How to Track Content Marketing Effectively

Many people are great at generating content but don't spend any time tracking the results of their efforts. In terms of building your business and giving your client base what they want, this is a big miss. Taking the time to analyse the things that are working best can help increase traffic to your website, build rapport with your readers and keep them coming back for more.

Here are some ways you can track your content effectively.

Identify Your Key Performance Indicators

For your content marketing to be successful it needs to tie in with your business and marketing objectives. And to prove its success (or lack of), you should assign key performance indicators to each of the objectives. By doing this, you will help other people in your company understand the place of content marketing in the business and give it the credit it deserves. It will also give you positive news to share with your team during those monthly update meetings!

For example, if one of your objectives is to engage more with your client base then, to understand which content best supports this, you could use metrics such as comments on your blog, likes on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, and so on.

You should also decide how frequently you'll collect data. Monthly is often a good place to start.

Use a Tracker

This can be as simple or as complicated as you like. It doesn't need to be anything fancy - a spreadsheet will do the job nicely. Here is an example - Content Marketing Tracker

This can be used as a starting point – it will need tweaked to suit your own objectives and measurements

Monitor the Success of Each Platform

Do you know whether your client base prefers your Facebook updates or blog posts? Would they prefer to read your email newsletter when it arrives in their inbox rather than making their own way to the same information on your website? If you don't know the answer to these questions then you may want to start monitoring the success of each content platform you use. Once you know what your target audience likes best then you can focus more on giving them what they want – which is surely the ultimate goal?

You can also use the analytics tools of social media sites, such as Facebook Insights and Google+ Ripples. And, of course, Google Analytics should also be used.

Tracking the success of each platform will help you to identify things like:

• If you have more than one person writing content for you, is one author performing better than others? If so, what can be learned from their style, topics, tone, etc.?
• Are there any platforms that are not generating as much success? Should you continue with them? Do you need to change the format of the content you are posting?
• Are your freelance writers performing better than your in-house writers? Or vice versa? What can be learned from this?
• Which topics are more popular than others? Should you focus more on these and less on the ones that are not performing so well?

You will then be able to share this information with your team. Congratulate the author of the best post. Share what was the best platform for gaining email subscribers. Decide whether to continue with the worst performing platform. Looking at your efforts in more detail will help direct your future content marketing. Here is a spreadsheet which will help give you an idea of the platforms you can monitor and the metrics you can use - Success By Platform

Many people think that content marketing is hard to measure but if you take these steps then you should have more than enough information to help prove its worth. And, more importantly, you'll know what works best for your client base.

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If you want to know more about how important online content is then please read our Content Odyssey Guide.

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