4 Insider Tips on Really Evaluating Your Content

Investments have been made. People have been hired. Results are expected.

We all know that content marketing works. But what indicators tell you that your strategy is paying off? And if it’s not, how can you improve it? After talking to countless companies struggling with measuring 1their content efforts, we came up with a helpful cheat sheet. Here’s a little taste of four things that indicate the health state of your content marketing moves. For more, download the complete Cheat Sheet.  

Reach under the hood

It’s not enough to count total website visitors if you want to refine your content strategy. Different types of content are meant for different channels: direct, paid search, organic, social, email, and referral. The content written for the blogs you post on social media is different from that written for email campaigns. You need to know which channels and content are leading the most visitors to your site. In this way, you can focus more resources on the channels that are most effective. For instance, you might decide to concentrate on using SEO to generate more traffic from organic searches.

Engage each visitor personally

Paying attention to page views per session, average time on page, and bounce rate is a good way to assess the appeal of the content on your website. You may find that visitors who get to your website from organic search leave quickly, while those channeled to you via email stay a while. This knowledge enables you to improve the content most often accessed by organic search, while maintaining the structure of your email campaigns.

It’s all about the journey

Location, location, location. Figuring out the pages that contain popular content, or lead visitors to it, is essential in fine-tuning the organization of your website and what appears on its pages.

Landing pages are the best place to start. The goal is to analyze which landing pages attract the most visitors and have the highest rate of goal completion (for example, buying a product or filling out a form), or which most frequently lead visitors to secondary pages where they complete goals. It’s also important to look at the points at which visitors exit your website so that you can check if there’s something you can do to fix that problem; for example, by introducing a CTA at that point.

Lead visitors straight to your goals

The ultimate goal of content marketing is, well, goals and events. Effective content is that which leads the visitor to take a certain action. Therefore, in addition to creating content that attracts visitors, it’s essential to have it all result in the visitor completing a goal that promotes your business objectives. This can include signing up for an email newsletter that will allow you to nurture the lead, or clicking a social media button so that you get more likes.

SOAR your way on up

These 4 indicators – reach, engagement, journey, and goals – can all be boiled down to numbers. It’s a bit more complicated than that, because knowing how to find those numbers, and what they mean, is a challenge. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to measure and optimize your content, and it’s called SOAR. Get it now.