Measuring content marketing performance includes the use of analytic tools and other metric-audit marketing technology solutions.

Content marketing is an essential aspect of today’s digital marketing landscape, driving unpaid or organic traffic for businesses that want to grow their online presence.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s content congestion in the digital space. A massive influx of businesses divert their marketing strategies and focus more on strengthening their digital marketing to keep up with the tight competition.

Giant communications and digital technology solution providers are partnering to create a powerful synergy. For instance, Slack and Salesforce partnered to help businesses build their digital HQ. The partner companies launched their recent innovations, including Slack Clips, allowing teams to create, share, consume, and review audio and video content in Slack channels. But how do you measure the performance of your content marketing? Here are some tips for you.

Know Your Key Content Marketing Metrics

What are your target metrics for your content marketing?

According to a 2020 Semrush survey result,  84% of businesses (1,500 respondents) have a content marketing strategy. However, only 11% think they have a good content marketing strategy. In addition, 61% measure their return on investment (ROI) from content.

This statistical data only goes to show that businesses acknowledge the importance of content marketing and rely much on content to generate satisfactory ROI. However, many businesses aren’t confident with their strategies.

Semrush compared the survey results between 2019 and 2020. The key metrics businesses use to measure content success in 2020 include the following:

  • Organic traffic
  • Leads
  • Sessions or page views
  • Conversion rate
  • Time on page
  • Social shares
  • Bounce rate
  • Backlinks
  • Comments

Consumption is one of the key metrics in measuring content marketing effectiveness, which shows the number of people who have accessed or viewed the content. Engagement metrics, on the other hand, are essential to foster a good audience relationship and establish trust and loyalty.

Determine the Best Tools and Tactics

Businesses recognize the long-term cost efficiency of organic content marketing over paid ads as backed up by a 2019 Databox survey. The survey shows that 70% of businesses generated more sales through search engine optimization (SEO) than through pay-per-click (PPC). Hence, it’s no wonder why many companies invest in content marketing tools.

It’s crucial to use reliable content marketing tools and tactics to measure your content marketing performance. Web analytics and social analytics tools are used by digital marketers such as Google analytics. Analytics tools provide basic analytical tools and statistics for SEO and digital marketing purposes.

How do analytics tools work? For web analytics, such as Google Analytics, this tool captures user data by using page tags, which involves the insertion of JavaScript page tag with each page’s code. The page tag runs in visitors’ web browsers to gather data and send it to one of the data collection servers of Google.

Web analytics tools generate reports to visualize and track data, including the number of users, average session duration, bounce rates, sessions by channel, bounce rates, page views, and goal completions among others.

How APAC Businesses Measure Content Marketing Performance

Content marketing strategies overflow with the rise of the pandemic. According to Gregor Almássy, the Overseas CMO of OPPO, their APAC marketing team and VICE APAC Asia partnered to create digital content series featuring artists from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Indeed, video creation for content marketing is an in-demand marketing technology strategy used by many APAC businesses nowadays.

But how do APAC businesses measure their content marketing performance? With analytics tools and statistical analysis, APAC companies can measure content marketing performance. A survey shows that mainland Chinese firms are the keenest adopters of digital technology in the APAC region, seeking to gain a competitive edge via innovation and digitalization and innovation.

Here are some examples of the statistical data relating to content marketing that marketers look into as a basis for measuring and creating more effective content marketing strategies:

  • In the Content Marketing Trend Study of Statista, advertising content using ads (73%)  and newsletters or email marketing (65%) were the measures implemented by APAC companies in 2020. APAC companies concentrate on allocating their budget on ads for a quick content marketing metrics boost combined with email marketing strategies to maintain long-term benefits cost-efficiently.
  • HubSpot’s 2016 Asia Pacific Content Marketing Report shows the survey findings of SurveyMonkey across Asia, New Zealand, and Australia to establish content marketing status in the APAC region. Content marketing brings a major commercial impact on incremental sales for Asia Pacific businesses. But, does this survey still reflect the same results during the pandemic?
  • The Adobe Digital Trends 2020 shows that content marketing is one of the top three digital-related areas of APAC organizations in 2020. The top digital trend is social media engagement, followed by content marketing and targeting and personalization, with Chinese businesses leading the way in implementing these strategies.

Many APAC businesses use content marketing as a strategy to attract more potential customers and sales. Measuring content marketing performance includes the use of analytic tools and other metric-audit marketing technology solutions.