Blogging is an essential part of the content marketing strategy for both B2B and B2C brands, but if you struggle justifying your efforts of creating content to your Managing Director you are not alone. According to an Econsultancy report from February 2014 only 24% of marketers are able to measure Return on Investment (RoI) for their content marketing and measuring RoI is rated as one of the top three challenges that marketers face.
It makes sense to say that the ultimate goal for content marketing is to generate more sales - therefore an article with ten views and five sales will look better in your reports than a post with 1000 views but no sales. But it is important to emphasize that a blog is not a complete sales tool, just a part of it. In the buying cycle a blog influences the buyer in awareness stage and to persuade the website visitors to make purchases you will need to create other types of content that influence them further along the cycle, such as case studies and testimonials.
So including sales there are four different ways to measure the success of your blog post.
4 steps to measuring a successful blog post
Step 1: Measure reach
Considering where a blog post sits in the buying process, I would say that reach and engagement are the two most important metrics for this type of content. If more people read your posts then you could say that the content has done its main job of grabbing attention.
On a basic level the reach of your blog post can be measured with number of page views on Google Analytics.
Step 2: Measure engagement
The engagement of the blog post can be evaluated by:
- The average time th visitors spent on the page. This can be found in Google Analytics.
- The number of comments that the post has received. This can be counted manually or through your Content Management System.
- The number of social shares of the post. You can track social media shares as a events in Google Analytics and set them as a goal oir use a tool like True Social Media to get a wider picture
If the people who read your reports want a single metric to easure performance with you can use a formula like this one to find out the ratio of reach and engagement:
((average time on the page + number of comments + number of social shares)/number of page views)*100%
For example if the average time on the page is 1.5 minutes , the number of comments is 30, the number of social media shares is 150 and the number of page views is 870, then the formula will give: ((1.5+30+150)/870)*100%=22
This is in no way scientific or complies with the rule of adding up different measurements such as time and ordinal numbers, but it does give you a single metric that you can use to compare different blog post against each other. In other words you could say
“the previous week’s blog with more images had an engagement of 38 but this week’s one only had an engagement of 22 - perhaps we should consider creating more visual content”
Step 3: Measure lead generation
Then you can follow up how many of the people who read the post then go to your contact page to send an enquiry form. Web enquiries related to certain posts are easily traced on Google Analytics but if your visitor decides to call you then it is slightly harder to find out exactly which content triggered them to the action. For the latter situation you could ask the caller how he or she has heard of you to identify the source of lead generation or consider whether call tracking software might be useful.
Step 4: Measure sales
Last but not least you can measure how many of the people who contacted you buy your product and services and the value of their purchases. This last measurement is not only applicable to shops but all profit and non-profit organisations as they all have their ultimate end goal, for example receiving donations or getting reviews
Conclusion
It is a long way from the first to last step and at each stage visitors will need additional motivation, such as calls to action and other types of content. However writing a good blog post that grabs attention is a great place to start and with the above measurements you will be able to persuade your management to look at the end to end story and how blogging supports other activities instead of just sales.
