Most content marketers are measuring the wrong things. Here’s how to tell the difference.
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC
Content marketing metrics are the quantitative and qualitative measures used to evaluate whether a content program is achieving its intended business objectives. They include audience growth, lead generation, search visibility, and revenue attribution. The distinction between meaningful metrics and vanity metrics is critical: vanity metrics (page views, social media likes, follower counts) may look impressive but reveal little about business impact, while meaningful metrics connect content activity directly to outcomes that matter to the organization.
Every content marketer I’ve worked with has felt the pull of the vanity metric. The blog post that got 2,000 views. The LinkedIn post with 150 likes. The social media following that crossed a round number.
These numbers feel like progress. They’re easy to report. But they’re often meaningless.
Continue reading “The Content Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones to Ignore)”
One of the challenges for — and criticisms of — the marketing function is that it’s often difficult to calculate an ROI on a company’s marketing efforts. For example, how does a soft drink or beer company determine whether or not their multi-million-dollar Super Bowl ad was worth the investment? How can they tell whether a customer made a purchase based on that ad as opposed to a purchase they were going to make anyway? Not an easy task.
It’s hard to believe another year is winding down. It’s the old “toilet paper roll theory” (a not-so-scientific way of explaining relativity). Time may pass more quickly (at least perceptually) for me, than for the university students I teach, for instance. For them a year represents about 1/20th of their lifetime. For me, well, you get the point!
A Harvard Business Review case study recently posed a provocative question: when should humans listen to algorithms vs. when should they trust their own experience and intuition? For this case study, the issue related to which of two employees to choose for a promotion. But, given the widespread applications for the use of big data and the power of predictive analytics, the question could be applied to any field or area of business practice—including content marketing.
Marketing has long been faced with a perception that its results are difficult to accurately measure. Consequently, many business leaders are skeptical of investing money into marketing efforts, because they aren’t convinced they can tie the dollars they put into marketing to their bottom line. When it comes to online marketing, in particular, a lot of metrics have been developed to help evaluate the effectiveness of marketing efforts in the absence of the ability to measure a concrete ROI.
Today, virtually every business has a webpage, sometimes multiple pages. Not to mention social media accounts. But, while getting your name and your brand online is a crucial first step for raising awareness and preference for what you have to offer, it’s just one piece of the marketing puzzle. To be truly effective, you need to develop a process and method of tracking how effective your online marketing actually is.