How to Benchmark Your Content Marketing Strategy
You see it everywhere. Content marketing is trending, and for a good reason. Top brands are integrating content into their marketing strategies to establish their authority in their field, drive traffic to their site, increase conversion rates, and reduce costs.
Because of this, content marketing is becoming an essential element of any successful marketing strategy. It has become so popular that even businesses that don’t directly deal with content or content creation will adopt it as part of their plan for success. However, not every company can have the same success with content marketing — because not every company does it well.
Whether you’re just starting or want to improve your current content marketing efforts, benchmarking your strategy will give you insight into what’s working and what needs to work. Read on to discover some helpful tips for benchmarking your strategy and identifying areas for improvement.
Define Your Goals
The first step to benchmarking your content marketing strategy is determining what your goals for the process are. Every business is different, and so are its content marketing goals. Whatever goals you set, make sure you keep them in mind throughout the benchmarking process.
Doing so will help you evaluate your current strategy based on those goals. Some standard plans for content marketing include growing brand awareness, increasing traffic to your website, generating leads, driving sales, and increasing engagement with your audience.
The benchmarks you use to measure your progress will differ depending on the goals you set. If you plan to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your site, then your benchmarking metrics may be the number of page views, the average time spent on your site, and the number of referrals (i.e., people who click on links to other sites from your site).
Decide on a Strategy
Once you have your goals in place, you can move on to deciding on a strategy. A content strategy is how your brand will execute its content marketing strategy. You may choose to publish a certain amount of posts each week, or you may want to publish less frequently but longer posts, for example.
Depending on your goals, you may want to focus on publishing a specific type of content. For instance, if your goal is to increase leads with content, you may want to focus on publishing more educational pieces that encourage your audience members to take action.
If your goal is to drive sales with your content, you may want to focus on publishing pieces that include calls to action that encourage your audience to purchase goods and services from your brand.
Benchmarking Tasks
The tasks below are not an exhaustive list but rather a guide for the things you may want to measure as you benchmark your content marketing strategy. Remember, each business will have different benchmarks, and what works for one brand may not work for another. Your benchmarks should be based on your goals and the type of content you decide to publish.
Page views: One of the most commonly used metrics, page views, is the number of times a page is viewed on your site. Page views are often used for measuring the success of a blog post since most posts appear as pages on a website. Since many businesses integrate blogging into their content marketing strategy, page views indicate how successful your blogging efforts are.
Average time spent on site: This metric is also commonly used in online marketing. It is the average amount of time that visitors spend on your website. This metric is often used to determine if your visitors are engaging with the content on your site. If your visitors spend a lot of time on your site, it indicates that they are interested in your content.
Conversion rate: Your conversion rate is the number of visitors who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of visitors. For example, if 100 visitors land on your home page and 10 purchase your product, you have a 10% conversion rate. A high conversion rate is reasonable because your content is resonating with your audience and successfully driving the results you want.
Reduced cost per lead: While measuring your conversion rate, you’ll also want to ensure that your content marketing is cost-effective. You can measure the cost-effectiveness of your content marketing strategy by calculating your reduced cost per lead. Your reduced cost per lead is the amount you spend on your content marketing (your budget) divided by the number of leads your content provides.
Measure Content Consumption
There are several ways to measure the consumption of your content. Depending on the goals of your content marketing strategy and the type of content you are publishing, you may want to focus on measuring specific metrics over others.
Visits: This is the number of times your content has been viewed on your website. You can measure this by tracking the number of page views on your site through Google Analytics. Page views are the overall number of times a page has been viewed, including the page showing when there is no article on your site. You can also measure visits by tracking the times a page is accessed from a guest’s browser.
Page views per visit: This is the number of times each page was viewed. You can measure this by tracking the number of page views for each page on your site and dividing that by the number of visits each page received. This way, you can see which pages were the most popular and compare which pages were more popular than others.
Bounce rate: A high bounce rate means that visitors didn’t spend much time on your page and quickly left your site without taking any other action. You can measure your bounce rate by tracking the number of visitors who left your site without visiting any other pages.
Measure Content Creation
There are a few different ways to measure your content creation efforts. Depending on the goals of your content marketing strategy and the type of content you are publishing, you may want to focus on measuring specific metrics over others.
Post topics: This is an excellent way to measure the type of content you are publishing. You can track the topic of each article to see which topics are being published and which are not. This way, you can see what topics are most popular and use them to publish more content on those topics.
Comment engagements: Engagement is an integral part of content marketing. This includes activities like likes, shares, and comments on your articles. You can measure engagement by tracking the number of comments on each piece. This will help you see how successful your engagement efforts are and which articles receive the most comments.
Shares: Sharing your content across social media platforms is an excellent way to increase your exposure and drive more traffic to your site. You can measure your social sharing efforts by tracking the number of shares each article receives. This will help you see which articles are most successful and which need improvement.
Summing up
As you can see, content marketing is an important part of any business marketing strategy. To stay competitive, every business needs to integrate content into their strategy, but not every business can have the same level of success with content marketing. To ensure your content marketing is successful, you must start by defining your goals and deciding on a strategy. Then you can benchmark your content marketing efforts by measuring your content consumption and creation metrics.
