Content marketing is a fundamental pillar of any growth marketing strategy. It covers everything from brand awareness and engagement to lead generation and conversions. Content marketing is a no-brainer for businesses in the travel industry, but it isn’t easy to know which marketing metrics to track. There’s no cookie-cutter approach to measuring content performance, and it’s easy to get lost in all the analytics. Your focus is ultimately website visits and revenue, so we’ve put together a list of five critical metrics to keep your eye on.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing focuses on a new level of engagement with your consumer. It’s a strategic approach driven by relevant content that intrigues and attracts the right audience. Instead of hard-sell product or service-focused communications, you create helpful content that adds value way beyond this. Think travel tips and blog posts or hotel reviews and local knowledge.
While this is undoubtedly aspirational content consumers will enjoy, you’ve got to drive that demand for your destination. Use your content to distinguish yourself from your competitors, striking that balance between inclusivity and exclusivity. People are looking for travel content that informs and entertains, making adventure accessible.
Measuring B2C Content
B2C businesses have different objectives from B2B companies, and your content marketing should reflect that. In a B2C environment, content plays a huge role in repeat website visits and purchases, luring in those abandoned carts. Your content needs to portray your brand personality. Creating shareable content is of great value to you.
Before you start analyzing your performance, spend some time identifying your goals and objectives. These will ultimately drive the KPIs you need to focus on internally. For most B2C businesses, this comes down to revenue targets, but there’s always more to it.
Remember to consider which stage in the sales funnel your content appears. If its purpose is awareness, bringing in new prospects, you should look at engagement and shares. Your more action-orientated KPIs would be middle-of-funnel content. The last level would be conversions.
Metrics To Focus On
1. Social Engagement
Despite the many updates to today’s social media channels, likes, follows, comments and shares are still valuable metrics to consider. To optimize for social engagement, you need to understand what the benchmarks are. Keep up to date with the new industry standard so you can evaluate your performance through an objective lens.
2. Website Traffic
Website traffic is another metric thrown around by marketers, but raw page views don’t provide any actionable insights. Take it a level deeper by utilizing attribution modeling. Understanding where customers are coming from, how engaged they are in your content, and the paths they took on your site. Attribution gives you the tools to optimize the onsite experience, increasing conversions.
Commonly used models include:
- First-touch attribution – giving sole credit for a sale to the first piece of content a customer engagement.
- Last-touch attribution – giving credit to the last bit of content the customer engaged with before visiting the site.
- Multi-touch attribution – offering several customer experiences, weighing up multiple pieces of content on one buyer’s journey.
3. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate builds on website traffic, giving you concrete sales and revenue figures. A conversion is when a visitor or lead turns into a customer. It may vary based on your business objectives; whether it’s a sale or a newsletter sign-up, it matters to your overarching strategy.
Utilize programs like Google Analytics to set up your onsite goals, allowing you to measure your social media performance. Not all content is conversion-driven, but more often than not, awareness pieces result in conversions too. It’s helpful to understand what content resonates with your potential customers most.
4. Customer Retention
Retention and loyalty should be a priority metric for any B2C marketer. You can measure your retention rate using a simple formula:
While new user acquisition is fundamental to growth, customer retention is enormously valuable for any company. Loyal customers will become brand ambassadors, referring your product or service to their networks.
5. Content Spend
Last but not least, you need to keep track of your content creation spend. Curating top-quality content can be expensive, especially if you’re outsourcing some of the specialized tasks. Spend some time evaluating what you’re investing into content creation each month versus your revenue. Understanding your return on investment will help you focus your efforts on the best-performing channels.
Start Tracking
Don’t get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of metrics available to you when analyzing your content marketing performance. Take some time to identify your objectives, focusing your attention on the metrics that matter.
About the Author
Dallin Porter is a Communications Manager at Galactic Fed. A self-motivated and strategic professional with 7+ years, experience, and success working within the communications, marketing, and content management industries.
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