Every content strategy, in fact any strategy, should start with the ‘what’ – what do I want to achieve? Documenting your content strategy goals and objectives will drive the actions that you take, as well as what you track and how you tweak your action plan.
It’s important to note that your content objectives are fluid. They will change with your overall business and marketing focus. In this way, they aren’t a set and forget part of your strategy and should be revisited at a minimum of every 90 days.
So, what you track will depend on your current objectives. Here are a few examples of the more popular objectives and how to track them.
Email list growth
If you’re looking to grow your email list to reach a wider audience, help with a course or service launch, then looking at your email statistics will help you determine what’s working and what’s not. The types of statistics you may like to look at include:
- % increase in subscribers – how quickly your list is going and whether any types of promotion help fuel the increase
- Unsubscribes – what types of content put off your audience to the point that they don’t want to hear from you any more
- Conversion rate – will determine whether your lead magnet (freebie) and landing page are hitting the mark with your audience
- Open rate – of your automated emails will be able to show you where people are dropping off and lose interest in your offers
Brand Awareness
This objective is a little more difficult to track as it is more subjective. From a qualitative perspective you could poll or interview members of your audience. For a quantitative approach you could track:
- Social media reach – No matter what platform you play on, looking at your reach can help you determine what types of content are meeting your objectives. Whilst the platforms themselves and their algorithms play a huge role in this, it is a good indicator of the quality of your content.
- Social media engagement – likes, shares and saves are all ways to help determine positive brand awareness. Whilst engagement isn’t everything it can help you figure out the content that resonates with your audience.
- Increase in social media followers – once again, social media numbers can be fickle, but the increase in followers can demonstrate that your first impressions or interactions with someone are being received favorably
Website traffic
If you’re looking to use your content to drive traffic to your website, then you will want to track the impact of your content efforts through:
- Acquisition source – knowing where your traffic is coming from helps you understand which types of traffic sources work best for you. It may be social media, direct to your website or via another website
- Page views – This will give you an idea of where people are spending time on your site and the opportunities for improving your content
- Pages per session – The higher the pages, the more time people are spending browsing your website
- Bounce rate – indicates the likelihood that people stick around. A high bounce rate means that a lot of users land on your website and leave without interacting with your content
The most important thing to remember when you’re measuring the impact of your content strategy is to compare your results to – yourself! Knowing industry norms is helpful, but only you can influence the effectiveness of your strategy. So, aim to increase your statistics each month, rather than aim for a particular figure that competitors or other online businesses use.
A great example of this is landing page conversion rates. Many people say that the conversion rate for a landing page should be around 30%. If your conversion rate is 12%, don’t despair! Work on ways to continually improve the rate until it gets to a level that you are happy with.
After all, this business journey is all about you and the time, energy and resources you have available to make things happen.
If you’re looking for a content strategy that not only takes into account the ‘you’ in business but provides you with meaningful objectives and a spreadsheet for tracking, then get in touch. These are just two parts of the entire content strategy that we will put together for you. Pop over here to find out more.
