Content Marketing differs from more traditional marketing strategies in that its focus is on building a strong relationship with current clientele rather than selling them a product or service. In order to build that strong relationship, content marketing requires that you create engaging content for your customers such as:
- Blog Posts: Relaying content about the products or services being offered on a company blog ensures that product information is consistently being communicated to customers.
- E-books: Should consist of mainly visual, educational materials regarding your products or services.
- Cheat Sheets: Easy to digest instructions to use the product or service.
- Whitepapers or Reports: Similar content as E-books, but less visual.
- Infographics: Only graphically presented information about the product or service.
- Case Studies: Describe real customer success stories to promote the value and benefits of the product being offered.
In order to determine the success of Content Marketing, your team can consider using the following metrics:
- Brand Awareness and Visibility: Determine how familiar individuals are with your organization and what you offer. One way to do this is to keep track of the number of website hits your organization gets, how long customers typically spend on the site, and how many emails are received inquiring about your product or service.
- Customer Attitudes toward the Brand: Monitor the feedback that the organization receives about the product or services offered. Assess how positive or negative it is, how much the customer cares about the brand, etc. This metric will help your organization gauge how likely it is that customers will purchase what is being offered. These metrics include how much your organization is spoken about compared to others and how many different social media platforms the brand is mentioned on.
- Demographics of the Client Base: Demographically dissimilar clients might have different buying habits or may respond more favorably to one type of advertisement over another.
- Sales: These metrics are more concentrated on customer spending habits. Commonly used measures are how quickly customers move from sign-up to check-out (i.e., do customers spend time browsing through the website), the amount of time spent on the website, whether the customer purchases from your organization more than once, and does the customer ultimately purchase the items in their cart.
- Innovation: Determine if social media marketing campaigns create conversation amongst customers. To measure this, use trend spotting on Twitter or Google Trends.