Measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy is one of the most important aspects of ensuring that it is successful. According to SEM Rush, only 19% of marketers have an advanced marketing strategy in place with metrics to keep track of. With 73% of companies spending 10-70% of their marketing budget on content marketing, putting the right KPIs in place becomes a necessity. Here are the most important metrics you can use to ensure the success of your content marketing strategy in 2022.
- Conversion Rate
Conversion rate represents the number of people who’ve “converted” into paying customers or subscribers. Your conversion rate is calculated by comparing the total number of visits to your website with the number of people who’ve turned into customers or subscribers. This metric is valuable because it can help you determine which marketing channels work best for your brand, which CTAs are most popular, and what types of content catch your target audience’s eyes.
- Average Time on Site
While this metric is somewhat self-explanatory, it’s worth elaborating further on why the time spent on your site is important. The average time on site represents how long any user has spent on your website once they’ve arrived at your landing page. It can be increased with long-form, multimedia, and other sizable content which requires more time to interact with. Increasing your average time on site will help bring the user closer to contributing to your conversion rate by making a purchase or subscribing to your emails, for example.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The Click-through rate is very important in content marketing because it will guide you down the right path with your keywords and calls to action. CTR represents the percentage of people who’ve interacted with your ads based on the copy you’ve presented them with. The goal is to increase your CTR as much as possible so that more people who’ve seen your ad click on it. This will help you bring more people to your website and have them consider buying something.
- Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Cost per lead represents the number of monetary resources you’ve spent to convert a single user into a paying lead. Advertisers often use CPL to calculate how much they’ll invest in a single campaign based on the brand’s previous CPL average. This metric is useful because you’ll be able to set how much you’re prepared to spend on a marketing campaign before entering full production. The goal is to decrease your CPL as much as possible so you can convert leads at the fraction of what they’ll spend on your website once converted.
- Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is indicative of how many people visited your website and then left without interacting with anything. Bounce rate is a negative metric that you should work on minimizing as much as possible. Your bounce rate will help you determine how effective your landing pages, calls to action, and purchase incentives are. The bounce rate can be decreased through first-time purchase discounts, limited-time sales, and other incentives for people to buy something before leaving.
- Social Shares
As you create and publish content, people will interact with it in various ways, especially on social media. Social shares are a useful metric to keep track of as they will help you determine which pieces of content are trending. This will help narrow down your choice of topics, keywords, and calls to action to use in social media content. In turn, these pieces of content will add to your CTR and allow you to control other metrics given that people now interact with your social media posts.
Wrapping Up
These metrics will help keep your content marketing strategy on track for success if you implement them from day one. Compare your current performance to previous periods to draw parallels and find out exactly what works for your target audience.
It’ll take some time for you to get an accurate estimate and data sizable enough to make conclusions about your marketing performance. Start using these metrics now, and you’ll have something tangible to work on within the following months to ensure your long-term success.
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