How to tell whether your content is truly successful

One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is determining the business impact and value of their content marketing strategy efforts. Challenging as it may sound, measuring your content’s success is a surefire way to improve it.

But first, we need to address an important question: what is “successful content” anyway?

Successful content — be it copywriting, landing pages, podcasts, webinars, white papers, etc. — can vary depending on the audience, goals, and objectives of the content creator. But, no matter the above three factors, there are some basic principles that all marketers should keep in mind.

Here’s what some of the most important figures of today’s marketing say about successful content creation:

“When we create something, we think, ‘Will our customers thank us for this?’ I think it’s important for all of us to be thinking about, whatever marketing we’re creating, is it really useful to our customers? Will they thank us for it? I think if you think of things through that lens, it just clarifies what you’re doing in such a simple, elegant way.” - Ann Handley, Wall Street Journal bestselling author and CMO of MarketingProfs.

“A lot of marketers are under the assumption that simply creating more content than the competition will get them the results they want. I beg to differ. If Google algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin have shown us anything, it’s that quality content trumps everything else.” - Neil Patel, entrepreneur and marketing guru.

“Real content marketing isn’t repurposed advertising; it is making something worth talking about.” - Seth Godin, entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker.

Before delving into the nitty gritty of understanding successful content, it’s also worth looking at some eye-opening statistics that showcase the most important industry trends and benchmarks.

• 54% of businesses will increase their content marketing budgets this year.
• Interactive content, behind-the-scenes information, and content relating to brand values are the top three types of content.
• B2C marketers reported that the top three goals effective content marketing helps respondents achieve are creating brand awareness, building trust, and educating their target audience.
• 1 in 4 marketers is leveraging influencer marketing and it offers the second highest return on investment (ROI) of any trend.
• 42% of marketers say that updating existing content has boosted their content marketing value.
• The pandemic increased content usage by 207%.
• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.

Before publishing, or in fact, creating any type of content in any format you must first make sure it ticks all the “successful content” boxes:

Your content must answer questions

There are numerous tools for finding the types of questions your audience is asking, like Buzzsumo, AnswerThePublic, and AlsoAsked.

Your content must be original

By original content we don’t necessarily mean new content, but content with a personal, unique angle that shows expertise and offers valuable information that your audience can’t find everywhere else.

Your content must be result-oriented

For content marketing success you should first decide your main goal for running the specific digital marketing campaign. Is it brand awareness? Customer retention? Lead generation? Once you have your content marketing goals in mind you can set out to plan your content strategy, as required.

Your content should be on brand

Fonts, colors, tone of voice, and personality, are all ways to communicate with your audience and express who you are through your content.

While there are hundreds of metrics out there, the choice of metrics for content marketing depends on your specific goals and objectives.

Here are some content marketing metrics to consider for measuring the effectiveness of your efforts:

Website traffic: Monitoring the overall number of visitors to your website is not a vanity metric, as some may think. Tools like Google Analytics can provide detailed insights into the sources of traffic (organic traffic, social, referral, etc.) and user behavior, helping you to shape your future strategies.

Click-through rate (CTR): For initiatives such as email marketing, awareness campaigns, or paid advertising, CTR measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your content. It's a valuable metric for assessing the effectiveness of your calls to action.

Page views: Track the number of views each piece of content receives. This can help you identify which topics and types of content resonate most with your audience.

Social shares: Count the number of times your content is shared on social media platforms. This can indicate audience engagement and brand advocacy.

Unique visitors: Measure how many individuals visit your website or specific pieces of content. This metric can help you understand the size of your audience.

Bounce rate: This metric indicates the percentage of visitors who leave your website without taking any action. A high bounce rate might suggest that your content isn't engaging, easy to navigate, or relevant.

Conversion rate: Determine how many visitors take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, filling out a contact form, or making a purchase. Conversion rate helps assess the impact of your content on achieving your business goals.

SEO metrics: Monitor your content's performance in search engine rankings. Track keyword rankings, organic search, and backlinks to assess your content's impact on SEO.

To address the challenges of successful content, marketers must set clear objectives for their activities and set their key performance indicators (KPIs) based on these goals.

So, what’s the best method for boosting your content performance?

1. Topic coverage and findability
    
   Topic coverage and findability go hand-in-hand. You’ll want to identify why your users visit your website and use this information to decide which related topics to cover and establish your brand’s position as a specialized authority. For this approach, success is measured in terms of your search rankings for keywords.
    
2. Emotional appeal
    
   This approach helps you build a consistent brand voice and shape your brand experience to inspire a lasting connection with your audience. To measure success for this approach, use techniques such as sentiment analysis or Net Promoter Score (NPS).
    
3. Reach and engagement
    
   Reach and engagement are linked to audience growth and whether your content is effective. This approach helps you drive a brand experience that reaches and converts your target audiences. Metrics will play an active role in providing you with insight into audience response. Examples of these measures include page views, time on content, scroll depth, shares, likes, and followers, as well as micro-conversions.
    
4. Business impact and efficiency
    
   Focusing on business impact and efficiency ties content investments directly to revenue and cost savings, helping you to promote the idea of content as a business asset. Sample measures of this type include micro-conversions and transactions, attributed revenue, and operational savings, such as call deflection.

Your brand should always aim to measure the effectiveness of its content by its business impact. Consider where you currently sit on the content maturity scale and quantify the value of your content efforts according to your current position.

We can define four levels on this maturity scale:

Level 1: Tactical publishing

When a brand is operating at this level, they’re creating and managing content with no intention of reuse. Often at this stage, their resources are limited, and their publishing strategy is determined by the volume of content.

If this is your current level of maturity, then reach and engagement metrics will provide the biggest insight into what’s performing well and how to improve your content.

Level 2: Experience delivery

At this level, a brand’s tactical publishing is paired with digital experience, data and optimization, and maintaining a repository of content to serve up to personas. They may have invested in a centralized media library or asset management. 

At this point, emotional appeal will become a key measurement as it will help you gauge whether your brand experience is connecting with your customers.

Level 3: Multi-channel reuse

At this stage of the maturity scale, more than one channel outcome is important to the business, and the brand is increasing the reuse of assets across channels and campaigns. Multiple teams derive value and utilization from content assets created by marketing.

Use topic coverage and findability metrics to ensure the assets and content you’re developing fully align with your audience's interests.

Level 4: Modular enterprise content

This is a highly advanced stage. Businesses at this level will have most of their content managed in a modular way, delivering to multiple personas and channels. They’ll have content cycles running separately from delivery lifecycles. What’s more, content will be available across the enterprise as a service.

By this point, you should be using all four approaches – and that includes business impact and efficiency to report how marketing efforts are correlating with business success.

Sitecore's Content Hub provides solutions to support the content production process at every stage of your maturity journey, helping your business to develop modular content that’ll better meet your targets.