Content Marketing Metrics: How Does Your Business Measure Up?

Importance of Measuring Progress

Metrics gauge a company’s performance in a number of areas.  Marketing and financial metrics, for example, help business owners determine the overall health of their organization and whether it’s on track for meeting its critical goals.

If you’re engaging in content marketing (which, of course, every smart Internet inbound marketing pro is, right?), you’ll have your own set of key metrics.  Monitoring the effectiveness of your content campaigns is just as important as keeping track of your customer acquisition costs and revenue percentages.  After all, the reason you’re producing all that great content is to attract and retain customers, right?

So let’s take a look at the content marketing metrics you can’t afford to ignore:

Conversion rates

The conversion of a qualified lead into a sale, or a visitor into someone who takes the desired action, is the goal of every Internet marketer.  The conversion rate is the percentage of your site’s visitors who sign up for the newsletter, opt-in to the email list and/or follow through to contact you.

So, what is considered a “good” conversion rate?  Of course, it varies according to industry, but if you’re getting at least a 3 percent conversion rate, you’re doing okay.  Remember that the quality of your content is key to improving this metric.  It’s the magnet that pulls them in, establishes your authority and builds the trust required to make the sale.

Unique visits

Knowing your traffic volume is great, but knowing how much of that traffic comes from unique visits is even better!  This number reflects the different, individual visits your site gets, as opposed to repeat visits from the same visitors.  An increase in unique visits indicates a larger number of people coming from different sources.

If the number is growing, it usually means, among other things, that your content is being spread around and shared.  This could be happening through social media, links to your blogs, or any other distribution vehicle (syndication sites, etc.) that you’ve set up.  Bottom line:  If your unique visits are rising, you’re doing something right!

Inbound links

This is the heart of inbound marketing—the idea that people come to you, drawn by your industry authority and the information that solves their problems.  Inbound links reflect your success in getting other sites to point to you.  The more quality sites that link to yours, the more certain you’ll be that your content is being trusted and shared.

And what does this ultimately mean?  Well, better search engine rankings for one thing, as well as increased site traffic and an improved conversion rate.

Bounce rate

A “bounce” is a visitor who comes to your site and then leaves your site without clicking on any of your site’s other pages.  For many possible reasons, they don’t think your site is what they were looking for. If your bounce rate is higher than 40-50%, you mayhave a problem.

Page analytics can help you uncover the problem.  Are you using the right keywords? Is your web page design clean and easy to navigate? Is your content clear and compelling?  Your bounce rate may be telling you something.

Page views

This data tells you how many web pages your visitors are clicking on over a period of time.  Compare this number to unique visitors to see how many individuals are clicking on multiple pages on your site.  If you make it easy for them by utilizing internal links and navigation bars, and if your content is useful, you should see a larger number of page views.

Summary

Content marketing metrics offer insights into your success, and they can point you to areas that need improvement.  If your inbound marketing efforts have stalled, try taking a deeper look at your content.  Better yet, get advice from the experts on content creation and optimization for your Denver business.

At DBC Digital, we like to stay current on inbound marketing trends. We do lots of research so we can provide relevant materials to our clients and prospects alike. Leading this morning’s business news was the announcement of a product launch by Microsoft. That, in itself, has not been unusual. Microsoft has been the leader in the software industry for 30 years.

We’ve come to expect new, usually innovative products from Bill Gates and company. However, Surface, their Windows 8 tablet, breaks from Microsoft’s decades-old tradition of relying on outside partners to manufacture the actual devices that run its software. Say what?!?! You mean…like Apple? Exactly…like Apple!

Many of our clients come to us and say it’s too late for them to start a business blog. They’ve missed the bandwagon. What they’ve been doing for years will have to be good enough. To which we respond, if Bill Gates can change horses way downstream, what’s stopping you?

Sure, you may feel like you’re not a writer. You probably judge yourself too harshly though. No one can write about your business better than you! That integrity will always have a way of appealing to your clients and prospects alike. On that level, you’re ready to write as well, or better, than anyone else in the world. As an ambitious business person, you’ve educated yourself in a variety of ways. Here’s one more for you.

Business blogging is essential in growing one’s business today. In an economy that is still perceived by many as being tenuous, whatever competitive edge one can utilize, the better off their business is going to be. Here are some common sense reasons why you should be blogging online, if you’re not already:

1. The Internet operates 24/7, every day of the year.

2. The overhead is negligible.

3. Your competition is already using it.

4. It’s the best advertising vehicle ever.

5. Your revenue will increase, perhaps dramatically!

We’ve intentionally kept today’s post simple and to the point. Yes, there are ultimately important considerations when one is developing a blog: Search Engine Optimization, content, social media choices and many more.

Look around though. Do a little research yourself. Check out your competition’s business blogging presence. As you can plainly see, there’s nothing magical about making a few keystrokes to promote YOUR business in a way that is helpful to YOUR clients and prospects. That’s really the essence of inbound marketing.

In closing, we’re reminded of a quote by someone most of us were supposed to read in high school, the 19th Century English novelist, George Eliot:

It’s never too late to be what you might have been.

At DBC Digital, we believe in possibilities. Yours! We help educate and inform our clients through a variety of online forums, including this blog. We have to continually hone our knowledge base to serve you effectively. Sometimes that involves change. It looks like even Bill Gates had to go back to school himself. You can do it too!

Did you have any obstacles that initially kept you from writing a blog for your business? How did you overcome them? Please let us know in the Comments section below!