Content marketing is not a short-term, campaign-based tactic, but rather a long-term commitment to producing amazing content that is unique, powerful, and effective... and most importantly, meets the needs of your target audience. But precisely because it is a long-term strategy, measuring your success is very different than measuring the success of, say, a typical advertising campaign. So, how do you measure the success of your content marketing efforts?
As a HubSpot Partner, we often have the opportunity to observe the results of our clients' content marketing efforts. Through HubSpot, we have the benefit of having integrated tools that ensure that the website pages, blog posts, and landing pages we construct are optimized for search engines even before being published. While there are a lot of tools that can give insights into the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts, HubSpot is a fully-integrated approach that we really appreciate.
Not only does HubSpot provide us with tools that help with SEO, it also includes tools that allow us to monitor the impact and reach of our social media efforts, visualize the source and mix of all inbound traffic, measure page performance and keyword ranking for each page, and measure inbound and internal links to and from each page. The Keywords report shows you how each of your target keywords is performing in search engines, including current ranking, monthly searches, and the average cost-per-click advertisers are paying for search engine advertising for those keywords.
HubSpot reports and dashboards give instant feedback on the trends associated with your inbound marketing and content marketing efforts. One of our favorite tools is the Competitors report. The Competitors report shows how your efforts are performing compared to your competition. It gives feedback on critical performance metrics like:
- traffic rank
- number of indexed pages
- linking domains
- mozrank
- marketing grade
Marketing Grade is HubSpot's proprietary tool for measuring the effectiveness of a company's online marketing presence. Soon to be replaced by HubSpot's Website Grader (https://website.grader.com), the Marketing Grade allows for side-by-side comparison of how your website is doing compared to the competition across several key areas, including:
- blogging
- social media
- SEO
- lead generation
- mobile
Ultimately, the success of your content or inbound marketing efforts should be measured within website traffic, social engagement, sales leads, sales, customer retention and lifetime customer value. But feedback like campaign statistics, lead scoring, page performance, traffic rank, keyword reporting, competitor reports, and marketing grade all provide near real-time feedback on how well your content marketing efforts are faring.
As an experienced, full-service branding and marketing agency headquartered in Colorado Springs, 30dps is fortunate to have clients throughout Colorado that are committed to long-term success through content marketing, and it's been exciting to see such positive results. Let us know if you'd like to explore how we might help you implement a content marketing strategy and HubSpot so that you too can measure the success of your efforts.
