Measuring Success in Your Next Content Marketing Campaign

So, you’ve got your next content marketing campaign strategy developed, a detailed marketing calendar in place and a robust content pipeline pumping great quality content out to your audience. Well done.

But now the inevitable question: how do you measure the success of that campaign?

In an environment where everyone is looking to get the very best return from their business activities, and the increasingly positive economic situation is driving businesses to seek new sales opportunities, marketing performance is coming under increased scrutiny.

Content marketing is one of those marketing disciplines that doesn’t offer an obvious single performance metric to measure success. Unlike email marketing or pay-per-click (PPC) click through rates, content marketing has a wealth of potential KPIs that can be used to inform business decisions.

Of this range of metrics, which would be the most useful to managers? In a recent survey by EPiServer, 80% of organisations surveyed focused on revenue and engagement – split 50/50. Only 10% focused on conversion, and 10% on visits.

This is interesting, because engagement – providing the campaign is constructed well – will naturally lead to revenue. If your quality content engages with your audience and allows them to easily connect with your conversion areas, then engagement will lead to revenue through increased traffic and conversion.

But there’s a small caveat here, and that is ensuring a happy balance is reached. If your carefully crafted content marketing is too overtly commercial, it may put off potential customers, which will clearly reduce engagement and therefore revenue.

My advice would be this: if you develop a good quality and highly engaging content marketing campaign, use strategically placed access points to your commercial or ecommerce areas, rather than including commercially focused elements within the content itself.

By having a centralised conversion or ecommerce area, this will also allow you to understand which campaigns are driving engagement and help you to understand how to engage more effectively with your audience throughout the campaign to drive greater revenue performance.

Measuring Success in Your Next Content Marketing Campaign