The topic of measuring the success of your content marketing efforts is not a glitzy one and it used to make me run for the hills. Numbers, graphs, charts, and the like seemed really detailed and boring. Calculating an ROI? Really? I’m a creative person, not a data drone! Maybe you are too. But you need to figure out if your marketing is working.

It’s not always possible to know which element of your online content has had the most impact on an individual’s decision to email you or pick up the phone and call. We might know where they were when the trigger was pulled. But the path they followed might have been circuitous. That being said, it is highly desirable to do what it takes to show up well in search engine results. For that you need a highly appealing and optimized website, and enough online presence and activity to convince the search engines that they need to push you to page one of the SERPs. Page three at a pinch.

But how does that work?

We’ve all done website searches and started sorting through the results that the search engine results gave us. We’ve found a web page listing that looked appealing and linked to that company’s website. It showed up in the first place because that company possibly/probably had active presences on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and their consistent messaging across all platforms indicates that they sell what you need. So the number of website visits that company gets is directly related to how well it is maximizing its online real estate overall. The matrix is expanding and I think businesses now need to measure as much as possible and become so familiar with their statistics that they get a good feel for which activities are co-related with more queries.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

You need to know what you want to measure and to do that, you need to know what your content marketing goals are. If you set a goal and take action anywhere in life, and then measure your results, you can adjust your action in the future to try to achieve different results. But without the goal, there’s no way of knowing whether your results are good or bad, and there’s no way to know what to improve going forward.

Content marketing programs can become very pricey. They can be very labour intensive and, to be honest, a consultant with enough expertise to think they know what they’re doing (to the extent that this field lends itself to overarching expertise) is not going to work for peanuts. You can find people who will work cheaply, and you can find writers on crowdsourcing sites who will write a page of copy for a handful of dollars. A lot of people I otherwise respect in the digital space recommend this route. I don’t believe you can get great quality for a low price in any field of endeavour, but especially not in the field of communicating any information at all that relates to your business reputation. You might save dollars on the outlay, but it’s going to cost you dollars on the in-come. Writing is an area of craftsmanship. You get what you pay for.

We’ll take a look at that issue in more detail in our next blog in this series on measuring marketing success – so stay tuned!