6 Ways to Measure Your Content Marketing Success

You’re committed to a content marketing plan for your business. But you don’t want it to be a waste of time and money. How do you measure your success without spending hours each week pouring over analytics?

The important thing to remember when looking at any data is how your goals are — or aren’t — being met. With that in mind, here are a few key measurement questions you need to answer on a regular basis.

1. Which social channels are performing the best? If any of your social channels are total duds, consider investing less time in them or dropping them all together.
   
2. Which types of posts within each channel perform the best? Give your audience more of those, or experiment with ways to boost interest in your other posts. 
3. How are my competitors doing? The analytics on some channels, such as Facebook, allow you to check out the stats on your competitors. In areas where you’re being bested, see what you can learn about what they’re doing right. 
4. What types of blog posts are performing the best? Do your readers like meaty, long form content? Or are short list posts what they crave? Give the people what they want! 
5. What are my open rates on my newsletters? If you’re sending a regular newsletter to subscribers, check your open rates against the industry standard. Is there anyway you can adjust your subject line and content to boost that rate? 
6. What’s your revenue per subscriber? Arguably the most important metric of all, this number will tell you how much each of your subscribers is worth. While many people think a huge list is the secret to success, if most of those people aren’t buying, or even engaging, they’re pretty useless. To calculate your revenue per subscriber, take the total value of sales you attribute to your email list and divide it by the number of people on your list. For example: $100,000 in sales with a list of 2,500 subscribers means each subscriber is worth about $40. Compare that to $100,000 in sales with a list of 25,000 subscribers. Each subscriber is only worth about $4. It’s better to have a list of engaged, buying subscribers than a big list of people who ignore your content and offers. Measure this number over time and see if you can improve your revenue per subscriber.

There are tons of things you can measure about your content marketing, but that doesn’t mean you must. Answering these questions will help you maximize your content marketing efforts without drowning yourself in data points. Happy marketing!