Utilizing Metrics to Achieve the Best Results

Is your investment in content marketing paying off in the way that it should? How many people are viewing your content, is it being shared and are you generating quantifiable leads as a direct result of your effort? If you can’t answer these questions, then you will never know if your marketing strategy is tuned for your business needs. This is why a number of independent marketers fail. They simply don’t have the data to guide their strategy and determine the value they gain.

In your own business, even if you could afford to blindly throw money at SEO content marketing, why would you? You want to see results and real business growth, so you’re going to need to know the key metrics that are used to validate and continually improve any strategy.

Ensuring that the Conversion Process Works

High-quality content is essential for developing credibility and authority for your brand. Content marketing is also used as a wide-reaching, almost blanket strategy that organically draws potential clients towards your sales funnel. Traffic is an important indicator to determine whether your SEO content marketing is working, but it’s not the only metric that you will need. Consider some of the more specific metrics below, and you will start to develop an understanding of just how important data is to your marketing strategy.

As we’ve mentioned, it all starts with traffic. Referrals and direct page hits can indicate how many visitors you’re getting and where they’re coming from. Referral sources can be incredibly useful for building data because they can be incorporated into analytics software, so you can see where you are achieving the most success. Is it from third party and affiliate referrals or maybe from your standard blogs and off-site content?

Even if you have an idea of the traffic that you’re receiving, the basic data won’t tell you how effective that traffic is. You could have excellent content that boosts traffic, but if the copy on your page is weak, this traffic won’t translate to leads or conversions. A purchase rate can be determined by how many unique visitors you have in relation to how many sales are generated. Advanced analytics can reveal repeat visits while also quantifying important data such as how long it takes between a first visit and an eventual purchase. Individual landing pages should also be tracked, so you can gauge the effectiveness of different types of content. This is instrumental for developing a better content marketing strategy.

How Important is Social Media?

With your own research, you may come across conflicting views regarding social media. If you’ve developed the impression that social media is not critical, you will need to reevaluate that thinking. Social media works and is a great way to drive traffic towards your landing pages, but it is important that you look at the right metrics. Collecting likes is not a useful indicator of how your content is performing on social media. The most useful metrics are shares and direct interactions. Comments, retweets and Facebook shares all indicate how your audience is interacting with you. A share or a direct message is more valuable than a like and can be used to prove that your content is working, and you’re starting to build meaningful relationships within your audience.

Collecting and Evaluating the Data

Let’s consider four key metrics. Viewing or consumption metrics, such as page hits, are your starting point. Sharing metrics are gathered from social media and blogs with social functionality. You will also track your lead generation through sign ups and opt ins to email lists or free accounts. Finally, you have your sales metrics. Do you have the resources and tools to collect all of this data? If you’re a small to medium-sized business, the answer is likely no. This is why you need a professional SEO content marketing company to bring everything together with a structured strategy that is designed to deliver results.

With a company like BMGcreative, you can implement a robust and effective marketing strategy without going through the learning and significant investment that is required to build a marketing team from scratch. By outsourcing your marketing activities, you can leverage the expertise of professionals who have proven success in digital content and other forms of direct marketing. Talk to us today and let us develop a strategy that fits your unique needs. Take advantage of one of Florida’s best marketing agencies for businesses of any size.