You put a lot of time and money into content marketing for your business, but how can you know if the investment is paying off? If you’re not tracking these important metrics, you could be missing critical information necessary for making decisions about which campaigns are the most profitable and which should be shelved.
Social Media Engagement
“Vanity metrics” have received a ton of negative publicity in most social media marketing circles, but hear me out here. Likes, follows, comments and clicks are signs your audience enjoys the content you’re sharing on social media and wants to see more of the same. A SproutSocial study found that, “74% of shoppers make buying decisions based on social media.” This means that the more a business is liked, shared, commented on and recommended across social media channels the more likely consumers will have a positive perception of that business.
As you publish new content, to your blog for instance, track how well the content is engaged across social channels. This should then be correlated back to traffic and lead conversions. Go deeper and assign quality scores to leads coming from different pieces of content, topics and social media channels so you can optimize future content.
Email Engagement
Email is still one of the most effective marketing channels a business can use. In fact, “for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI.” Today email automation software has taken the marketing landscape by store. These tools give marketers unprecedented automation and personalization that generates the type of engagement and ROI that we could only dream of ten years ago.
For example, a business can send a brand-new subscriber a welcome email with links to different content on their website and learn the types of topics, products, and services that specific subscriber is interested in just by how they engage with that email. The subscriber can be further profiled by how they engage with subsequent emails in your funnel so every email they receive is more tailored to exactly what they’re interested in and how your product or service can satisfy that need.
Customer Retention
Increasing customer retention and loyalty is a game changer for B2C brands. B2B enjoys built in retention due to multi month contracts, while B2C have much shorter relationships with customers. Retention is calculated by the number of customers at the end of a given period (CE), minus the number of new customers acquired during that period (CN), divided by the number of customers at the start of the period (CS). Multiple the result by 100 and you have your retention rate. The formula looks like this:
Using content driven by all of a brand communication channels is the most effective means of keep customers retained and loyal to the brand. Identify what sparked a customer’s original interest in the brand and provide content that reinforced that interest in the brand.
Phone Calls Received
Attribution is one of the most important aspects to properly calculating the ROI of any marketing campaign. So many small businesses do this poorly because they don’t use unique phone number in each campaign. This means that when a business published content and pays to have traffic delivered to it in an effort to generate incoming calls, there’s no way to tell which traffic source generated the call.
For example, a plumbing company buys advertising from the local TV station, Google and Facebook to generate phone calls. They need to have a system that provides unique phone numbers for each campaign and be able to attribute which campaign is generating the best ROI. If that same plumbing company is buying traffic from Google using different ad copy and content on each landing page version they would need to use a unique phone number per ad and landing page combination to know for sure which is converting to sales at the best rate.
When you know the outcomes of each content marketing campaign, you can focus your attention on the most profitable ways to reach your target audience. Streamlining your marketing efforts brings in better leads and increases ROI. Start tracking these metrics today to boost revenue and grow your customer base.
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