Understanding Your Content Marketing Success

As you start to look back at your content marketing strategy this year and figure out what has worked and what has not, you should understand the factors that went into your strategy’s success and how it came to be.

With all of the time and effort that you put into your content marketing strategy, it is very important that you have a clear understanding of how to measure the success of that strategy and how well you are actually doing. You should be looking at your strategy from a broad angle, with the picture in mind. Your content marketing strategy should engage your audience and increase revenue in your business.

The questions that you should ask

A great way to work a research, analytical or creative task is by starting with pertinent questions, which you have organized in a way that will work for you. The responses to the questions will serve to make you understand which parts of your strategy are working and which parts need tweaking.

• Is the information that you use in your content marketing strategy relevant? If your content solves the problems of the people whom you are trying to reach, your strategy is relevant to your business. If you have been able to reach your professional goals, your strategy is working. If you aren’t sure of the answer, you may want to look at your audience and compare them to some of your metrics, such as “likes,” website visits, retweets, referrals and conversion rate.
• Is your content marketing consistent across the board? If your content marketing is going to be successful, you will have to be consistent with how you communicate the information. Your audience needs to be able to count on a steady flow of information and the type of information must be there for them when they expect it. This is one of the ways in which you are building trust with your audience. A metric for this is how depend you are about sharing your content in order to draw prospects as well as maintaining your existing clients. It goes without saying that if you are going to succeed at being consistent, you will need to keep to a consistent schedule (an editorial calendar can help tremendously with this) and make sure that you are fully committed to your posting schedule.
• Are you able to engage your audience? If your content is exciting, informative, educational and compelling, you will succeed at engaging your audience. It is critical that you write stories about which your audience can relate. If the content touches your audience on an emotional level,  they will want to interact with you and they will continue to read whatever you are posting. Of course, your particular voice is important when it comes to writing top-quality content. It may change over time but whatever you choose as your voice should be yours and yours alone.
• Are you using your time wisely? You need to make sure that you spend your time wisely when it comes to your content marketing strategy. It is a good idea to have a process in place before you do anything. If you don’t do that, you may be faced with frustration and a great deal of wheel spinning and stress. If you are working efficiently, that means that you will succeed at delegating responsibilities effectively, choosing great topics and accomplishing everything that you want to do in a timely manner. If you find that you are having difficulty meeting your deadlines, doing a lot of things at the last minute, rewriting content a lot of the time, etc, you are most likely not using your time wisely.
• Has there been positive improvement in your level of influence? It may seem that it is difficult to measure influence; however, it really isn’t that hard. It is very possible that the actual metrics may vary over time but the presence of influence will always be there (if you work at it). Influence is a broad quality and it should be viewed over a long period of time. If you are doing a good job, you should see positive progress in your influence from month to month.
• Does your content match the goals that you have established? Your content strategy should support all of your business goals (both long- and short-term). It is important that you don’t become obsessed with meeting deadlines because it can actually impede your being able to complete the particular project that you are working on.

Implementation

Now that you have successfully asked and answered the important questions, you need to implement your strategy. There are some tips that will surely help you to do that.

• Share the responses with your staff: It is an excellent idea to share your data with your staff. The information should be in front of them at all times so that they can refer to it. It should be their bible.
• Do your own rating: You should rate your own content marketing. You can use a scale of 1 to 5 where “1” is “very satisfactory” and “5” is “very unsatisfactory.” After you have finished rating the content, you can total everything and it will be easy to see your strategy’s strengths and weaknesses. You can then tweak accordingly. You can eventually use the information to identify patterns and trends.

The importance of feedback

Feedback is critical to your business. Without feedback,  you won’t know where you need to improve. It is also extremely important that you measure your results against the results of your competitors. It is a good idea to try to identify information that is missing and information that is not relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.

Conclusion

There is no point in putting a content marketing strategy together and implementing it if you just let it go after that. You need to work it as hard as you can so that your content eventually goes viral. You need to figure out if it is working and if it is not working, you need to figure out how to make it work. In a market that is so competitive, you need to grab a hold of any information that you can to give you a leg up on your competition.

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