How to know, if Your Content Strategy is working or not?

The content marketing strategy for your website has to serve many objectives including increase in the website’s traffic as well as it serves a purpose to "boost your digital reach and sales".

The process of measuring the effectiveness of the content strategy can be slow as the learning to measure your marketing strategy isn’t an easy task.

When you figure out how to measure whether your strategy is working tell you that whether you are getting the right business and whether your business is worth the return on investment.

Look at the Basics of Your Content Marketing Strategy

The first thing to consider is what goals did you define for your content strategy when you developed it for the first time?

Did you just want to match up to your competitors’ published content because they are successful with it?

Or did you have really no plans of doing that but you simply posting blog posts with minimal value?

Or perhaps you don’t have any real focus on your strategy from the outset.

But these kinds of early missteps can be difficult to overcome in the future, so it is very important to define the clear goals for your content strategy even before you start actually developing content.

Whenever you stuck to your content marketing strategy or when it hasn’t panned out the way you expected then you may only require an adjustment to your approach and you will acquire a greater success.

However, this will require an extensive research as well as testing on the end of an SEO Company.

In order to understand the content strategy “you’ll need to review your previously published content” and need to determine which pieces of your contents seemed to succeed and which pieces fell short as per your expectations.

You can then compare these results in order to determine what went wrong. When it comes to successful content publishing include, some of the most often ignored factors are as follows…

At first, find the answers for the following questions?

1. Did you publish your content during peak traffic hours?

Posting an article during the peak hours is the most important factor so you should look that do you most often post your articles during the peak traffic hours or do you overlook your publication’s timing and allowed a piece to publish whenever you feel it comfortable.

2. Have you noticed a decline in engagement with your content over time?  

If you have switched up your content format or structure then you must notice that is there any decline in the engagement and if this decline in traffic coincides with publishing a new type of content? 

Therefore, suddenly changing up your content structure could sometimes alienate some of your audience, but it also has the potential to attract the attention of some new prospects.

3. How much value does your content provide?

At last you must take into consideration that what kind of value you content is providing to the prospects.

For instance, does it solve your customers’ problems or does it satisfy their curiosity? You must also check if your content appeal to the customer’s needs and provide them a reason for interacting with your brand.

As you must previously know that content is king, but it is true only when your content is valuable. Therefore, you need to provide the readers with consistently valuable experiences.

So, the above discussed factors are the important ones for any marketing team to consider if their content marketing strategy hasn’t worked out as they expected it to do.

With these tools you can make informed decisions about the direction of your content strategy in the future.

Fix What’s not Working:

Every business have different situations there are some brands which may need to entirely work on their content structures in order to get success with content marketing while there are some which may only need to make a few changes for better results.

At the time when you consider fixing what’s not working in your content strategy then to track your results over time is an absolute necessity.

We are discussing about some steps which will help you in identifying problems with your current content marketing strategy and in developing actionable solutions…

• Identify weak points:

In the very first step, you should identify your pain points. For instance, which aspects of your content marketing are not working as expected? Or are you failing to generate engagement on social media?

Or have you produced various types of content? Or have you stuck with one or two content formats?

So, these are some important questions which you should ask if you want to identify the pain points in your content marketing strategy.

• Fix those weak points:

In the next step you need to identify the opportunities to fix the kinks in your content marketing pipeline.

This will be the same case for any other type of pain point that you encounter. Therefore, you’ll need to perform a cost-benefit analysis for either improving or stopping working on any type of content strategy that has underperformed.

• Review past content for value

Moreover, you should also review the value of the past content published by you like what kind of pieces of content got the greatest success?

And after that you need to determine what things made those posts special.

Try to translate that energy which made past posts successful into your future posts but without becoming repetitive.

• Develop new content ideas

Always try to come up with new brainstorming ideas apart from posting just the text contents, for example, producing any kind of video content.​

Measure Your Content Marketing Success

The above tips can help you get started with refining your content marketing approach. However, you should know that how you can properly track your success with your new strategy.

Therefore, to measure the return on your investments in content publication, you need to make sure to keep the following things to count on:

• Lead Quality. Try to segregate the leads as cold leads or warm leads and you need to approach cold and warm leads in distinct manner in order to guide them toward converting. Successful content marketing strategies involve different types of contents for the different phases of the customer conversion tunnel.
• Sales. The bottom line of any business is sales so you can consider sales for measuring success of content strategy. You need to access that, has your bottom line fluctuated over time? Or have your sales declined with your content marketing changes, or have the sales remained relatively same despite of your changes in your content strategy? If you have a firm grasp of your sales record then it would be enough to inform about any content strategy.
• Web Traffic. Web traffic tells you that how many users visit your website every day. It also tells that how many are spending more time looking at different pieces of content in comparison of the ones who bounce away within a few seconds? Therefore, make sure the content you’re developing for your website is appropriate for drawing more traffic to your site.
• Onsite Engagement. You may have a good amount of traffic towards your website but do they actually spend time on your content and exploring the many other pages of your website? These onsite engagement factors can be measured by tracking things like bounce rate and average session time.
• Social Media Engagement. You should track the numbers of your followers who have shared your past content to their personal pages. Or how much engagement does your post on your social media profile could generate? Because if your content isn’t reaching out to enough readers then you may need to start leveraging your social media presence in some more effective manners so that it can encourage your followers to share your content in the future.

So, these metrics are fantastic tools for finding problems with your current content marketing strategy. With the help of above discussed factors you can measure your efforts and adjust your approach accordingly for attaining better results with your content.