What’s music to a marketer’s ears is that content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing, but costs almost 62% less! Research shows that 95% of B2B product buyers rely on content when evaluating a company and its offerings.This clarifies why many businesses push the envelope on their content marketing budgets every year.

Good content attracts visitors and entices them to stay longer on your website - whether it’s to sign up for a newsletter or buy a product. However, to ensure it is adding tangible business value, a robust content marketing strategy is indispensable. It not just helps develop, streamline, and optimize various content assets but also provides a clear perspective into what’s generating ROI and what needs improvement.

For brands eager to quantify how their content marketing efforts are fueling their sales revenues, here’s where they should look:

1. Buyer persona segmentation

   If crafting razor-sharp content is half the battle won, the latter half depends on your strategy. It’s virtually impossible to successfully market to everyone at once. So ensure you are focusing your customizing your content planning efforts on one buyer persona at a time — preferably one that commands a sizeable majority.

   If you have multiple buyer personas, it would be wise to create specific prototypes basis their demographics, interests, preferences, and the content they typically consume. For instance, in a B2B scenario, an executive would be more inclined to download a detailed report, while the CEO of a company, because he needs to make quick decisions would prefer an infographic that sums up the analysis. Understanding these nuances and testing the waters with each segment will rationalise the marketing money tagged to each content piece.

2. Analytics

   To know how useful your content is to your end customer, you have to quantify clicks and views. These statistics will provide you with the base for evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing, and they’re readily available through services like Google Analytics.

   We can further bisect this into two critical aspects:

   • Clicks are helpful, as it shows the website traffic, but you want to make sure people stay on the page, too. That’s why it’s important to check the average time on a page. If most of your views are a couple of seconds long, viewers might have liked your headline, but the article didn’t answer their question or solve their problem. On the other hand, if they stuck around for a few minutes, you can safely assume that they left with a valuable takeaway.

   

   • What are people doing once they’ve viewed your content? Are they moving on to other pages (hopefully on your site), or are they talking in the comments? Some metrics — like the number of clicks — help measure quantity, but looking at engagement can show you quality. Good comments are positive signs that you’ve created something valuable, helpful, or edifying. When a person comments on any piece of content from a blog to a video, it’s a clear sign that what you’ve put out there has made an impact. Something you said or displayed resonated with them on a personal level, and — whether their comment is positive or negative — you can use it as a guide for your future content.

3. Digital downloads

   Sometimes, large pieces of content like whitepapers, how-to guides, and e-books can be so valuable that customers may want to keep a copy for future reference. If you offer a download of something you’ve made, knowing how many people have used it can serve as a yardstick for its quality and popularity.

   Whenever someone downloads a presentation, video, or an infographic, you can be sure your content has been valuable and effective in answering their needs. A great way of leveraging downloads to your advantage is by placing them behind a ‘gate’, requiring visitors to provide basic information such as their name and email address in order to download. With this, you’ve just generated a sales lead. Now you can follow up with them in a professional way with personalized content via email, offer reasons to get them to sign up for your weekly newsletters, and work to turn them into paying customers.

4. Organic search (SEO)

   Organic search results are built on relevance to the customer’s search query and other organic ranking factors. With your rivals employing the same strategies and competing on the same keywords as yourself, it’s vital to measure the current keywords you are vested in and dig deeper into your prospects’ shoes to think like them. This will arm you with more innovative and unique keywords to embed into your next content series.

   Another way to garner organic reach is by creating mutually beneficial content – something that’s not too brand-specific but talks about an industry trend that fringes on what you do. This will afford you the spotlight from established journals in the form of inbound links. In the end, you will not only drive in traffic from other websites but will also prove to be a key part of your overall SEO strategy. Moreover, if such established publications view you as a thought-leader in your business niche, you can be sure to attract more visitors than before, and build a loyal customer base.

5. Conversions

   Conversions are one of the best signals of your content marketing effectiveness. Now while marketers spend sleepless nights trying to mine credible numbers and pain-staking graphs to prove the effectiveness of content marketing efforts, what’s more important to focus on really is the customer’s journey from discovery to purchase and how content enabled it.
   This requires gleaning data from all your digital touchpoints – be it e-commerce platforms, display ads, social media, or your own website, and third-party websites where your content has been mentioned. A content marketing digital agency with expertise in assimilating such volumes of data will be instrumental in painting the right picture of your content-driven conversions. Such initiatives will not just help evoke confidence from key decision makers but will also arm marketers with a data-driven roadmap on which to base their future content strategies.

   Now that you have discovered how well-thought through content can help you meet your sales and marketing goals, putting it into practice will reveal the results it’s driving for your business. To know how we can help accelerate this discovery and implement revenue-driven content marketing strategies connect with us.

   Source: https://www.demandmetric.com