybe they walked away from their device to made a sandwich. Try supplementing your time on page stats with scroll depth to make sure they’re extra meaningful.

Shares- Social media shares can be a great metric as they imply that someone has read your content and it has resonated with them enough to want to share it with their friends, family and colleagues.

However, many people share content based on the headline and / or featured image alone without even reading it so it may need some supplementation.

Have a look at the comments on each share. These are far more telling as they imply that a user has read the content and formed an opinion worth sharing, even if it’s just a thumbs-up emoji!

Now that you know your metrics and how accurately they gauge user engagement, you can measure the success of your content strategy and adjust it accordingly.