The Only 3 Content Metrics Your Boss Cares About
Despite what some corporate people may say, content marketers do not have an easy life. When you work in a department like sales, accounting or engineering you typically have a very straight-forward job: sell the product, crunch the numbers or develop an exceptional product that functions well.
Unfortunately those employed as content marketers don’t have such cut-and-dry guidelines. One day the job may consist of scouring various social platforms in search of shareable content, another day it will consist of writing, editing and then editing some more, and then you may very well spend the rest of the week writing up an editorial calendar and generating buzz around the content that’s already been produced.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re not saying that it’s easy to work in sales, accounting or engineering, but at least the results are more easily measured. When you work as a content marketer you have to dig deep and report on metrics that your boss will actually care about.
Over the last few months we’ve taken a close look at the metrics that matter most to our bosses and we’ve decided to share them with you. Enjoy!
Brand and Social Interaction
The online environment is extremely competitive, especially for businesses that operate in a competitive geographic area and vertical. If you want your company to stand out among the host of other reputable competitors, content marketers need to work tirelessly on improving brand visibility and social interaction. We’ve found that creating exceptional content on a regular basis is one of the best ways to improve your social clout and brand awareness, but what is the best way to report on the metric?
The rise of social analytics tools and software is making the process of measuring social metrics much easier for content marketers, but most content marketers don’t know which metrics to report on. At our company, we hone in on a few important metrics, including: social mentions, likes, follows, comments and shares.
If we were to break it down by social platform it would look something like this:
Twitter:
# of Retweets per week
# of Mentions per week
# of Replies per week
# of Direct messages per week
Facebook:
# of Shared posts per week
# of Link shares per week
# of Likes per month
# of Impressions per week
# of Comments
Google +:
# of +1’s per week
# of Comments per week
# of Shares per week
# of New followers per month
LinkedIn:
# of New followers per month
# of Likes on shared content per week
# of Shares per week
Reporting on social activity is not easy, but if you can show your manager the importance of building an online community and how it can eventually translate into sales, you’ll be your boss’s new favorite employee. If you’re stumped on tools to use for social reporting, we’d suggest looking at the social category on Google Analytics or using the free link tool, Bitly. If you want the best Twitter tool out there, opt for the social analytics tool Followerwonk by Moz.
Subscription Count and Lead Generation
The whole purpose of content marketing is to increase your email subscriber base and generate leads for future business. If you can get a website visitor to opt-in to your email program you’ve done at least one thing right. Eventually you can take the relationship with that subscriber one step further and attempt to hook them with various products and offerings via email that might cater to their personal or business needs. But again the question is: how do you measure the success of your efforts in this category?
There are various paid and free email contact services available online that make building a subscriber base extremely simple. Our company recommends Mail Chimp (available for various CMS platforms), Email Blaster (a free service with the option to upgrade to unlock additional features), and the best one: Wish Pond(a paid tool that allows you to build custom contact forms, popup forms, email lists, and everything else imaginable).
All of these email services allow you to build your own email database, send blast emails to your list and download free contact forms that make the process of obtaining new email addresses much easier. You can also view your stats on the dashboard of these services, so you’ll always know how many new subscribers you have, how many emails have been opened and who followed a link to one of your products or offerings. As far as lead generation is concerned, you’ll kill two birds with one stone, because the leads will come directly through the email contact system.
Conversions
While most content marketers believe their job is defined by the amount of organic website traffic they bring in, the email contact list they build, and the amount of impressions their content receives, in the end it’s all about the bottom line. Conversions are the single most important metric in content marketing and it’s definitely the one that will get the attention of your boss the quickest.
To track the conversions that result from your content marketing efforts, make sure to put tracking info on every page of your website and blog posts. You can install a tracking phone number to measure where calls come come, create customized landing pages for various products and services and install buttons that track the number of purchases from a particular page. The best part: all of this information can be viewed for free via Google Analytics. If you don’t have Google Analytics yet, definitely get it as soon as possible. It will make it simple for you to compile in-depth reports for your managers so you can show ROI.
Conclusion
Though it’s not easy to live the life of a content marketer, it’s extremely rewarding when you do the job well. If you want to impress your boss with the work you do, make sure you always report on brand and social interaction, email subscription count and lead generation and most importantly, conversions. If you can do this consistently your boss will give you the raise and the praise you deserve.
