The expectations for a content marketer’s areas of expertise have inflated in every direction. We’ve needed to evolve into masters of multiple formats as diverse as blog posts, whitepapers, social media, webinars, videos, podcasts, snaps, and other assorted forms of micro content. This multiplicity of formats and channels also means that the role of the content marketer has expanded from the traditional roles of writer and editor to include designer, videographer, and often ad hoc website developer among others.

What’s more, content marketing has become more operationalized, making organizational skills such as project management, people management, technology evaluation, and especially data analyzation increasingly important. Even the title of “content marketer” might be somewhat outdated given that we support not just marketing in all its permutations, but also sales, customer success, HR, and any number of other departments or initiatives at our organizations.

With such a diversity of channels, roles, and spheres of influence, content marketing KPIs can be very difficult to define.

Content Marketing Influence: Hiding in Plain Sight?

But content’s omnipresence ironically might be responsible for making its full impact opaque. Most marketing analytics and attribution tools are focused on a specific function or point in the funnel (such as SEO, acquisition, or demand generation) instead of measuring the impact of the content that all of these functions utilize. It’s like David Foster Wallace’s famous anecdote about the invisibility of ubiquity.

Content Marketing KPIs: Siloed Data, Siloed Knowledge, Siloed Access

For many of us, trying to measure the ROI of content marketing is like trying to measure water in the ocean: overwhelming and too slippery to pin down. Think of all the different types of data a marketing team may use to determine what a successful program looks like: search position, social shares, pageviews, conversions, MQLS, opportunity value, and revenue. These are all different types of data using different systems used by different teams for different purposes. Sounds insane, right? Yet here we are. And this problem is compounded for the content marketer because none of these things are actually meant to measure content marketing KPIs, at least not primarily or fully.

What’s even more pernicious is that not only is data across different marketing functions siloed, but so is access to and knowledge of these different systems. The majority of content marketers are focused on creating, managing, and distributing ever-increasing amounts of content on an ever-increasing number of channels, not Salesforce. And the folks who are responsible for the complexities of marketing automation or CRM systems are typically focused on lead and account performance, not content’s influence on those leads and accounts. So when it comes to content marketing KPIs, their point of view is often limited to conversion rates of gated content items, not all the links the chain that might have lead up to that conversion.

Create a Content Marketing KPI Structure That Fits With Your Business Model and Culture

All of these missed connections results in a very limited perspective on content marketing’s impact. For the content marketer, that means that we are often perceived as an internal service organization instead of as a strategic partner equal to acquisition or lead generation. If that sounds familiar, then one of your main goals should be to work to change that perception. It can be a chicken-and-egg problem, but the best place to start is by developing content marketing KPIs that speak to your company’s business model and culture.

Understanding what your organization values, where content is playing a role, and how content marketing is perceived by both the marketing function and the wider business will allow you to map content marketing KPIs that are both comprehensive and readily received. It also helps you understand if you’re currently measuring the things that truly reflect your impact.

Inclusive content marketing KPIs allow you to prove content marketing’s value to your organization. But beyond proving your worth, the right KPIs will allow you to grow as well. You’ll be able to quantify and justify spend on your content program, perhaps even expanding your program to include additional content formats (like video) or improve the depth of your team’s design or coding skills with specialized hires.

Take Control of Your Team’s Time and Resources

Even more importantly, inclusive content marketing KPIs based on what you know works. Too many content marketers have to make guesses about what to create because their metrics are insufficient. Or even worse, content marketers may spend a lot of time creating content just to placate the “hunches” or opinions of people throughout the company. Sometimes these perspectives can be helpful, but other times it just sends the content team chasing their tails. A solid, data-based approach using the right content marketing KPIs gives you firm ground on which to make decisions about what and where to spend your team’s time and resources. Data-driven content creation will help earn your seat at the strategic table.

So how does the content marketer map KPIs that demonstrate content’s true impact on the organization?

First, you have to deeply understand your business. Discovering the answers to these questions is an essential starting point:

• What is your company’s business model? How does your company make money?
• What is your company known for? What does is want to be known for?
• Who are your company’s customers?
• What does your company value internally? (actions speak louder than words)
• In what ways is success defined for the business overall?

Once you’ve defined the big picture, hone in on marketing’s role within the business:

• In what ways does marketing contribute to the organization’s goals?
• How is that contribution measured today?
• Is the marketing function perceived as a service organization or strategic partner?
• What are all the different sub-functions within marketing?
• Are the marketing functions equally credited with driving marketing’s contributions? If not, which areas are credited the most?

Then dig into content’s role in both the marketing function and in the wider organization:

• What are content’s current responsibilities?
• What are content’s current KPIs? Do they encompass all of your responsibilities?
• How does content support all of marketing’s sub-functions?
• Do other business units utilize content that your team creates?
• Does your team create content specifically for these other business units?

Having insight into these questions will help you identify what your company values and how it defines success. You can also uncover any new opportunities to demonstrate content marketing’s impact through data.

Aligning Your Content Marketing KPIs to Success Stages

Revenue generation or revenue influence is the ultimate measure of success. However, it should not be the only measure. Some experts advocate for using revenue as the only metric, but I think this is over-committing. The revenue metric is the result of getting a lot of other metrics right along the way. Especially for businesses with long sales cycles, it could take months (or years) to get feedback on your work if your only measure of success comes at the very end of the cycle.

I recommend aligning your content marketing KPIs to the traditional funnel model, especially if your business is oriented around lead generation. Funnel models have certainly changed over the years with more and more complex stages. Start with a simple Top of, Middle, and Bottom reporting framework first. This will be easy to understand and share with others in your organization.

Strategic Content Marketing KPIs vs. Operational Content Marketing KPIs

One other thing to consider is that KPIs aren’t the only kinds of reports you’ll need. There’s a whole other class of reporting that I like to categorize as “operational” content reporting.  Those are reports that help you make specific decisions: what to write, what to promote, what to socialize with your sales team. The following KPIs are intended to help you track your program’s high-level success and contribution to the business at each funnel stage. They are by no means the only reports you could and should create, but they are foundational and are the best candidates for an executive dashboard.

Content Marketing KPIs: Top of Funnel

These KPIs are intended to measure awareness and interest. For the content marketer that almost always includes both search and website metrics. 

Average Position of Unbranded Terms

This query report based on Google’s Search Console data within Google Analytics shows the average position – or SERP (search engine results page) rank – of all the unbranded terms that a user types into Google to surface a URL from your website. The lower the number, the closer it is to the first position on page 1. From a KPI perspective, your objective should be to get that number as low as possible.

“Unbranded” means the search query does not contain your brand name. Most brands rank in the top spot for their branded terms. By focusing on unbranded terms, you can get a better line of sight into the performance of your thought leadership topics. Since this is taking into account all of your unbranded terms, the average position for all those terms may be quite high, especially if you are in a highly competitive space.

Another option for this report is to further refine unbranded terms into topic clusters. You can create reports that are focused on one keyword or a group of related keywords. This report is important because it tells you how competitive you are in the search channel via your position and if (via the CTR) users’ intent matches up with the content you are creating.

Percentage of Organic Users on Website

This report is based on Google Analytics’ Audience Overview. I added a segment of organic traffic (traffic on your website that came from search engines), to isolate the performance of that segment and compare it to overall traffic or even other segments such as display advertising. I think it’s most powerful to represent these numbers as percentages. Based on this example, you could report that organic accounts for 74 percent of all users (or unique visitors) and new users and 71 percent of all sessions (or visits) to your website.

Recently, top of funnel metrics like these have gotten a bad rap in the industry as “vanity metrics.” I think that’s a bit unfair. Sure, visits do not equal revenue (heck they don’t even equal conversions), but for most companies, there’d be no leads without traffic, no opportunities without leads, and no revenue without opportunities. At best, it is incomplete to only use top of funnel metrics as your indicators of success. But if you are using full funnel KPIs in the proper context, then I believe they have a place on your strategic content marketing KPI dashboard and in a data-driven content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing KPIs: The Middle of the Funnel

These are content marketing KPIs that meant to measure depth of engagement and intent to purchase.

Percentage of Organic Traffic That Converts

This is a Google Analytics conversion report that gets much more specific than the organic traffic report. In this example, the GA instance has many different options for goal completions. The goal many content marketers would interested in at this point are conversions from premium pieces of content: white papers, webinars, videos, etc. For others it might be a demo or contact request or a newsletter sign up. You could even run different reports against different website goals. Again, expressing this metric as a percentage of the whole allows you to quantify your impact.

One thing to note is that these conversions don’t necessarily equal leads. A conversion may be completed by an known lead or existing customer, therefore would not be a new lead. That’s why I consider this report a great measure of engagement and possible intent to purchase.

Another option for this report is to hone in on a particular area of your site, say, the Resources section that houses all your ebooks. Use a Goal URL report and filter by page path:

New Leads by Program & Asset

This Marketo report takes the concept of conversions a step further and allows you see how many new leads your premium content generated. Instead of using anonymous data like Google Analytics does, a marketing automation program such as Marketo will be able to show you the number of “New Names” your content generated versus names that might have already existed in your database. Post-conversion, those previously “unknown” leads are now “known” leads. Because you have to create a distinct Marketo program for every piece of content to get this performance data, most marketing organizations only create programs for premium or gated assets and not for ungated assets such as blog posts.

MQLs by Program & Asset

This Salesforce report takes the concept of a “new name” or a lead and takes it still a step further. An MQL (marketing qualified lead) or an AQL (automation qualified lead) are leads that go through a qualification process before marketing hands them off to sales. It’s an indication of both the quantity and quality of leads your content has generated.

These reports are similar, but the differences between them can tell you different things about your content. For example, if a content item is high on conversions but low on new names, then you may need to figure out a better way to reach new audiences. If a piece is driving a lot of new names but very few MQLs, then it might not be attracting the right kind of leads for your business.

Content Marketing KPIs: Bottom of the Funnel

These are metrics that measure content marketing’s influence on opportunities and revenue.

Pipeline Generated

This Curata report uses advanced content metrics to show the dollar value of the pipeline created by content marketing. The report tracks all of the content consumed by a contact associated with an opportunity before the opportunity was created. Essentially it shows you how effective your content is at creating new opportunities. An important thing to note is that Curata can track gated as well as ungated content influence. If you are struggling to measure blog performance or connect any top of funnel content to bottom of funnel metrics, this type of report may be able to help.

Pipeline Touched

This KPI shows the total value of opportunities that were nurtured by content (again, all content both gated and ungated). The report tracks what the opportunities’ contacts consumed while the opportunities were open. This report tells you how much and which content items were part of the purchasing decision process.

Revenue Influenced

And here is the ultimate content marketing KPI: how to calculate content ROI. this report shows how much revenue is influenced by content marketing. The report shows the value of won opportunities where contacts consumed content anywhere along the journey prior to the opportunity close date.

Similar to the progression through the middle of the funnel from conversion, to lead, to MQL, these bottom of funnel KPIs show the influence of content through what has traditionally been thought of as the sales process.

Hopefully these suggestions for strategic content marketing KPIs for the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel points you in the right direction for building a strategic content marketing dashboard for your company.

We keep this post updated regularly, so do send us a note if you come across some great research that should be in here. Feel free to share these stats with your Twitter followers. Last updated July 17, 2017.

Start by clicking on a category below, or scroll down to begin the learning!

Content Marketing Definitions:

• Curata: Content marketing is the process of developing, executing, and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base. Stages of the content marketing process include: strategy; content development; asset development; and channel leverage across outbound marketing, inbound marketing, and sales enablement.

• IDC: Content marketing is any marketing technique whereby media and published information (content) is used to influence buyer behavior and stimulate action leading to commercial relationships. Optimally executed content marketing delivers useful, relevant information assets that buyers consider a beneficial service rather than an interruption or a “pitch.”

• Altimeter: Eight primary content marketing use cases:
  • Feed the Beast: Creation; Curation and Aggregation
  • Refine: Optimization; Analytics; Audience and Targeting; Distribution
  • Govern: Workflow; Legal and Compliance

• Content Marketing Institute: Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience–with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

• Forrester: Content Marketing is a strategy where brands create interest, relevance, and relationships with customers by producing, curating, and sharing content that addresses specific customer needs and delivers visible value.

• Gartner: Content marketing is the process and practice of creating, curating, and cultivating text, video, images, graphics, eBooks, white papers and other content assets. These are distributed through content management systems, media platforms, and the social graph.

Content Marketing Strategy

• 70 percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy. (Altimeter)
• CMOs at the largest technology companies report that building out content marketing as an organizational competency is the second most important initiative, only behind measuring ROI. (IDC)
• 29 percent of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content. (Curata)
• Ninety-two percent of marketers said their organization views content as a business asset. (Content Marketing Institute)

Strategy Documentation:

• Forty six percent of marketers said their organization has a documented strategy for managing content as a business asset; 44 percent said they don’t, and ten percent weren’t sure. (Content Marketing Institute/Intelligent Content Conference)
• Seventy two percent of marketers have a content strategy in place. Thirty percent have a documented strategy; 42 a non-documented strategy. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)
• The top three things that make content effective: audience relevance (58 percent); engaging and compelling storytelling (57 percent); triggers a response/action (54 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Content Segmentation:

• Content segmentation by product/service category (53 percent); buyer persona (40 percent); vertical (35 percent); stage in buying cycle (32 percent); pain point (28 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Forty eight percent of marketers support three to five buying stages with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Fifty two percent of marketers support two to four roles and buyer personas with dedicated content. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Sixty three percent of marketers create content by buyer persona; 38 percent by vertical; 30 percent by geography; and 30 percent by account or customer. (Curata)

Buyer Insight:

• Prescriptive content that lays out a formula for success was the most popular type of content among B2B buyers in 2017, with 97 percent citing it. (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

• Eighty seven percent of B2B buyers give more credence to industry influencer content. Buyers also indicated they give more credence to peer reviews, third-party publications and user-generated feedback. More than two thirds (68 percent) of buyers said they frequently give credence to peer reviews and user-generated feedback. Sixty percent give credence to content authored by a third-party publication or analyst. (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

• Case studies are the top content type for buyers, with 78 percent accessing this format type
  when researching purchases in the past 12 months (vs. 72 percent in 2016). (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

• Forty seven percent of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson. (DemandGen Report – 2016 Content Preferences Survey)

• Buyers prefer LinkedIn as the top social network for sharing business related content, with 84 sharing business content on LinkedIn. But email remains the channel most buyers employ to share content, with 94 percent saying email was their number one channel for sharing. (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey)

• Buyers are most willing to register for and share information about themselves in exchange for white papers (76 percent said they will share information), eBooks (63 percent), webinars (79 percent), case studies (57 percent) and third-party/analyst reports (66 percent). They’re less willing to register for podcasts (19 percent), video (19 percent), and infographics (24 percent). (DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey) (Ultimate White Paper Template)

Budget:

• Eighty eight percent of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• Seventy five percent of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing. (Curata)

• B2B marketers allocate 28 percent of their total marketing budget, on average, to content marketing. The most effective allocate 42 percent, and the most sophisticated/mature allocate 46 percent. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• Fifty one percent of B2B marketers indicate they will increase their content marketing spending in the next 12 months. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• Sixty four percent of companies with a documented content strategy have a dedicated content marketing budget. Meanwhile 14 percent of companies without a documented content strategy have a dedicated content marketing budget. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Eighteen percent of companies allocate 10 percent of their budget (excluding headcount) to content marketing (majority of responses from 0 to 30 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Fifty three percent of marketers allocate between 1 and 30 percent of marketing budget to marketing technology (25 percent allocate between 1 and 10 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

Size of Content Marketing Market:

• The marketing software market is expected to grow to more than $32.3 billion in 2018. It will be one of the fastest-growing areas in high tech, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4 percent. (IDC)

Content Marketing Growth:

• 42.5% of companies are increasing their content marketing staff levels in 2016. (Curata)

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Content Marketing Priorities and Challenges

• Top three content marketing objectives: Drive sales and/or leads; engage customers/buyers/influencers; boost brand awareness. (Curata)
• Top five B2B content marketing challenges: Producing engaging content (60 percent). Measuring content effectiveness (57 percent). Producing Content Consistently (57 percent). Measuring the ROI of content marketing program (52 percent). Lack of Budget (35 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)
• Top five content marketing challenges: Lack of time/bandwidth to create content (51 percent). Producing enough content variety/volume (50 percent). Producing truly engaging content (42 percent). Measuring content effectiveness (38 percent). Developing consistent content strategy (34 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Top three goals of content marketing: Lead Generation (59 percent). Thought leadership/market education (43 percent); brand awareness (40 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Business bloggers’ greatest priority is creating a strategy, followed by the need to measure impact of the blog on their organization’s success. (Curata)

• Marketers’ top needs from a content marketing perspective: Audience identification and targeting (67 percent). Analytics (67 percent). Creation (60 percent). Distribution (53 percent). Curation and Aggregation (48%). (Altimeter)

• Thirty percent of marketers say their organization is effective at content marketing (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

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Organizational Structure (“People”)

• Forty two percent of companies have an executive in their organization directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy. (Curata)

• Top four areas responsible for setting content strategy: Corporate marketing (54 percent); Product marketing (25 percent); CEO/president/owner (21 percent); PR/communications (19 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Top five skill-sets missing from today’s content marketing teams: content creation; content marketing leadership/strategy; promotion; performance management/metrics orientation; subject matter expertise. (Curata)

• Top five areas responsible for creating content: Corporate marketing (53 percent); product marketing (39 percent); subject matter experts (36 percent); PR/communications (32 percent); external agency/consultant (30 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Seventy one percent of business bloggers have some type of center of excellence team. This is a team that provides a blogging code of conduct, audience engagement guidelines, best practices and guidance to help internal teams execute their own blogging activities. (Curata)

• Seventy two percent of B2B marketers surveyed by Forrester say less than half of their marketing staff plays a primary role in content marketing today. (Forrester)

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Content Marketing Tactics

Type of Content:

• The target content marketing mix by superstar content marketers is 65 percent created, 25 percent curated and ~10 percent syndicated content. (Curata)

• Top five B2B content marketing tactics: Social media content (92 percent); eNewsletters (83 percent); articles on your website (81 percent); blogs (80 percent); in-person events (77 percent). (IMN Inc.)

• Top three content marketing tactics: Blogging (65 percent); social media (64 percent); case studies (64 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Top five B2B content marketing tactics: social media content (93 percent); case studies (82 percent); blogs (81 percent); eNewsletter (81 percent); in-person events (81 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• Fifty three percent of content marketers use interactive content. (Content Marketing Institute)

• Top five types of interactive content used by marketers: assessments, calculators, contests, quizzes, interactive infographics. (Content Marketing Institute)

Publishing Frequency of Content:

• Thirty eight percent of marketers publish content weekly or more often. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Ninety one percent of the best business bloggers publish weekly or more often. Only 70 percent of all other bloggers post at this frequency. (Curata)

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Content Creation (Including Outsourcing and Curation)

• Target content mix: 65 percent created (created by dedicated, internal staff, crowd-sourced internally, or outsourced); 25 percent curated; and 10 percent syndicated. (Curata)

• On average, 18 percent of companies’ blog posts are 750 words or more. (Curata)

• Long-form blog posts generate more than nine times more leads than short-form blog posts. (Curata)

• Types of content used in social media marketing include visual assets (85 percent), up from 74 percent in 2016. In second place was blogging (66 percent). Live video (such as Facebook Live and Periscope) is used by 28 percent of marketers (up from 14 percent in 2016). Podcasting is only used by 8 percent of marketers and represents an opportunity. (Social Media Examiner)
• B2B marketers are much more likely to use blogging (75 percent) when compared to B2C marketers (61 percent). B2C marketers are more likely to use live video (30 percent) compared to B2B marketers (24 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

• The most important content for marketers is (only one choice allowed): visual images (41 percent) up from 37 percent in 2016, surpassing blogging for the first time. Blogging dropped from 38 percent in 2016 to 32 percent in 2017. (Social Media Examiner)
• Blogging is more important for B2B marketers (43 percent say it’s the most important) than B2C marketers, 26 percent of whom claim it’s most important. B2C marketers place more importance on visual content (45 percent say it’s the most important) than B2B marketers (32 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

Content Curation

• Eighty two percent of marketers curate content. (IMN Inc.)

• Sixteen percent of marketers curate for their audience every day. Meanwhile 48 percent curate from third party sources at least once a week. (Curata)

• Eighty three percent of marketers curate/share content with their customers and/or prospects from third party sources such as blogs, social media, industry publications or news sites. (Curata)

• Over 50 percent of marketers that curate content say it has increased their brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, web traffic and buyer engagement. (Curata)

• Forty one percent of marketers that curate content indicate it has increased the number and/or quality of their sales-ready leads. (Curata)

Outsourcing

• Marketers outsource 18 percent of their content, with the remaining content being created in-house, curated, or syndicated. (Curata)

• Twenty five percent of marketers don’t outsource any content creation. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• About two thirds of marketers outsource less than one third of their content creation (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• The top two most outsourced content marketing activities are writing (44 percent) and design (41 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Business bloggers outsource 14 percent of their blog posts. The best practitioners outsource 24 percent. (Curata)

• Fifty seven percent of business bloggers’ outsourced blog posts originate from non-paid contributed or guest posts. (Curata)

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Content Promotion

• B2B content marketing social media platform usage: LinkedIn (94 percent); Twitter (87 percent); Facebook (84 percent); YouTube (74 percent); Google+ (62 percent); SlideShare (37 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• The top five most effective social media platforms to deliver content and engage audiences: LinkedIn (82 percent effective); Twitter (66 percent effective); YouTube (64 percent effective); Facebook (41 percent effective); SlideShare (38 percent effective). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Top three paid advertising methods used by B2B marketers to promote/distribute content: Search Engine Marketing (66 percent); print or other offline promotion (57 percent); traditional online banner ads (55 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• Twenty one percent of all business bloggers send posts through a newsletter to their subscriber base at least weekly; 39 percent of best practitioners do this weekly. (Curata)

• Have marketers integrated their social media and traditional marketing activities? Strongly Agree (27%); Agree (54%); Uncertain (10%); Disagree (7%); Strongly Disagree (2%). (Social Media Examiner)

• Weekly time commitment for social media marketing in hours: 0 (3 percent); 1 to 5 (33 percent); 6 to 10 (23 percent); 11 to 15 (11 percent); 16 to 20 (10 percent); 21+ (20 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

• Over 81 percent of marketers found that increased traffic occurred with as little as six hours per week invested in social media marketing. (Social Media Examiner)

• Which form of paid social media are marketers regularly using? Facebook Ads (84 percent); Google Ads (41 percent); LinkedIn Ads (18 percent); Twitter Ads (17 percent); YouTube Ads (12 percent); Promoted Blog Posts (7 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

• LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter or blogs individually. (Inside View)

• Have marketers integrated their social media and traditional marketing activities? Strongly agree (24 percent); agree (60 percent); uncertain (9 percent); disagree (6 percent); strongly disagree (2 percent). (Social Media Examiner)

• Top five social media platforms most used by B2B : LinkedIn (94 percent); Twitter (87 percent); YouTube (74 percent); Google+ (62 percent); SlideShare (37 percent) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

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Content Marketing Impact

• Seventy four percent of companies indicate that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity. (Curata)

• Thirty six percent of companies with a documented content strategy indicate their content marketing is “very effective” or “extremely effective.” (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• Seventy seven percent of all companies rate their social media marketing as successful at achieving the most important objectives set for it to some extent. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• The greatest impact today’s business bloggers have on their organization are: thought leadership, SEO, and brand visibility and buzz. (Curata)

• Fifty five percent of business bloggers are getting five percent or more of their corporate web site’s traffic from their blog. (Curata)

• Eighty seven percent of B2B marketers surveyed by Forrester say they struggle to produce content that truly engages their buyers. (Forrester)

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Content Marketing Metrics

Top Content Marketing Metrics

• The top five content marketing metrics are: web traffic/visits (63 percent); views/downloads (59 percent); lead quantity (42 percent); lead quality (39 percent); social media sharing (36 percent). (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Only 30 percent of leading marketers feel they are effective at measuring content marketing’s impact on the bottom of the funnel. (Curata)

• Metrics for B2B content marketing success: sales lead quality (87 percent); sales (84 percent); high conversion rates (82 percent); sales lead quantity (71 percent); website traffic (71 percent); brand lift (69 percent); SEO ranking (87 percent) (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

• Content marketing metrics routinely tracked by organizations: Views (55 percent); leads (48 percent); likes, +1’s, tweets, shares (45 percent); downloads (41 percent); conversion rate (40 percent). (MarketingSherpa)

• The top three metrics used by business bloggers today include: page views, shares or likes, and time spent on site. The best practitioners are leading the charge to identify their blog’s impact on the sales pipeline. (Curata)

• Top three B2B goals of content marketing: Lead generation (85 percent); sales (84 percent); lead nurturing (78 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Content Marketing Measurement Success

• Only eight percent of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI. (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community)

• Forty five percent of content marketers rate interactive content as “extremely effective” or “very effective”. (Content Marketing Institute)

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Content Marketing Technology

• Fifty six percent of marketers use content marketing-specific software to manage their content workflow and distribution. (Curata)

• Seventy percent of content marketing leaders are increasing investment in marketing technology. (Curata)

• Sixty nine percent of companies use an editorial calendar for content marketing. (Curata)

• Over 100 content marketing vendors have been placed in 15+ categories in this Content Marketing Tools Map.

• Top five areas of technology investment by marketers: social marketing, digital commerce, marketing analytics, customer experience and advertising operations. (Gartner)

• Thirty three percent of marketing budgets go to technology, with 28 percent of that spent on infrastructure. (Gartner)

• Forty percent of companies have either “moderately” or “fully” integrated their marketing and sales automation systems. (Curata)

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Vertical-Specific Data

Automotive Industry

• Forty six percent of auto marketers have a formal content marketing program in place, compared to 33 percent of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)

• Almost 70 percent allot less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets to content marketing efforts, versus 38 percent overall. Twenty five percent acknowledge they don’t set aside enough budget to those efforts. (IMN Inc.)

Banking and Financial Services

• Forty five percent report content marketing efforts are done on an ad-hoc basis, compared with 30 percent of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)

• Fifty percent of banking and financial services marketers have not even thought about using content across channels, versus seven percent of overall respondents. (IMN Inc.)

• Fifty five percent of banking and financial services marketers allocate less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets to content marketing efforts. However, 45 percent say they would increase budgets if funds were available. (IMN Inc.)

• Ninety one percent of banking and financial services marketers curate content, compared to 82 percent overall. (IMN Inc.)

• More than half of banking and financial services marketers worry about trademark, copyright and citation issues. (IMN Inc.)

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Had Your Fill of Content Marketing Statistics Yet?

For an in-depth look at more useful content marketing numbers, download Curata’s Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics and Metrics.

There is a better way.

Content marketing has come a long way in the past few years. There are now definite content marketing metrics to answer this question, along with technologies that help quantify the return on your content marketing investment. 

The following guide provides a comprehensive overview of marketing metrics and analytics to help you determine the effectiveness of your content, and ultimately how it affects revenue. I also asked over 20 experts how they measure content marketing efforts.

We’ve included their answers throughout the post. For an even more in-depth analysis, check out the entire eBook I authored on this topic: The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Metrics & Analytics.

Content Marketing Metrics: A Framework

Looking at metrics as a whole can be an intimidating task. To make it easier to identify the content marketing metrics most relevant to your business, it helps to break them down into distinct categories.
REBECCA LIEB
Digital Advertising, Media & Content Analyst, Altimeter @lieblink
“It makes no difference whatsoever what MY most important content marketing metric is—the real question is: what metric, what key performance indicator is most important to your business? No two marketers’ objectives are exactly alike. What matters is aligning against business goals, not all the abstract things you can measure.”

To start off, I have adapted a four part framework proposed by Jay Baer in his eBook on this topic, and placed this into an inverted pyramid model as shown below:

If you look at the various content marketing metrics, you can answer many of your most pressing content marketing strategy questions:

• Consumption Metrics:
  • How many people are consuming your content?
  • Which channels are they using?
  • How frequently and how in-depth is their consumption?
• Sharing Metrics:
  • Which of your content pieces are being shared?
  • Who is sharing them?
  • How/where are they sharing?
  • How often are they being shared?
• Lead Metrics:
  • How is content supporting demand generation in terms of lead generation and lead nurturing (middle-of-the-funnel)?
• Sales Metrics:
  • How does your content influence bottom-of-the-funnel results?
  • Which ways does your content drive revenue?
  • How does your content fill the pipeline?

Four Additional Metrics

In addition to Jay’s four categories, we have identified four additional types of marketing metrics (two customer-focused and two production-focused). These provide more detail and clarity about the ROI of content marketing:

• Retention (Subscription) Metrics:
  • How effective are you at holding your audience’s attention beyond the initial point of contact?
• Engagement Metrics:
  • How does the intersection of consumption and sharing metrics translate into “engagement?”
  • Does your content inspire users to take some kind of action?
  • What kind of action are they taking?
  • How frequently and consistently are they taking action?
• Production Metrics: (to assess team and/or individual performance)
  • How is your team performing against editorial calendar deadlines and goals?
  • What time does it take your team to turn a content idea into a published piece of content?
  • How many pieces of content do you regularly publish in a given period of time?
• Cost Metrics: (to determine return on investment – ROI)
  • What are your overall content marketing costs?
  • What are your costs per piece? Per creative resource?

You can measure each of the above marketing metrics across several content channels, such as websites, blogs, or social media. The following framework maps the content marketing metrics (in the order they appear in the marketing and sales funnel) against content channels. Using this framework, you can get a better idea of how to measure content across all channels.

Next, we will walk through how you can compute these marketing metrics for each part of this model.

PERFORMANCE METRICS

Consumption Metrics

As discussed earlier, consumption metrics can answer the following types of questions:

• Are people consuming my content?
• Which channels are they consuming my content on?
• What are their content consumption behaviors and preferences?

Let’s take a look at what the different consumption metrics are by channel.

Site & Blog

For a site or blog, the most important consumption metrics are page views, unique visitors, and average time on page:

• Page view analytics tell you how many and which of your content pages your visitors are consuming.
• Unique visitor analytics help you get a sense for the overall size of your audience and how much of your traffic is repeat visitors.
• Average time on page analytics give you insight into how people are consuming your content. Are they reading or viewing the content thoroughly or are they quickly skimming?

 Each of these statistics is easily available via Google Analytics or a similar web analytics tool.

SHERRY LAMOREAUX
Writer/Editor, Act-On @SherryActOn
“I have different metrics for different channels. For the blog, I keep track of unique users and page views, and I’m more concerned about trend than absolute numbers. I like to track which posts and topics generate the most interest; we’re always interested in what people want to read. For our downloadable assets such as white papers and eBooks, particularly the high-value ones we gate, the numbers that really matter are conversions and closed sales. If an asset is working well, we’ll keep it gated. If it’s not generating results, we’ll un-gate it. We also track linking domains.”

Assets

You can get a good idea of the consumption of downloadable assets such as PDFs of white papers or eBooks. Simply keep track of how many times an eBook is downloaded.

For gated content—content locked behind a landing page—you can measure form completions. In other words, how many times someone fills out the form completely and with valid information.

ROB YOEGEL
VP of Marketing, Gaggle @RobYoegel
“The most success I’ve had is looking at conversion metrics (downloads/registrations) and website traffic (blog posts) from traffic sources. Either in aggregate (i.e., social vs. search. vs. direct) or by a specific website, campaign, etc. By analyzing the source of conversions/traffic, you can better understand what content resonates and what audiences are valuable to the business, assuming you can track them through to a sale.”

Form Completion Problems

Marketing automation systems such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, and Act-On each include a feature to measure form completions. However, accurately measuring actual downloads—while arguably more important because it encompasses both gated and ungated content—is more difficult for two technical reasons:

1. Marketing Automation does not track asset views. Most assets, specifically PDFs, are not tracked as lead activities. Furthermore, you cannot place a munchkin or tracking code on such files, so they are invisible to both marketing automation and web trackers such as Google Analytics.

2. They exclude form bypasses. You may assume that everyone downloading an asset has completed a form already. In reality, a significant percentage of visitors may have bypassed the form, particularly if it is indexed by a search engine.

For example, Marketo can (but does not) tell search engines not to index gated assets, so they often end up showing up in search results. The screenshot below shows a Google search results page for “The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.” The landing page shows up second, but the direct link to the PDF shows up first.

Therefore to track assets, you have to either:

• Use a flash-based PDF viewer like Zmags. These types of viewers include design and publishing tools as well as tracking features that give marketers insight into download data, and can also track reader eye movements to create viewing heat maps.
• Rely on softer indicators such as form completions for the landing page, page views on the post-form completion thank you page, or click-throughs on the email that links to your asset after form completion.

Social Media

Unfortunately, there isn’t a completely accurate way to measure how many people viewed a particular social media post. Some social platforms and third-party management tools provide “reach” or “impression” stats. These attempt to measure how many people your content was potentially exposed to. But just because a piece of content could have been seen, doesn’t necessarily mean it was seen. Things move fast on social media feeds, content shelf life is short, and many posts go unseen by the majority of users.

You can, however, measure how many people clicked a link within a social media post, which serves as a fairly accurate measure of consumption. The easiest way to measure click-throughs is a link-shortening tool with analytics capabilities such as bit.ly.

Emails

Because you cannot embed analytics trackers in emails, you cannot get a true measure of content consumption. In lieu of actual consumption data, you can look at open rates and click-throughs. Marketing automation platforms such as Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On, etc. commonly report both metrics, along with email marketing platforms such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.

Warning! Open rates and click-throughs are only proxies for consumption. They have several limitations:

• When a hidden image in an email is loaded, Open rates record an open. But many email clients don’t load images for spam protection. Open rates are consistently underreported for this reason. They can also make image-heavy emails such as infographics appear to perform better than others. They entice a recipient to load images, even though the content is not necessarily more appealing.

• Click-Through rates only reflect the number of clicks on an embedded link. This data can help you understand which calls-to-action are most appealing. But many recipients gain value from email content even without clicking links. For example, if your emails include the full text of articles, your click-through rates will underreport consumption as a reader can consume your content without leaving the email.

 BARRY FELDMAN
 Founder, Feldman Creative @FeldmanCreative
“I’ve been operating with the mantra ‘the money is in the list’ for a year or more, so my top priority for measurement is the growth of my email list. Beneath each of my posts (and also in the blog page sidebars) are email opt-in forms. Now, I should say that many visitors are there to read my posts because they’re already on my email list. However, for a big picture metric of how my content performs both for “pull” and on-site, I look at my email list. I call an email opt-in a conversion.”

Feeds

Feed consumption statistics (primarily views and click-throughs) are measured by wrapping your feed URLs with those provided by FeedBurner or FeedBlitz.

However, if you wrap your feed URLs with an analytics-provided one, they only measure feed consumption for readers who subscribe to your feed after you have added the tracking URL. You won’t capture the consumption behavior of readers who subscribed to your original, untracked feed.

Retention Metrics

Retention metrics give you the ability to track how well you are able to hold onto your audience after a visit. They can answer the following types of questions:

• How many people are coming back to consume other content?
• What amount of people are subscribing to receive future content updates?
• How often are they coming back to consume other content?

Comparing consumption and retention metrics helps you understand whether your content is inspiring your audience to keep in touch and expand their relationship with your brand.

Let’s look at measuring retention on each online channel.

Site and Blog

For a topic-specific microsite or blog, you can measure blog retention by tracking the following metrics using Google Analytics:

• Percentage of Returning vs. New Visitors. It’s good to have a healthy mix of both returning and new visitors. If your returning visitors percentage is low, you are attracting a lot of new visitors, but few of them come back. If your traffic primarily consists of returning visitors, you are retaining traffic well, but not attracting new people.

• Bounce Rate. Bounce rates don’t measure retention across visit sessions (unlike the percentage of returning visitors). They measure retention within a single visit. It’s entirely possible to have a low bounce rate and still be unable to attract a visitor back to your site for another session, or vice-versa. Optimize for both independently.

  Note: When it comes to content curation analytics, remember that unlike created content, curated content does not live on your site or blog. You are intentionally bouncing visitors to a third-party site to consume the original content, so this can inflate bounce rates.

• Number of Visits and Days since Last Visit. One of the less common statistics to keep an eye on is the number of visits, and how long it was since the last visit. To track this, log into Google Analytics, click on Audience, then Behavior, then Frequency & Recency as shown below.

Now you can toggle between Count of Sessions (how many times they visited) and Days Since Last Session (how long it’s been since they came back) under distribution, as shown below.

It’s normal for the vast majority of readers to only visit once. To better analyze returning visitors, add a segment and just filter by returning visitors (see below).

Assets

For assets, there’s no easy way of tracking retention directly, so we will just skip this.

Social Media

The primary means of retaining a visitor on social media is being “followed” by them. This way they get updates and hopefully come back to your site. To track follower growth over time, there are many services such as Twitter Counter available. If you run a Facebook page, you can use the internal analytics tools to monitor audience growth.

Email

You can track existing email list subscriber retention by keeping an eye on unsubscribes and opt-outs. Similarly, you need to track new subscribers to see if you can grow your list at the same time.

You can combine these two metrics to see if you have a leaky bucket by looking at your list size week over week. Are you losing more subscribers than you’re gaining? If your opt-outs exceeded your weekly new visitors, you are in trouble, and may need to have more engaging content in your emails, or reduce the frequency of your emails.

ROBERT ROSE
Chief Strategist, CMI @Robert_Rose
“Understanding how you are drawing in your different influencer and buyer personas toward a common content marketing mission is perhaps the most important first goal of any approach–and will give you a great early indicator of future success. So, mostly that looks like a registered or “known subscriber” metric–and also provides some indication of “quality of audience” as well.”

Feeds

Similarly to emails, you can measure the number of feed subscribers to gauge retention. This can be done using a feed analytics tool such as FeedBurner or FeedBlitz.

Sharing Metrics

People share content because it is useful, entertaining, and/or informational. They only share content if its quality reflects well on them, so if your content is earning shares that’s an excellent indication you are producing content your audience wants.

Site and Blog, Assets and Social

When it comes to tracking sharing metrics for sites, blogs, assets, and social posts, the metrics to keep track of are all pretty similar, but the key metric to track is Social Media Shares. Use a tool like SharedCount for a unified and consolidated statistic on the number of shares across all networks. That’s regardless of whether the user shared directly via the social media channel, liked or retweeted someone else’s post using a share button on your content, or used a meta-sharing tool like Buffer.

The type of asset you share will determine the platform it is best shared on. For example, the minimum ideal length for articles shared on Twitter is approximately 500 words, with articles on the higher end of the spectrum (1400+ words) driving the most average engagement, according to Atomic Reach.

HEIDI COHEN
Chief Content Officer, Actionable Marketing Guide @HeidiCohen
“Content marketing metrics must be tracked back to your specific business goals. Each goal often requires a series of smaller steps and objectives that contribute to romancing your prospects into ultimately purchasing from your organization. Due to the complexity of today’s marketing and the number of potential buyer paths, don’t rush to attribute sales entirely to the last platform touched. Platforms such as social media may contribute to your results but not yield quantifiable contributions. Where appropriate, incorporate a call-to-action to aid tracking.”

Email

If you receive great content in an email newsletter and want to share it, what do you do? More often than not you forward the email to someone and write a note up top. Unfortunately, such forwards cannot be tracked or measured.

Forwarded emails can be tracked—not natively through an email client—but by clicking on a forward-to-a-friend button or link embedded in an email. However, even though some marketers wishfully include these in emails, they are rarely used by recipients. So for all intents and purposes, sharing over email is not measurable.

Feeds

Since users don’t typically share feeds, sharing metrics don’t apply to this channel.

Engagement Metrics

BETH KANTER
Social Media Expert, @kanter
“The most important metric for me is the number of speaking engagements or training projects I get hired to do, but leading up to that I have to look at how my content is engaging audiences and reach.”

While closely related to consumption and retention metrics, engagement metrics are also slightly distinct. Here are a few things you may want to track when it comes to engagement:

NEIL PATEL 
Founder, Quick Sprout @neilpatel
“The one metric I really look at is comments per post. It tells me how engaged an audience is. No matter how much traffic you have, if you can’t cultivate an engaged audience you won’t be able to convert those visitors into customers.”

Session Duration

Session duration lets you know how long a visitor stays on your site during a given visit across multiple pages. Others call this dwell time. To measure this, log into Google Analytics, then go to Audience, then Behavior, then Engagement.

Page Depth

This shows you how many pages your audience visits per session. Are they just reading one piece of content and then leaving? Or are they very interested and consuming several pieces of content? You can find this information in the same view in Google Analytics by clicking on the Page Depth link.

LARRY KIM
Founder/CTO, WordStream @larrykim
“One important new metric I started tracking recently for content marketing is reader feedback. For example, are you getting fan mail from people who are blown away by your content? Are your readers reaching out to you to connect on LinkedIn? How enthusiastically positive are your press pick-ups? There’s a lot of content out there and so it’s important that your content stand out from the rest—these types of reader sentiment metrics can give you an indication if you are succeeding or not.”

Comments and Social Media Chatter

Many people consider comments to be an important metric of engagement. Others have contested this assumption, arguing most conversations don’t happen onsite. Rather, those discussions take place on social media channels. Regardless, get a handle on engagement by counting reactions and interactions with your content, whether comments or social media discussions.

Lead Metrics

DHARMESH SHAH
Founder/CTO, HubSpot @dharmesh
“The most important metric for us in measuring the success of our content efforts is number of qualified leads. We make considerable investment in content creation—particularly our blog, which represents a major component of our overall inbound marketing. The most important result of those efforts is qualified leads that we can then pass along to our sales team. We’ve found that the cost for leads generated through our content efforts are lower and the quality is generally higher than our paid channels, so we continue to increase our investments in this area.”

Campaign Tracking

The easiest do-it-yourself means of associating content with leads is to set up campaign tracking in Salesforce and your Marketing Automation platform. It can be an initially complex process, but it’s certainly possible and the insights gained are worth your while.

A campaign is an object in Salesforce that stripes across Lead objects, Contact objects, and Opportunity objects. First, for each piece of content, you create a campaign in Salesforce. Then, when a particular marketing event occurs (e.g. opening a newsletter, reading an article, or downloading an asset), your marketing automation system can associate the record of the lead with a campaign representing the activity performed.

The following image should help you visualize the process:

There are three powerful attributes of campaign tracking that help with content attribution:

• Persistence. Once a lead is attributed to a campaign, campaign mapping follows the lead. This holds even as the lead is converted to other objects lower in the funnel, such as a contact or opportunity. It lets you track not only how many leads a piece generated, but also whether these leads resulted in further actions.

• Multiple Attribution. You can associate more than one campaign with a lead record. This lets multiple pieces of content get credit under a multi-touch attribution model (more details on what this is later).

• Time Stamping. You can replay content consumption when a lead-campaign association is time stamped. For example, you can ascertain the last piece of content a lead viewed prior to converting to an opportunity.

ARNIE KUENN
President, Vertical Measures @ArnieK
“Without a doubt, the most important metric is lead conversions.”

JASON MILLER
Global Content and Social Media Marketing Leader, LinkedIn @JasonMillerCA
“At the end of the day why are we doing this? The answer is for more leads. If the leads that are coming into your pipeline are more qualified based on the engagement with your content and are closer to buying, then your content strategy is working.”

Campaign Reporting

Once you have implemented campaign tracking, you can then generate reports or use a Salesforce plugin like Full Circle Insights to analyze campaigns.

The types of questions you can now answer include:

• How many new leads did a given piece of content generate?
• Which pieces of content helped convert leads lower into the funnel?
• How many existing leads in my database touched a particular piece of content?
• In which areas of the funnel do we not have sufficient content?

MARCUS SHERIDAN
Founder, The Sales Lion @TheSalesLion
“For me, the most important metric is number of pages read per lead. Why? Quick answer: in 2012 my swimming pool company compared the leads on the site that had bought a pool vs. the ones that ended up not buying (both had filled out contact forms). As we looked at the analytics comparing these two groups, we found that when leads viewed 30 or more pages of the website before our initial sales appointment they would buy 80% of the time, an astronomical number in the industry. I firmly believe every business has their own “content tipping point” when it comes to leads converting to customers. This is exactly why today I help all of my clients attempt to learn what their tipping point is, and how they can help their leads reach said metric to dramatically impact the sales process.”

Sales Metrics

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT
Online Marketing Strategist, @dmscott 
“How’s sales? Ultimately content marketing drives sales success.”

If you have set up campaign tracking properly in your CRM (as described in the previous section), the campaign associations will also apply to opportunity objects. This will enable you to generate many other powerful sales reports.

By picking one choice from each column in the chart above, you can calculate some helpful sales metrics including:

$ of Pipeline Opportunities Influenced

This tells you how much of the sales pipeline was influenced by consuming one or more pieces of your content. You can report on this metric for a single piece of content, over several pieces of content in a content marketing pyramid, or for all content across the board.

MIKE VOLPE
CMO, HubSpot @mvolpe
“Revenue. And anyone that says you can’t attribute new customers and revenue down to a single piece of content, like a blog article, is doing it wrong.”

$ of Revenue Influenced

In a similar manner, this number tells you the dollar amount of revenue closed where a contact associated with that opportunity consumed one or more pieces of content prior to the deal closing.

DOUG KESSLER
Creative Director/Co-Founder, Velocity @dougkessler
“Revenue has to be the mother of all metrics. It’s what we’re here for, right?”

$ of Pipeline Opportunities Generated

You can use a first-touch attribution model to tally the total dollar amount of all opportunities. This is where first touch of a lead associated with an opportunity is from a piece of content your team created. If that’s confusing, think of it as reporting on the amount of sales you ultimately generated because a prospect found you through your content.

JEFF ROHRS
VP of Marketing Insights, ExactTarget @jkrohrs
“As with any marketing activity, the number one metric we should be paying attention to is how does it positively impact sales. Whether directly or by influence and loyalty, content marketers must deliver measurable value to the organization.”

$ of Pipeline Revenue Generated

This is very similar to the prior metric but only measures opportunities won. This is often considered the ultimate marketing metric. It counts dollars at the bottom of the funnel that marketing generated; it cannot be easily gamed or fudged.

IAN CLEARY
Founder, Razor Social @IanCleary
“My most important metric for my content marketing success is revenue generated. My path to revenue is driving relevant traffic to my site, building an email subscriber database and then converting the email subscribers. For example, I run webinars where I invite email subscribers and then make sales on the webinars. My other key metric is my email conversion rate and I measure my conversions rates from social media channels, social advertising, referrals, organic and direct traffic.”

Percentages

For each of the above, you can also generate percentage variants of these metrics to show the impact of marketing on sales. When trying to justify your content marketing team’s existence, these statistics go a long way. Here’s a few percentages you can report on:

• % of Pipeline / Revenue Influenced by Content
• $ of Pipeline / Revenue Generated by Content

LEE ODDEN
CEO, TopRank Online Marketing @leeodden
“While all marketing roads must eventually lead to revenue, the single most important metric for content marketing success is the one that measures the goal you’re after. It would be easy to say that goal is customer acquisition, sales, revenue or profit. But content marketing programs can deliver results on a variety of objectives that create value for a business. For example, using content marketing to grow thought leadership can increase unsolicited media inquiries. Coverage in industry publications citing your company’s expertise can affect both brand perception as well as sales.”

OPERATIONAL METRICS

Production Metrics

Production metrics are wholly different from the other marketing metrics we’ve covered here. Rather than measuring the performance of your content, they measure the performance of your content production operation. Here are some metrics you may want to measure:

Time to Publish

How long does it take your team to transform a content idea to a live published piece of content? This metric is similar to measuring the length of a sales cycle for a lead. It captures the speed of your content marketing team.

Track this by keeping one column on your editorial calendar for when an idea is conceived, and another for when it’s published. Calculate time to publish by taking the difference of the two dates.

CHRISTOPHER STELLA
Senior Marketing Director, Siegel+Gale @CStella
“One of the most critical metrics at this early stage of our content marketing program is employee participation. Because we are a professional services organization, content creation needs to be a team sport—our subject matter experts must publish their unique points of view to differentiate our brand in a competitive space. This year, approximately 40% of our employees contributed original content to our blog, and many more have published articles. That number is growing. Seeing so many colleagues eagerly join our bench of content creators is both exciting from a cultural perspective, and critical to our firm’s success.”

Content Throughput

You can measure how many pieces of content or words you are publishing in a given period of time. Or for a single writer, you can measure how much content they are producing in a given period of time. For stats like these on a blog specifically, you can try a WordPress plugin such as WordStats.

Content Backlog

You can also compare one metric against the other. For example, to ascertain whether you have a content production backlog, compute the Average Number of Days between Posts (a production metric) divided by the Average Days Since Last Visit (a retention metric).

If this number is greater than one, you are producing content quicker than your average visitor can consume it. Should the number be less than one, your visitors are hungry for more content and you are not producing content quickly enough. If you are at approximately one, you are producing content at the right velocity.

RYAN SKINNER 
Account Director, Velocity Partners @rskin11
“Of one thing you can be certain in content marketing: your first efforts will almost definitely be your worst. And your current efforts will be eclipsed by later efforts. Everyone improves. What sets great programs apart from mediocre ones: the rate of improvement.” 

Cost Metrics

Like production metrics, cost metrics track production efficiency. They look exclusively at the financial costs of content marketing however, or the “I” (investment) part of ROI. Here are a few good places to start:

Production Costs per Post. If you use freelancers to write content, it should be easy to track the cost per post based on their invoices. It gets harder to account for this if you track full time internal resources.

Distribution Costs per Post. Many people assume that content distribution is free. But with more and more content online, distributing it is getting expensive—sometimes more expensive than the cost of producing the content. Here are some distribution costs to consider:

• Social Media Promotion. Time and equivalent pay spent on promoting your content.
• Influencer Marketing. After you have created your content, you may be outreaching to influencers to notice your post. This has a cost that has to be accounted for.
• Native Advertising. If you are using native advertising networks like Outbrain or Taboola, these costs should be factored in as well.

ROI Metrics

Last up are my favorite class of marketing metrics: the holy grail—ROI metrics. These combine different classes of the aforementioned marketing metrics with a broad range of variations. Here are a few you may want to consider.

Return on Investment

For each piece of content x in Campaign C, take the $ amount of Revenue generated (a sales metric) by Content x and divide it by the ($ Production Cost for x + $ Distribution Cost for x) (a production metric). If the ratio is greater than 1, your content was profitable from a sales perspective. You can similarly compute this for a single piece of content, or all your content marketing. Alternatively, C can represent all content produced by a particular writer, and the calculation will give you the ROI for that individual. If their ratio is less than 1, they may need to up their quality and/or quantity of content produced. Take this with a grain of salt however, since there are a lot of other variables that influence revenue.

JIM LENSKOLD
President, Lenskold Group @jimlenskold
“Average Value per Customer. The power of content marketing goes far beyond generating leads. It is critical to measure the increase in the Average Value per Customer to reflect content marketing’s effectiveness in educating buyers and differentiating the brand in order to increase purchase volume and earn long-term loyalty. This additional profit margin generated helps to justify the ROI of higher-cost content that truly improves the quality of the lead and the customer relationship.”

Pipeline Influence per Word per Writer

For all content produced by a given writer denoted as W, sum over the total pipeline influence for each piece of content x divided by the word count of x. Now you get a metric in the units of pipeline dollars per word.

This is useful because some content writing services charge by the word. If you find their pipeline influence is less than their cost per word, it may be time to try another service provider.

CYRUS SHEPARD
Content Astronaut, Moz @CyrusShepard
“Because it’s hard to choose a single measurement of content performance, we actually invented a score called 1Metric which combines several different factors into a single number. You can configure it different ways, but our 1Metric combines traffic, social shares and link data into an algorithmic score between 1-100. By focusing on a single number, we eliminate outliers and gain a much clearer picture of our content success metrics. We’re testing this internally and may release a public version soon. Here’s a screenshot:

Where to Go From Here

Set up a “dream dashboard” that includes all the marketing metrics you hope to eventually measure. Start by implementing the ones at the top of the funnel (retention, engagement) and work down. Once all metrics are consistently measured, you can create the following changes to content marketing operations:

If you’d like to quantify a content marketing career, download LinkedIn and Curata’s joint eBook: The Ultimate Guide to a Content Marketing Career.

Not everyone likes the same content. People respond to different things in different ways. You need to take the time to truly know your audience; what they’re looking for and why they want it on an intimate level. Otherwise even the best infographics in the world won’t get you what you’re after.

Enter Google Analytics.

You need Google Analytics to understand an audience on that deep, organic level. It helps you discover the true insights beneath the surface. In many ways Google Analytics offers the best form of self improvement. It gives you accurate, insightful, and actionable information for reaching your audience the best possible way.

Behavior

To know your visitors and why they respond to certain types of content—and avoid others—requires behavioral insight. Which pages are they visiting? What types of items do they spend the most time on? How do they arrive at your website? Where do they go once they’re there? What causes them to leave, and how long are they staying? These are all questions Google Analytics helps answer.

Action, Action, Action

The goal of all marketers can be summed up in one word: conversions. Simply put, is the content you’re creating compelling enough to prompt your visitors to take action? (Check out how to convert more visitors through lead value optimization.)

Whether that’s sharing content with their friends on social media or making a purchase doesn’t matter. What matters is if they’re motivated enough to take the next step you want them to take. Google Analytics gives you much of the reporting you need to measure activity against your site’s goals.

Funnels

The idea of the sales funnel is familiar to all marketers. But not all know how Google Analytics can help you create these funnels.

Analytics allows you to set up a series of pages as goal posts. These allow you to see which processes a user is engaged in and how far along the process they made it. It’s a valuable tool for optimizing multi-step processes, with e-commerce checkout being just one example.

Finally, you can gain superior visibility over the funnel, and the end user’s experience of traveling across the funnel. (Learn how to Make Sales From Stories With a Content Conversion Funnel.)

Mobile

We live in a mobile world. Increasing numbers of people use smartphones and tablets as their primary means of getting online. Worldwide, mobile Internet traffic has already overtaken desktop traffic as of November 2016.

With Google Analytics, you can see not just how many of your visitors are using mobile devices. You can see what types of mobile devices. And how those mobile device users are responding in their own unique ways.

These are just some of the benefits of Google Analytics:

The Content Marketer’s A-to-Z Guide to Google Analytics

This infographic was created with Visme for Orbit Media Studios. To create your own infographic, download the Beginner’s Guide to Creating Shareable Infographics. To better understand analytics, download The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics eBook.

Without measurement, you have no way to know what’s working, what’s not, and how to revise your strategy to amplify the strengths of what you’re doing and eliminate the weaknesses. Perhaps more importantly, you have no way of justifying continued (or expanding!) investment in content marketing to the C-suite if you cannot show numbers to back up your claims.

Which Marketing Metrics Matter?

To address this, Curata has published The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. It provides a detailed guide to proving the effectiveness of content using various marketing metrics. It provides an eight part framework to help identify the metrics most relevant to your business, consisting of consumption metrics, sharing metrics, lead metrics, sales metrics, retention (subscription) metrics, engagement metrics, production metrics, and cost metrics. Each of these metrics can be measured across several content channels, such as websites, blogs, or social media.

To give you a high-level roadmap, I compiled 29 of the most essential content marketing metrics into the following infographic. Use this as a guide if you’re looking to expand your level of measurement or if you’re just getting started.

Once you are consistently measuring all the marketing metrics relevant to your organization, it becomes possible to effectively:

• Incentivize your team
• Diagnose and troubleshoot problems before they escalate
• Create alignment between organizational divisions

Want to discover even more content marketing metrics and learn how to compute these? Download the entire eBook on the topic, The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics.

It wasn’t always this way. In 1904 Jell-O started printing Jell-O “best seller” recipes and distributing them for free. Jell-O credited its distribution of these free recipes with over $1 million in sales from 1904 to 1906. At a sales price of $0.10, that’s over 10 million units.

The books were physically printed however, with no way to connect people who purchased or influenced a purchase of Jell-O to people who received the recipes. So the company actually had no way of attributing these sales to the cookbook.

Given the lack of data for the campaign, practitioners in today’s world of content analytics and metrics would chuckle that Jell-O not only felt good about the recipe campaign, they attributed a significant amount of their revenue during those two years to it. Today the Jell-O recipe campaign is still remembered as a founding content marketing effort.

Currently, content marketers have the opposite problem: an overwhelming amount of trackable data in the digital space. As digital strategies evolve, the metrics we use to track the success of our programs are constantly playing catch up.

33 percent of B2B marketers and 41 percent of B2C marketers cite an inability to measure as a significant challenge, according to the Content Marketing Institute. Robert Rose, CMI Chief Content Advisor, recounts a related conversation he had with a CMO at Content Marketing World 2016:

During our discussion about the event (and how great it was), he said, “Robert, you know the thing that I’m missing is how we’re ever going to draw a line from content marketing to top-line revenue. If I can’t do that,” he said, “then I’m not sure we actually should do content marketing.

In a 2009 McKinsey survey, two-thirds of marketers said their respective companies had either a very weak link or no link at all between marketing performance and financial incentives. While not everyone is yet at the point where they can draw a line from content to revenue, we’ve all come a long way in our methodology for content analytics.

Many marketing teams now prioritize training on data analysis. Data is now analyzed and applied in increasingly diverse ways.

Here’s a look at some of the ways measurement has changed over the years, and how we’re getting better.

2012: Inbound Links and Search Engine Traffic

One example of a CMI post written in 2012 shows how that year was arguably when online content measurement truly became sophisticated. The focus was on site traffic and keeping potential customers on your website, interacting with your content. Key metrics suggested by CMI and other expert content sites included:

• Page views
• Search engine traffic
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Inbound links
• Time on site

What We’ve Learned Since Then

Inbound links are great, but it’s hard to determine how they should be measured. They do demonstrate that your content is interesting/useful, and help improve SEO and page reach. Though more inbound links are usually better, take their quality into account when analyzing how successful your content is. Rand Fishkin argues that:

If there’s a lot of links from Wikipedia and DMOZ and the site has high PageRank, lots of inbound links and blog links, there’s clearly some value to getting a link. Just make sure you judge based on the data, not the numerical score.

Best Takeaways of 2012

Page views and conversions rates are an important way of measuring content marketing success.

2013: Mobile and Geo-Targeting

In 2013, marketing measurement shifted to mobile and geolocation analytics as platforms such as Google and Facebook changed the ways measuring took place. Google changed their terminology. “Visits” and “unique visitors” became “sessions” and “users,” respectively. As the popularity of mobile devices rapidly spread, along with the ability to track IP addresses from page to page, marketers developed more advanced and targeted measuring capabilities.

Key metrics included:

• Mobile readership
• Geography
• Bounce rate
• Heatmaps and click patterns
• Page views
• Comments
• Social sharing

What We’ve Learned Since Then

Focusing on comments and social sharing became more popular as social media continued to increase in importance. However, the popularity of social platforms such as Snapchat that don’t allow for comments or sharing mean such measurements have slipped slightly in relevance. Google’s change in the words used for search, though probably more accurate, are indicative of a larger problem: the large and increasing fragmentation of data sources with little standardization in format and taxonomy.

What was Right

While perhaps ahead of their time, heat maps, click patterns, and geographic tracking have laid the groundwork for more sophisticated marketing, including automated workflows and automated campaigns based on location.

2014: Big Data Waits in the Wings

Forbes named 2014 the year of digital marketing analytics. According to Forbes, “37 percentof companies surveyed said that they desperately needed staff with serious data chops.” The focus for 2014 was strengthening collection capabilities for big data. Here are some of the things marketers were thinking about in 2014.

• Page views, newsletter subscribers and similar measurements were labeled “vanity metrics”
• Who is converting, what’s converting them, and what conversions are driving revenue

What We’ve Learned Since Then

Big data isn’t quite there for content marketing just yet. Though marketers can collect a lot of valuable information, collection methods and the analysis applied to big data for marketing currently falls a little short. A reliably accurate marketing attribution model has yet to exist and journey mapping is as complex as ever.

Best Takeaways of 2014

2014 was the beginning of a shift away from tracking for the sake of tracking and toward looking at analytics in terms of how they’re contributing to revenue. CrazyEgg founder Neil Patel said of analytics: “Measure what matters. With metrics, it’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics.”

2015: Using Content Analytics to Determine ROI

As sales and marketing alignment becomes more important, marketing teams are looking at measurement to prove their efforts add value and achieve positive ROI. The amount of content analytics available increased, but marketers weren’t yet focusing on their content’s ROI. CMI’s Robert Rose argues:

… goals such as incremental sales revenue, cost per lead generated, cost per sale generated, and cost of a new customer are not returns on an investment; neither are they even goals. These are accountability metrics toward a particular business goal (e.g., higher revenue, decreased costs).

Mobile was more important than ever in 2015, with Google updating its search algorithm to increase the visibility of mobile-friendly websites.

Black Ink forecast that predictive analytics and marketing automation would receive increased focus in 2015. These continue to be a focus in marketing analytics and are informing other technology-focused marketing trends today, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

2016: New Metrics Arrive

The way we think about content analytics is increasingly thoughtful. This includes a greater focus on branded search, sales accepted leads, and share of voice.

2016 was a year of introspection. The popular metrics were rethought and new, more powerful metrics put in their place. Some of the changes industry experts peddled in 2016 included:

• Conversions over clicks.
• Scroll depth over time on page. Why? We calculate time on page using an average based on users who didn’t bounce. Users leaving within that time do not figure in the calculated average.

2017 and Beyond

In 2017 the technology we use to understand content analytics continues its relentless advance. The increasing power of artificial intelligence (AI) is driving content intelligence where AI and big data increasingly automate content and incorporate predictive analytics. As AI improves, marketers will leverage it to determine what content to create, when and who to serve it to, and at what time.

Further in the future, measurement will become increasingly automated by machine learning. While this may be years away, content marketing platforms are already available that track marketing efforts directly to attributable revenue. Not quite the exact ROI we’re talking about in the first paragraph—but not far off. The landscape will become more complex, data more granular, and there will be a growing focus on accountability.

To learn more about content analytics, download Curata’s Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics.

ABM is a strategic approach to marketing that focuses on select customer accounts and treats them as markets of one. When done well, account based marketing has the potential to be one of the most lucrative methods of marketing today.

However, tracking the impact of content is a major struggle for content marketers today. Even more so in a world where ABM is at the forefront of many people’s content marketing strategy. This article discusses the most relevant account based marketing metrics as they apply to content marketing.

Account Based Marketing and Content Marketing: Definitions

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing:

…is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Account Based Marketing is, according to Engagio CEO Jon Miller, “…a strategic approach that coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to open doors and deepen engagement at specific accounts.”

Content marketing is about attracting an audience. Account based marketing is about personalized marketing and specific accounts. Both are effective and widely implemented.

• 80 percent of marketers measuring ROI say ABM outperforms other marketing investments.
• More than 90 percent of marketers believe ABM is essential to B2B marketing.
• Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, and generates three times as many leads.

While both strategies can be effective, the methodology behind them is arguably at odds.

Account Based Marketing and Content Marketing: Friend or Foe?

JOE CHERNOV
VP Marketing at InsightSquared, keynote speaker @jchernov
“Inbound marketing and account-based marketing are like a taco and a burrito. They have the same ingredients, they’re just shaped differently.”

Regardless of methodology, account based marketing can’t work without the personalized blog posts, mailers, and sales enablement content generated by content marketing.

According to the Harvard Business Review, stakeholders who perceive supplier content to be tailored to their specific needs are 40 percent more willing to buy from that supplier than stakeholders who don’t personalize.

Similarly, MarketingSherpa research indicates that 82 percent of prospective customers value content targeted to their specific industry.

In the same way that content created for an account based marketing strategy should be tailored to that strategy, the way in which you measure that strategy should also be different.

Think Differently for Account Based Marketing Metrics

There are eight categories you should consider when developing a system for measuring your content marketing.

While these are important for determining content marketing success, account based marketing changes the way these metrics are interpreted.

Consider these three points when analyzing content metrics from an ABM perspective.

• Instead of measuring people, measure accounts. (But still write to people.)
• Quality is much more important than quantity. While most content marketers are interested in increasing their website’s reach or overall visits, these metrics are unimportant with an ABM model. It’s less about how many people are coming to your site, and more about who is coming to your site.
• Leads are less important than opportunities or revenue. Many leads can make up one account. When employing an ABM model, content should focus on the impact on the account or revenue generated.

What Your new Metrics Outline Should Look Like:

1. Consumption Metrics:
   What percentage of target accounts are consuming your content?
   Which channels are they using?
   How frequently and how in-depth is their consumption?
2. Sharing Metrics:
   Which of your content pieces are being shared?
   Who is sharing them?
   How/where are they sharing?
   How often are they being shared?
3. Lead Metrics:
   How is content supporting demand generation in terms of lead generation and lead nurturing (middle-of-the-funnel) at target accounts?
4. Sales Metrics:
   How is your content influencing bottom-of-the-funnel results?
   Is your content enabling targeted account pipeline?
   How is your content driving revenue?
5. Retention (Subscription) Metrics:
   How effective are you at holding your audience’s attention beyond the initial point of contact?
6. Engagement Metrics:
   Does your content inspire target users to take action?
   What kind of action are they taking?
   How frequently and consistently are they taking action? How does this correlate with the success of your account-based goals?
7. Production Metrics: (to assess team and/or individual performance)
   Is your team performing against editorial calendar deadlines and goals?
   How long does it take your team to turn a content idea into a published piece of content?
   How many pieces of content do you regularly publish in a period of time?
8. Cost Metrics: (to determine return on investment (ROI))
   What are your overall content marketing costs?
   What are your costs per piece? Per creative resource?

Four Big Changes to Account Based Marketing

Account based marketing metrics require more direct, tangible numbers like accelerated pipeline velocity, increased lead generation, and more conversions… there’s no spray and pray in ABM, it’s about making every piece of content count.
—Leadspace

After tweaking your preexisting account based marketing metrics to focus on the success of your content from an account level, ensure your content marketing metrics are optimized for ABM. There are four main areas of measurement to focus on:

1. Coverage
   Build contacts at target accounts rather than building overall reach. This total is much more important than overall increases. You can measure this using unique traffic from account IP addresses.
2. Awareness
   Look at web traffic from target accounts rather than overall traffic. Again, the increase in numbers and percentages from target accounts is more important than overall increases.
3. Engagement
   Create a heat map for engagement by title. Engagement is no longer a question of “how much?” but instead “who”—and how influential that person is. Measure this using the total traffic from account IP address, total number of touchpoints by account, total time spent with an account, or total time spent with a decision maker at an account.
4. Influence
   Track your content directly to pipeline revenue using software or a defined strategy. This is hugely beneficial not only to your account based marketing strategy but your content strategy too. However, the problem with only using Influence to measure success is the lag in results from campaign execution.

Influence is intimately related to Time to Close. Influence is a KPI popularized by Jon Miller at Engagio. It can help you determine which of your marketing activities contributes the most to revenue. Rather than attributing sales credit to every marketing activity (there can be MANY), Influence attribution requires looking at groups of accounts that have a similar profile. By comparing these successfully closed accounts, you can determine which of your account based marketing activities are truly adding value.
—Metadata

After making general changes to your measurement methodology and taking a deeper dive into these four categories, consider how your ABM strategy changes the content created. This changes the content and account based marketing metrics.

Consider Strategy Changes to Inform Measurement Changes

An ABM content strategy naturally looks different to a traditional content strategy. Consider these ABM strategies that are less common or important in a traditional content strategy:

• You send printed content and direct mail to decision makers at target account.
• Target accounts receive sales enablement content tailored to their needs/questions.
• A lead at a target account shares content with other contacts at an account.

(Share PDFs as a link rather than attachment; it can capture some of the sharing in your

analytics.) Here are some suggestions for tracking these and why it matters:

Traditionally the types of questions you can now answer include:

• How many new leads were generated from a given piece of content?
• How many existing leads in my database were touched by a particular piece of content?
• Which pieces of content helped convert leads lower into the funnel?
• In which areas of the funnel do we not have sufficient content?

Developing an ABM Attribution Model

Once you have a clear idea of what to track in your ABM content strategy, start looking at those account based marketing metrics and create a related attribution model. ABM attribution models differ from traditional content marketing attribution models in two ways:

• They consider attribution from an account based perspective rather than a lead-based perspective.
• They enable marketing attribution past the opportunity stage through to the closing of a sale.

An ABM attribution model uses one funnel for sales and marketing instead of two. This allows you to look at an account journey as one holistic piece. It enables you to give appropriate credit to all content—including sales enablement content—and gives you a more comprehensive picture of how content is pushing potential buyers through your sales cycle.

You don’t have to do all this measuring manually. The following software will help drive your ABM analytics endeavors.

ABM/Content Analytics Software

For assistance measuring your content from an ABM perspective, the following tools are useful:

Engagio: Provides analytics and automaton for an ABM strategy. It connects to your website and existing Salesforce and Marketo accounts to keep track of leads, marketing programs, and site visitors. Engagio’s utilization of account based marketing metrics such as “engagement minutes” offers a straightforward way to track lead interest.

LeanData: Lean Data’s Demand Management product focuses on account-based reporting and nurturing to alter your strategy based on account based marketing metrics and attribution models.

Bizible: Assists with attribution of all kinds. According to Bizible’s website, their account-based measurement feature enables the measurement of everything from accounts to mailers and ties to revenue.

DemandBase: Offers a full suite of ABM solutions including account-based measurements that separate high-value account visitors from traditional metrics.

Curata CMP: Ties both gated and ungated content directly to revenue, leads generated, social shares, and more, so you can measure from both an ABM and content perspective. Also shows you content engagement at the account level.

ABM and content marketing can work together to help you close more business and increase revenue. To ensure your content marketing works with your ABM programs, develop a measurement methodology that uses accounts rather than leads, a single marketing/sales funnel, and attributes content beyond opportunity created through to revenue generated.

The Importance of Tracking Revenue in Account Based Marketing 

Revenue has to be the mother of all metrics. It’s what we’re here for, right?
-Doug Kessler, Creative Director/Co-Founder, Velocity

Measuring revenue from an ABM standpoint requires measuring pipeline opportunities influenced. This tells you how much of the sales pipeline has been influenced by consuming one or more of pieces of your content. You can report on this metric for a single piece of content, over several pieces of content in a content marketing pyramid, or for all content across the board.

Cost Metrics

Cost metrics, like production metrics, track production efficiency, but exclusively examine the financial costs of content marketing, or the “I” (investment) part of ROI. Here are some places to start:

Production Costs per Post. If you are using freelancers to write content, it should be easy to track the cost per post based on their invoices. This gets harder when tracking full time internal writers.

Distribution Costs per Post. Many people assume content distribution is free. But with more and more content online, distributing it is getting more expensive—sometimes even more expensive than producing the content in the first place. Consider these distribution costs:

• Social Media Promotion. Time and equivalent pay spent on promoting your content.
• Influencer Marketing. After you have created your content, you may be reaching out to influencers to promote your post.
• Native Advertising. If you are using native advertising networks like Outbrain or Taboola, factor these costs in as well.

ROI Metrics

Last up is the holy grail—ROI metrics. These combine different classes of the aforementioned content and account based marketing metrics with a broad range of variations. Here are some to consider.

Return on Investment. For each piece of content x in Campaign C, take the $ amount of Revenue generated (a sales metric) by Content x and divide it by the ($ Production Cost for x + $ Distribution Cost for x) (a production metric). If the ratio is greater than 1, your content was profitable from a sales perspective.

You can similarly compute this for a single piece of content, or all your content marketing. Alternatively, C can represent all content produced by a particular writer, and the calculation will give you the ROI for that individual. If their ratio is less than 1, they may need to up their quality and/or quantity of content produced. Take this with a grain of salt however, since there are a lot of variables that influence revenue.

How to Implement Account Based Marketing Metrics for Content Marketing

• Incentivize your team. Your content marketing team, right down to individual writers, are accountable for achieving not only a certain level of content output, but also a certain level of content performance.
• Diagnose and troubleshoot. Content marketing metrics let you effectively diagnose when things don’t go as planned. For example, if your data tells you content is effective at the top of the funnel, but isn’t producing high quality opportunities at the bottom of the funnel, this may indicate you need better calls-to-action.
• Create alignment between divisions. If there is a singular focus on one ROI-based content marketing metric—particularly if you pay team members for it—walls between different functions will suddenly come down and teams will find new and more effective ways to collaborate.

For a thorough examination of how to measure the results of your content marketing, download The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics eBook.

Curata CEO Pawan Deshpande recently published The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. As a part of his research, he asked several experts what metric they use to measure their content marketing efforts.

Click through this SlideShare to see their answers.

The following experts were interviewed for this presentation:

Rebecca Lieb, Digital Advertising, Media & Content Analyst, Altimeter @lieblink
Sherry Lamoreaux, Writer/Editor, Act-On @SherryActOn
Rob Yoegel, VP of Marketing, Gaggle @RobYoegel
Barry Feldman,  Founder, Feldman Creative @FeldmanCreative
Robert Rose, Chief Strategist, CMI @Robert_Rose
Heidi Cohen, Chief Content Officer, Actionable Marketing Guide @HeidiCohen
Beth Kanter, Social Media Expert, @kanter
Neil Patel, Founder, Quick Sprout @neilpatel
Larry Kim, Founder/CTO, WordStream @larrykim
Dharmesh Shah, Founder/CTO, HubSpot @dharmesh
Arnie Kuenn, President, Vertical Measures @ArnieK
Jason Miller, Senior Manager of Content & Social, LinkedIn @JasonMillerCA
Marcus Sheridan, Founder, The Sales Lion @TheSalesLion
Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot @mvolpe
Doug Kessler, Creative Director/Co-Founder, Velocity @dougkessler
Jeff Rohrs, VP of Marketing Insights, ExactTarget @jkrohrs
Ian Cleary, Founder, Razor Social @IanCleary
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing @leeodden
Christopher Stella, Senior Marketing Director, Siegel+Gale @CStella
Ryan Skinner, Account Director, Velocity Partners @rskin11
Jim Lenskold, President, Lenskold Group @jimlenskold
Cyrus Shepard, Content Astronaut, Moz @CyrusShepard

To see our Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics, download the full eBook here. Also be sure to tune into our upcoming webinar to hear Pawan Deshpande discuss his findings.

Content marketing is still a red-hot buzzword in the world of digital marketing. Many marketers are starting to see the positive impact content has on improving buyer engagement and driving qualified leads. This is leading to an increase in content marketing spend across the U.S. According to the results of our third annual study, 2015 Content Marketing Tactics Planner, 76 percent of organizations are increasing their content marketing budget this year, but many are unsure where to allocate it. Here are three places to start.

Your Staff

If you want an effective content strategy, you better have a solid leader for your content marketing effort. Only 43 percent of organizations have a content marketing executive in place. If you’re lacking an executive dedicated to content or digital marketing, it’s time to catch up! After hiring your content executive, work on building a team of excellent content creators and dependable freelancers.

Include in your content budget because: An executive solely dedicated to content marketing will help set the strategy and plan for content overall.  In addition, they can guide the production, organization and distribution of content, even if they are not responsible for all of the resources that are generating this content.  Most importantly, a dedicated content marketing executive will ensure there is accountability for all related initiatives. A content team can consist of a variety of roles – writers, marketers, designers, editors. This team will create and curate more relevant and higher quality information to better engage with your audience as part of awareness building and lead nurturing. Think about outsourcing content creation if your budget won’t allow you to hire full-time staff. Outsourcing is also a great way to keep the created content coming when your on-hand staff has other responsibilities on their plates, or you simply need new perspectives in your content creation process. A steady stream of published content will set you apart from competitors. Based on our most recent survey results, best-in-class marketers should be producing 65 percent original content.

“Best in class marketers are producing 65% original content.” Share this tip – click to tweet

Content Tools

Even with a content marketing team in place, it can still be difficult to keep up with the thousands of articles published on your topic each day. Content marketing specific software is used by 56 percent of marketers to manage the content workflow and distribution process.

Include in your content budget because: If you’re not currently using content marketing tools, you’re most likely implementing a makeshift management system using Microsoft Word, email, whiteboards, etc. Though this duct-tape method may work for organizations with one or two content producers, it requires more work and can lead to inefficiencies. Having a content management tool keeps all of your content in one, easy accessible place. Stay on top of your calendar, writers, freelancers and distribution channels in the same hub to ensure quality content goes out daily, your employees are organized and your content is reaching the right channels.

Implementing curation tools can: help a small staff publish relevant content more frequently; allow an organization to obtain thought leadership through diverse perspectives; and cut back spend on freelancing original content.

“56% of marketers are using a tool to help them manage their content strategy learn more .” Share this tip – click to tweet

Promotion and Measurement of Content

Once you have a great content team and have started using technology to pump up your content marketing strategy – where should you focus your efforts? Spend more time and resources promoting and measuring existing content. These are some of the most important components of a successful content marketing strategy, but the results of our survey revealed that promotion and measurement are steps being overlooked by most marketers.

Include in your content budget because: Promoting existing content can save you time and money, so you have more to spend where it counts (sponsored content on high-traffic sites, press releases, etc.). Your content team spent weeks creating that great eBook – don’t just publish and forget about it! Promote that content by turning it into a webinar, then into more digestible formats such as blogs, infographics, curated content social campaigns. Get the most mileage out of your content.

Without analyzing the impact each piece of content has, it can difficult to understand which content resonates with your audience and which pieces just aren’t working. If you’re publishing too much unpopular content without knowing it, you can be burning a hole in your marketing pocket. Budget for a content marketing platform that can help you measure the impact of your content, or at least have your team take the time to set up an in-house strategy (e.g. keeping track of social sharing, site visits, lead quality and blog comments). By measuring the impact your content marketing strategy is having on these areas, you can better understand the type of content that is bringing in more leads, more site visitors, and improving buyer engagement.

“76% of marketers saw an increase in customer engagement as a result of content marketing.” Share this tip – click to tweet

Need more information on what content marketing tactics can help your organization prepare for a new and improved marketing strategy? Find out what 500+ marketers are planning in our free eBook, 2014 Content Marketing Tactics Planner.

Earlier this month, we released our third annual industry study, Content Marketing Tactics Planner 2014. We surveyed over 500 marketers on their current content marketing practices and where they’re taking their strategy in 2014. The results revealed a focus on three major marketing strategy components: people, technology and the content mix. With 71 percent of marketers increasing their content marketing spend, we expect to see these organizations driving more high quality leads and building more brand awareness.

People

The Content Marketing Tactics Planner reported that 43 percent of organizations already have a content marketing lead in place. These executives dedicate their time solely to the development and management of content. Top-notch marketing organizations are also starting to grow their content teams. These teams are taking authority on creating and curating high quality, consistent content for their audiences. This type of in-house content production and distribution gets more relevant, valuable content out the door – driving leads and increasing customer engagement.

Technology

Most marketers find it difficult to feed the content beast a steady stream of content with a limited staff and budget. However, many are turning to content marketing specific technology to help them manage their content workflow, find reliable sources and create enough content on a regular basis – 56 percent to be exact! These best-in-class marketers using technology are better able to produce more content (using curation tools) and manage content production more efficiently (using content management tools). Technology allows content marketers to become thought leaders on their topics, engage more buyers and stay afloat in the flood of online content.

Content

Many content marketers are realizing that it’s nearly impossible to create 100 percent original content with limited resources. Curation and syndication are proving to be life savers when it comes to getting content out on time without overworking your writers or stretching your marketing budget with outsourcing. The Content Marketing Tactics Planner revealed that first-class content marketers are only creating 65 percent of content, with 25% being curated from reliable sources and 10 percent being syndicated from topic-related sources. This mix is perfect for supporting a limited staff and budget, publishing consistent content and becoming a go-to source of information for potential customers.

Want to learn more about what’s next for content marketing, where your strategy should be headed and what content tactics to implement? Download our latest eBook Content Marketing Tactics Planner 2014.