Using content marketing as your primary digital marketing strategy can definitely bring your business many benefits, especially in the areas of search engine optimization (SEO), social media engagement, and public relations. This is why the content you create should not only be valuable to your target audience, but should also be strategically distributed. Meaning, it’s not enough for you to focus on content creation. You also need to measure if your content marketing efforts are successful.

Content marketing success can never be measured by a single metric. Instead, you need to come up with a list of evaluation criteria that can help you comprehensively assess your standing as far as content marketing is concerned. Here are some areas to look at when evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts:

1. Website metrics

The most reliable tools in measuring content marketing success are your website analytics. Obviously, not all Google Analytics tools should be used when gauging this marketing area. The only ones that you will be needing the most are page views, crawl rates, time on site, inbound links, and bounce rates. These five website metrics will allow you to analyze website activities that are directly related to the content published on your website. They describe the extent and nature of content engagement and user experience happening in your own online portal.

2. Social media metrics

Social media remains to be the most strategic avenue to direct your content marketing efforts since most people like to read materials that are filtered according to their interests or their peers’. Moreover, social media metrics such as click-through rates, likes, comments, and shares, have great influence on SEO standing. For all of these reasons, your social media numbers are effective metrics in measuring how well your content is received by your target audience.

3. On-site social interactions

Once traffic is driven to your site from the content you created and distributed, you need to observe the on-site engagement it generates. Even if you’re successful in driving people to your website, your marketing efforts will be rendered useless if those people don’t do anything once they reach your website. Qualitative feedback, email responses, and user discussions that contain user comments, inquiries, and criticisms are your measuring tools to see how socially captivating your published content is.

4. Lead generation and subscription

Lead generation is crucial in measuring content marketing success because it reflects how effective your content efforts are in converting people into contributors of your business revenue. Revenue is the single end goal of any marketing plan, so it makes sense to measure how many site visitors have successfully become leads upon gaining access to your content. Blog or email subscription lists are your master lists of quality leads. If people find your content valuable and agree to sign up for exclusive content privileges, you can treat them as leads that can later be convinced to do further business with you.

5. Conversions

Conversions from your leads, followers, site visitors, and subscribers illustrate the actual value of your content marketing. They signify that your efforts in creating quality content have guided people from being prospects to leads to actual paying customers. In the end, the money you gain from your content marketing marks the success of your campaigns. Since content marketing is an investment, the number of closed deals made from your content initiatives is a yardstick of your return of investment (ROI).

Monitoring the impact of your content marketing requires a multi-faceted assessment strategy. By using these areas as metrics in measuring content marketing success, you can effectively analyze results in refocusing your efforts to produce better content for your target audience.