Is your content marketing strategy failing? How to find out about it and what to do

Originally published on March 29, 2019

You’ve developed a marketing strategy, fastidiously organized your editorial calendar, and spent countless hours and perhaps priceless money on your business. How do that your effort is paying off? In just a few easy steps, you’ll be able to determine whether your content marketing strategy has failed or succeeded.

Start by understanding your goals

First and foremost, understand your goal. Is it to establish thought leadership for your brand, generate leads, construct a community of fans, higher understand your audience, etc.? This could appear obvious, but defining your goals is a necessary first step before analyzing whether you might be achieving them.

Use Google Analytics to get basic user data

Analyzing Google Analytics trends is a superb place to begin for monitoring content quality. Google Analytics is a free, feature-rich and powerful analytics tool provided by Google. Setup is so simple as installing a snippet of code into your site’s global header. Once installed, GA will provide a wealth of data about user behavior on every page of your blog. You can get this information by going to “Content”, then “User Behavior”, then filtering by “Blog”.

There are just a few key stats in GA which are value being attentive to. You’ll want to monitor the next across all posts and individual posts:

• Views indicate whether your topics and headings are interesting and Search engine optimization-friendly, and whether your blog posts are being shared on social media. Page views are influenced by various aspects, equivalent to the amount and quality of content and promotion on social media platforms and email newsletters.

• Bounce rate and exit rate show you how to understand whether users click through to other posts after reading a given article. A bounce occurs when the primary page on your site can also be displayed last time. The exit indicates that the user has left the positioning after viewing that page. These metrics typically measure the standard of content, in addition to the effectiveness of cross-promoting content from other blogs or sites.

Social sharing behavior layer

Next, it’s value understanding the virality (defined as “the tendency of an image, video, or information to spread quickly and widely among Internet users”) of your content. The essential reason is to understand your overall sharing behavior, but the subsequent step is to understand how your content is shared across different social media platforms. For example, it’s possible you’ll be surprised to discover that your content is shared more often on Facebook than on X, formerly often called Twitter or LinkedIn.

However, the variety of shares alone won’t inform you much without considering the variety of views. A not-so-obvious key metric that actually indicates how viral your content is is the share-to-view ratio. This metric indicates whether the subject of your content was interesting and of excellent quality, or in other words, whether the content delivered value as expected within the post title.

Look for trends in your data

Now that you’ve your content dashboard created, you’ll be able to analyze the general performance of your blog and, more importantly, the performance of individual posts. In a short while, you’ll give you the chance to discover trends that may influence future content creation and allow you to understand how aspects equivalent to content quality, quantity and promotion affect the views and shares of content pages.

Examples of content trends within the dashboard:

• Topics – Which topics or themes tend to resonate with your audience? You’ll probably want to create more content on these topics in the long run. Conversely, content that seems of little interest to the audience could also be faraway from the long run editorial calendar.

• Titles– Do certain title styles appeal more to your audience? Some audiences may prefer a straightforward title, others may prefer a listing format, equivalent to top 10 lists or teaser-style headlines. Identifying title trends will show you how to be sure that future content is more likely to be read by your audience.

• Author’s—Perhaps some authors have more views and shares than others. When this happens, be certain that you maintain good relationships with successful authors and consider increasing the frequency of their posts.

These are only just a few examples of trends that illustrate the ability of maintaining a blog dashboard. You’ll likely discover other trends relevant to your specific business and blog.

By following these easy steps, you must give you the chance to confidently proceed with your blogging strategy. Updating and reviewing the dashboard once per week with your content team will be sure that your blog is tailored to your audience and that the standard, quantity and findability of your content meet your expectations.