Three Common Problems With Measurement
As content marketing continues to play a larger role in the lives of marketers, the question of "Well, how do we measure this?" inevitably arises in corporate meeting rooms everywhere. Organizations often want to look at:
- Traffic -- what type of increase in traffic are you seeing from blogging, press releases, white papers, twitter etc.
- ROI -- Often times this is the most difficult to track but if you're in business, you're probably interested in some sort of return on your investment in the marketing vehicles you use.
- Engagement -- Similar to ROI, if you're not interested in dollars in the door immediately, you might be interested in the level of engagement you have with your customers and prospects.
Clearly, the list above could go on and on as marketers tend to want to measure different things and value different metrics given the goals that are in place for the organization. However, when setting up a program or considering a new initiative, there are commons mistakes made when thinking about what to track along the way.
- Don't Focus on Trailing Indicators -- In a recent webinar with Jay Baer and Joe Chernov (Solving the 25 Greatest Content Marketing Challenges), Jay discussed the idea of using Facebook Likes as an indicator of success. As he notes, someone will not Like you unless they know you already so this is not a great way to get at new customers or measure new customer interest. Likes are not a leading indicator of success.
- Don't Confuse What is Important with What is Popular -- Every day there is something new to consider for marketing programs like Google+, Pinterest etc. So, don't make the mistake of measuring what is popular (e.g. the number of followers you might have on Google+) with what is important (e.g. the decrease in cost per lead you're seeing as a result of a blogger outreach program)
- Don't Use the Wrong Metrics for Your Goals -- This one is pretty simple. If you're interested in measuring engagement with current clients, don't use search traffic as the metric for that goal being achieved.
All in all, there is so much going on and so much to consider, you really have to focus, develop goals and come up with quality metrics that indicate success, or failure, in each case.
What you do you typically use to measure your content marketing efforts?
