Part of an effective content plan is being able to see what works and what doesn’t, then amending your plans and content in accordance. Granted, this is not the easiest task in today’s B2B marketing world, but it’s vitally important if you are to succeed. Without the ability to measure open rates, click through rates, and download numbers for your content, you won’t have the insights you need to avoid bad tactics and replicate good results in future. So, here’s what you need to know about measuring, analysing and optimising your content in 2021…
Measurement
B2B content consumers access material from desktop devices 68.1% of the time.[1]
To effectively measure the success of your content, you first need to determine what you are looking to achieve, and then use the appropriate metrics to track your results. Below, we’ve listed the most common content goals and the metrics that can be used to measure their success.
Brand awareness – web traffic, views, downloads, social responsesEngagement – likes, shares, inbound links, social responses
Lead generation – form completion, downloads, email responses, conversion rate
Sales – online sales, offline sales, manual reporting
Customer retention – % of content consumed by existing customers, retention rates
If you’re unsure of how to measure the success of each content type in accordance with your specific goal, check out the key performance indicators for different content pieces:
- Analysis
69% of B2B companies prioritised investment in content measurement and analytics in 2020.[2]
Now that you’ve established your goals and the KPIs you will use to measure them, it’s time to start collecting your results, and analysing them. To simplify this process, it’s worth investing in content management and marketing automation tools to aggregate all your performance data into a single dashboard. This will enable you to track the performance of your assets against your goals quickly and easily.
Optimisation
Just 43% of successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.[2]
Finally, we’re on to the trickiest part of the process – optimising your content strategy based on your findings and your specific goals. For example, you may find that prospects are opening your HTMLs, but are not downloading the content inside them, or that your target audience are liking your social posts but not commenting or sharing. The easiest way to overcome these challenges is to work with B2B content marketing experts, who have the unrivalled industry know-how to help you to unlock the true value of content marketing – and that’s where we can help…
Create content that stops prospects in their tracks
At Really B2B, we will not only optimise your strategy with topical, unique and engaging content that appeals to the unique challenges of your audience, but we will also use content calendar curation to make sure your whole communications package flows throughout the sales-cycle – from halo awareness right through to conversion.
To find out more about optimising your content strategy, check out our top tips today…
7 steps to B2B-ready content
[1] https://www.elisedopson.co.uk/blog/b2b-content-marketing-statistics/#:~:text=69%25%20of%20B2B%20companies%20will,measurement%20and%20analytics%20in%202020&text=But%2C%20there%20is%20some%20good,driven%20marketing%20and%20advertising%20goals
[2] https://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing/b2b-content-marketing-statistics/
