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.

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.

I have spent countless hours, days—even weeks creating content that just failed.  

In fact, I even plotted every piece of content Curata has ever created in order to analyze how successful every item has been. This chart includes content types such as blog posts, webinars, eBooks, and case studies, across all channels: owned, earned and paid.

I found what I expected—there’s a long tail of “failed” content. And even when content is considered a “success,” it’s typically measured as being successful based on the number of social shares it got—as seen above, or page views, which do not necessarily impact the business.

But we can learn from our failures (and successes) to greatly improve the effectiveness of our content marketing. And we can demonstrably show how this has an impact on our business goals.  

Both of these actions, however—learning from successes, and showing business impact—require data.

In this post, you will learn:

• How other industries use data to make decisions.
• How we created a data-driven content marketing strategy.
• How to get started on your own data-driven strategy.

How Other Industries Use Data to Make Decisions

Using data to inform future content strategy decisions is nothing new. Other industries have been using past successes and failures to make decisions for years. Here are two examples:

Digital Advertising

There is also a long long tail in digital advertising. Many digital advertising campaigns start with buying hundreds of thousands of ads across combinations of media properties, keywords, offers, landing pages, and ad creatives. The truth is however, despite all that effort, most will fail. But through data, campaigns can be made highly effective by focusing on the successes. Ad planners then typically prune 95% of the ads, and reallocate their budget on the 5% that perform the best.  

Journalism

The Huffington Post has become one of the most popular news sources online, largely through a data-driven content strategy. For example, they performed A/B testing between the headlines ‘‘How GM Silenced a Whistleblower,” and ‘‘How GM Bullied a Whistleblower’’ and found that “silenced” far outperformed “bullied.” This is the headline they used going forward.

While content marketers are not running the Huffington Post, there are a number of lessons we can learn about how to be more effective—and impactful—from data.

Before Implementing a Data-Driven Strategy

In 2014 Curata’s own marketing organization was not data-driven. We were intuition-driven, and more often than not—as we saw from the long tail of failures, our intuitions were wrong.

We would create content on a hunch, guessing what would work best. We tracked content performance based on the number of social shares and the number of page views. We measured our team’s performance based on how much content we produced in a given time period.

Ultimately we were unable to justify our content spend; we did it because we felt it was working. But just how much was working we didn’t really know.

Here’s how we used to track our data:

This spreadsheet took hours to complete, and at the end of the day, we were only tracking page views. We had no idea how our content was impacting the middle and bottom of the purchase funnel (i.e., marketing pipeline and sales pipeline). Worst of all, because it was such a tedious exercise to compile, we were only tracking content performance for the first five weeks rather than over its whole lifetime. Much of our evergreen content continues to generate the majority of our page views and social shares years after it was published—but we were oblivious to this.

How We Created a Data-Driven Strategy

Since this method of analyzing content was tedious and ultimately insufficient, we decided to start from scratch. We wanted to use data to inform decisions across three areas of our content marketing process: strategy, production, and promotion.

We plotted out the key metrics we wanted to track and created the Content Marketing ROI framework below:

The goal is to measure our content marketing ROI. On the performance side, we chose the above six separate metrics to track. To learn how to compute each of these metrics, see Curata’s Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics.

Here is how tracking this data helped us make decisions in each of these main areas of our content marketing process. 

1. Strategy

We were able to answer the following strategic questions:

1. What topics should we create content about?
2. What formats should we use for this content?
3. What should be prioritized based on available resources?

Choosing Topics

To determine our topics, we used a variety of tools such as BuzzSumo. Data from these sources helped us determine which topics were being searched for and which topics were being shared. 

But we didn’t rely on data alone. We also looked at our larger objectives as a corporation and determined a number of Content Marketing Pyramids to execute in the coming months.

What is a Content Marketing Pyramid?

At a high level, a content marketing pyramid is a strategic framework for enabling the execution of a content program, assuring optimal content consumption, reuse and reach.

To learn how to implement this framework today, download our 70+ page eBook on the topic: The Content Marketing Pyramid.

Choosing Content Formats

Once we established our content marketing pyramids, we had to decide what format this content should be presented in. We wanted to know: Which content formats are the most effective and have the best ROI?

We were able to draw many conclusions with the data at hand. Here is one example that led to the largest change in our strategy:

Focus on Long-Form Content over Short-Form Content

Previously, we created one short-form piece of content every week to send out in a weekly newsletter. Based on intuition, we thought this was the best strategy—it makes sense to create fresh information each week for your audience. Our data told us otherwise. We discovered that on average, long-form content generates eight times more page views, three times more social shares, and nine times more leads than short-form content.

This realization caused us to pivot our blogging strategy. Even though long-form content takes more effort, the results greatly outperform short-form content. We now exclusively write long-form content, even if we are only able to produce two pieces of new long-form content a month. (Check out more business blogging secrets here.)

2. Production

After forming a strategy, we moved on to production, where we used data to answer questions such as:

1. Who should work on which content?
2. What’s the status of our content supply chain?

Choosing Content Creators

To evaluate which content creators we should continue to use, we ranked all of our writers based on the average number of social shares they garnered for their content. 

From this, we were able to prioritize which freelancers and agencies we should work with again, which guest bloggers we should invite to write for us again, and which internal employees were good content creators.

We also learned what didn’t work: the low producing creators on the right side of the chart. These are mostly people in non-marketing roles writing about a subject they specialize in. So instead of asking them to write for us, we have our dedicated content creators act as journalists and interview these employees for articles.

Determining the status of content supply chain

One key element of a data-driven strategy is maintaining a robust editorial calendar, which enables you to analyze data in multiple ways. It provides a quick look at the status of each piece of content as it moves through the calendar (in process, under review, published). The following picture provides the fields that we use as a marketing organization and what we recommend using for your own calendar: 

Need a template pre-filled with these fields? Download our content marketing editorial calendar template today.

3. Promotion

When it comes to content promotion, here is one question we were able to answer:

What should we promote in our newsletter?

Since we decided to focus solely on fewer pieces of long-form content versus many pieces of short-form content, we needed to ensure there was a high enough quantity of content options in our weekly newsletter. We added more freshly curated content, and also included our most popular evergreen content. Again, we looked at the data to identify the best content for this effort.

We looked for content that was popular with our existing audience (i.e., through “leads touched”), as well as content that was doing well in terms of consumption such as page views. This is the content we would recycle and promote to our audience.

The Results

Creating a data-driven strategy is a work-in-process, and we still have many areas we would like to improve. For example, we’d like to incorporate more data sources and measure more content types (such as YouTube videos). However, since 2013 when we began measuring our content, we have seen the following results:

• 48 times more page views this year so far, versus the entire year of 2013 when we started measuring.
• 101 times more leads generated in 2016 to date, versus the entire year of 2013. 
• 67 times more revenue generated via content in sales pipeline for 2016 to date, compared with 2013.

How to Get Started

Want to create similar results for your content marketing program? Here are a few ways to get started:

1. Create an editorial calendar (these 12 must have fields are a good start).
2. Start measuring basic analytics.
3. Build a content measurement dashboard that combines your calendar and your stats together.

To learn more about each of these steps and to take a deeper dive into our content marketing journey, download a recording of my webinar, Data-Driven Content Marketing: How to Generate More Leads with Content.