The primary B2B content marketing goals set by organisations vary from customer acquisition and sales to engagement and thought leadership. Organisations use B2B content marketing for lead generation, lead management, promoting customer loyalty/retention, increasing website traffic and improving brand awareness as well. 

Much thoughts and efforts go into the creation of a strategy that aligns with the set goals and thorough measurement of the performance of those strategies often gets overlooked.

According to a 2013 content marketing survey by Skyword, only 25 percent of the organisations measure their ROI on content marketing, down to individual elements of the strategy. The rest use consumer activities like likes, comments and shares for an indication of how well (or not) their strategies are working.

So what can the remaining 75 percent do to measure the success of their B2B content marketing strategies more efficiently? A couple of things including the most obvious metrics – inquiries, leads and closed sales.

Top metrics for measurement of B2B content marketing success

According to the results of a recent content marketing survey by The Content Marketing Institute, the top five metrics used by organizations to measure the success of their B2B content marketing include –

  • web traffic (68 percent)
  • quality of sales leads (54 percent)
  • amount of social media sharing (50 percent)
  • quantity of sales leads (48 percent)
  • and their SEO ranking (44 percent).

The time a visitor spends on a page, number of direct sales, qualitative feedback received from customers, number of inbound links received and growth in the number of subscribers from the second set of metrics used by brands to measure their success. A smaller number of organisations also used their benchmark lift data pertaining to company awareness and product or service awareness as a measure of success. Increase in customer loyalty, cross selling and cost savings formed the last three of the top 15 metrics used. 

Measurement of seemingly intangible goals like awareness and engagement

The page performance metrics provided by Google Analytics can be used for strong indication of the success of B2B content marketing. However, for measuring brand awareness and the reach of content that you have developed for promoting brand awareness, the following tools can be used.

#The keyword report from Google Webmaster

After logging into Google’s Webmaster Tools, go to the Search Traffic option, choose Search Queries from the list and then click on the Top Pages tab for an overview of the the number of clicks and impressions your web pages have received from organic-search visitors.

On exporting and filtering the report, you’ll be able to locate the web addresses behind the impressions. The content on those web addresses are what you’re looking for. Since Webmaster displays data from the past 90 days only, conduct period assessments to ensure you don’t miss any important trends.

#Tools from Bing Webmaster

Bing provides the same information, expecting it to use data up to six months old for its analysis. After registering your website for the Bing Webmaster, go to the Reports & Data option and then navigate to Page Traffic for accessing the information.

Post performance on social media

With the growing trend of “social media for business”, social media platforms have significantly fine-tuned measurement and performance benchmarking. For your Facebook page, you can measure the performance of individual posts. Navigate to Page, then Insights and then Posts to access the information. Here, you can also export data at the post or page level to uncover specific details about the engagement of your social media activities.

On Twitter, you can use the menu of Twitter Ads, or the Twitter Analytics toolset to access similar data about your tweets. LinkedIn allows you to navigate to the company insights section for information on the types of visitors and the engagement and impressions percentage of the company updates you make.

For measuring engagement and thought leadership, the following tools can be used.

#Social shares

Tools like “SharedCount” and “Raven” can be used to measure the volume of social shares of your content marketing assets. Social shares are a reliable indicator of engagement levels and thought leadership on a broader level. You can also use API calls and Google spreadsheets to generate your own set of automated reports.

Performance of inbound links using webmaster

Webmaster of both Google and Bing allow you to measure the performance of inbound links which can be used to establish a relationship between your content and its attribution by other parties. Ahrefs Tools also can provide you the same data, allowing you to go one step further with more in-depth analysis.

Further, you can filter the referral data from Google Analytics to get information about your landing page. The information will help you uncover the specific sources that make up the traffic to your website.

Sources:

6 Ways to Measure B2B Content Marketing Performance
The Future of Content Marketing: Trends and Predictions for 2014
What’s the state of digital copywriting?- The annual survey 2013 ( PDF)
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