Six tips for measuring the success of content marketing campaigns
CONTENT MARKETING Content marketing is no longer a trend, but an established marketing tool and - with careful planning - extremely promising. But how can companies measure the success of their content marketing measures?
How can the success of a content marketing campaign be measured? SoQuero gives six tips.No campaign, no matter how creatively and focused, can be kept alive in the long run if the success of the budget used cannot be measured. The foundation of return of content marketing investment (ROI) is therefore a solid objective: this makes campaign success measurable and creates the framework for defining individual measures. Online Marketing Specialist SoQuero has filtered out the six most important tips for sound ROI measurement in content marketing:1. Define your content marketing goals as concretely as possible! Content marketing is not an end in itself but a marketing tool - and thus "only" a means to an end. Even before you come up with a grandiose idea, you need to define concrete goals, e.g. a positive effect on sales, branding or costs. Only the objective makes campaign success measurable and creates the framework for the individual measures.2. Conduct detailed target group research! Campaigns do not always have to reach a broad mass of users. Here it is important to know in which channels a predefined target group spends time and which typical questions prevail. Both classic market research and customer data from the CRM system, as well as an analysis of typical profile information within social media, help to define the target group. Search behavior including relevant keywords and the formation of typical personas also simplify target group research. Only after this step can you determine which content formats come into question.3. Limit yourself to the relevant KPIs! Not everything that can be measured is relevant for determining ROI! Direct metrics include, for example, the number and cost per lead acquired. Lead potential, in turn, can be determined based on profit per customer, purchase frequency, and customer lifetime value (CLV). By limiting the number of relevant KPIs and measuring quality, campaign successes can be compared in a compact and clear manner. Secondary measurements subsequently help to capture effects that go beyond the actual objective.4. Try to track your customers along the customer journey The challenge in content marketing is to track users across different channels. Pixelation through link parameters and analysis of "top conversion paths" within Google Analytics, for example, help track target audience behavior. The careful use of personalized URLs, voucher codes and QR codes enables cross-media tracking and thus cross-medially connects the offline with the online world.5. Test, test, test! The number of digital touchpoints along the customer journey is constantly growing. Simple A/B tests help keep track of testing and identify high-performance combinations. Content marketing campaigns should test different channels, content formats, advertising formats and different budget allocations against each other. Depending on the traffic volume, there is also no way around testing usability and optimizing landing pages.6. Stop thinking in channel silos! For ROI measurement, it is essential to stop thinking in terms of channel silos and instead record the overall ROI. While the performance of individual channels and content formats should certainly be compared and optimized, it should always be done with the overall ROI in mind. If individual channels are considered in isolation, there is a risk of ignoring cross-media effects. Since the final ROI is always an approximation of reality, it should also be taken with a grain of salt. In practice, it primarily helps to compare individual campaigns and put them in relation to other marketing measures.
