When it’s all boiled down, marketing is purely content. From blog articles and social posts to paid ads and infographics, your digital marketing efforts leave you with a mountain of content. But, is that content working? Are you actually increasing brand awareness? 

Measuring the value of your content is not only important, but can be easy with the right process in place. That’s where TWIO’s five steps for measuring meaningful content come in.

1. Create a Content Inventory

Before even beginning to track content outcomes, you need to know what you have. Start with creating a list of where you produce content: website, social media, emails, etc. Then start digging and organizing. We recommend using the following format: 

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Remember to link the location of the content as well as any available metrics.

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2. Perform an Audit

All content has been organized into a hopefully clean document. But, what good does a list do? The value is not simply the written content itself, but the metrics behind it. Every form of content is measured in a different way. Comments, article views and shares are viewed for blog articles, yet likes, page visits and website taps are common key performance indicators (KPI) for social posts. Choose the right KPIs for your content and start the audit:

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Key Performance Indicators (KPI) by Content Type

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3. Set Goals and Measure Content 

Once you know how your content is performing, you need to measure if it’s beneficial and if it matches your business objectives. Setting goals and aligning them with the associated metrics is what adds value to your content. Be strategic with your planning and aim for certain KPIs. For example, if your set goal is to increase engagement with your audience, you will want to measure your content for comments, likes, mentions, etc. From there, you will know how well it aligns with your goals and what to change to make it perform better. 

Business Objectives and Their Metrics

• Brand Awareness: Post reach, web traffic, document views and downloads, impressions, page views
• Engagement: Mentions, comments, likes and shares, forwards, clicks
• Lead Generation: Form completions and downloads, email / blog subscriptions
• Sales: Online sales, offline sales, monthly growth, sales targets, average purchase value

4. Create an Action Plan 

After you know what you have, how it’s performing and what KPIs need to improve to meet your marketing goals, make an action plan laying out how to best leverage and improve your content. Say your social and blog content lacks engagement. You may want to consider reevaluating the type of content you are producing. Does it resonate with your audience? Do you truly know who that audience is? Answering questions like these will help you realign your content to achieve your goals. 

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5. Evaluate Periodically

To continually improve the value of your content, it’s important to periodically evaluate it. Decide how often to measure your content and when to realign it with your marketing goals. Doing this means you won’t have to begin the whole process over again, you simply measure and realign.

Content is one of an organization’s most valuable assets. Be strategic with what you produce and continue to measure its value, growing your business along the way.

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