In this, the final lesson in my 4 part series on Content Marketing, I’ll be looking at how to measure your content marketing efforts and some tools that you can use to make the job a little easier.
Already in this mini series, I’ve looked at research methods to identify your audience online, ways of creating killer content, and last time I looked at ways to share and amplify your content to get maximum exposure.
Today, I’m looking at the end process: collate data, examine, assess, repeat success.
You can have the best marketing strategy ever, but if you don’t track success, how will you know what works for next time?
How can you know where you are going if you don’t know where you are?
In order to gauge accurately how successful a piece of content was, I want to know who engaged with it. I like to know who shared it, who’s talking about it, who linked to it.
There are a number of analytics tools that measure content engagement and shares… These are some of my personal faves:
Marketing Strategy Tools That Track Success
1.Google Analytics
Google analytics is the most popular tracking platform by far, and there is a reason why. Apart from the fact that it’s free, it does an excellent job of helping website owners determine traffic sources, bounce rates, conversions rates, and more. The way I use Google Analytics for content marketing is to isolate the url of my blog post and look at how much traffic it got and where the traffic came from, i.e. Google search, Twitter, Facebook… This is an effective way of quickly identifying strengths and weaknesses in traffic acquisition.
2.Twitter/Facebook
Twitter and Facebook notifications are a simple, free way to see who is doing what with your content. This approach is limited and not automated, but it can help you track the success of your blog posts effectively on these two platforms. Twitter notifications shows you new followers, tweets that have been favourited, and tweets people have re-tweeted, all great ways of surmising the audience engagement of my content. Facebook send weekly engagement reports by email, which are great. These show how many new likes I’ve had and who’s talking about my posts.
3.Topsy – Social analytics for Twitter.
With Topsy, I can see at a glance who has included a link to my content in a tweet. It’s limitation is that it only shows results for Twitter, but it’s great at what it does and I use it a lot. It also shows who’s influential in my sector and which keywords are popular, which help me craft my next piece of content.
4.Moz–
Moz is a bit of a goldmine really, it has so much to offer. It’s a paid for subscription and well worth it at just $99p/m (£60). Moz is actually 12 tools in 1. I won’t discuss all 12 products, just the 2 most relevant to this post; Open Site Explorer (OSE) and Followerwonk. I use OSE for 2 things; firstly, to see who’s linking to my content, second, to see the most popular pages on my, and other site(s). I use Followerwonk to scour Twitter for people to share my content with. One of the coolest things about Followerwonk is it shows the times Twitter is most active for you, saving time and allowing me to leverage time spent sharing content.
Why don’t you have a play around with these tools and use them to assess the success of a recent piece if content?
Moz offers a 30 day trial so you can use it without committing to the subscription cost.
If you run into any problems, let me know, I’ll be happy to discuss your content marketing strategy in more detail.
Got any questions? Don’t hesitate to call us on 01928 788 100.
