A Practical Guide for Small Business Owners to Track and Evaluate the Effectiveness of Their Content Marketing Strategy
Alright, so by now you’ve put in all this work into creating content, distributing it, and making sure it resonates with your audience. You've been out there hustling—posting blog articles, making videos, sharing stuff on social media—but how do you know if it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do?
How do you know if your content marketing strategy is working? Well, that’s what we’re about to get into. Let's get real about how to measure your content marketing success and find out what's hitting the mark and what's missing it.
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Why Measurement Matters
Look, I get it—metrics and data can be boring. You didn’t start your small business because you wanted to spend hours staring at numbers on a screen. But here’s the deal: if you’re not measuring your content marketing efforts, then you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. You’ve got to know what’s working so you can do more of that, and what’s not so you can make changes.
The goal here is to understand how your audience is interacting with your content. Are they finding it helpful? Are they sharing it? Are they taking any action after reading or watching? When you track your content’s performance, you get insights that help you make informed decisions and, ultimately, help you grow your business. Thankfully, content marketing tools for small business owners like us have come a long way, so you can take the guesswork out of knowing whether a piece of content is really reaching people.
Even the various social media platforms have, over the last few years, invested heavily in tools that help small businesses and creators alike create quality content, share it, and measure its success. TikTok, for example, has a whole host of content-creator-friendly tools.
Key Metrics to Track
Now, let’s talk about what exactly you should be measuring. There’s a lot of data you could look at, but to keep things simple, let’s focus on some of the key metrics that will give you the most valuable insights:
1. Traffic Metrics
Expected Results: A successful content piece could see an increase of 20-30% in unique visitors month-over-month. For example, if your blog post is getting 1,000 page views a month and then grows to 1,300 page views, that’s a solid indicator that your content is gaining traction.
Page Views: This is the total number of times a piece of content has been viewed. It’s a basic measure of how many people are clicking on your content.
Unique Visitors: This tells you how many individual people are viewing your content. If you have a lot of page views but not many unique visitors, it could mean a small group of people is checking out your content repeatedly.
Traffic Sources: Understanding where your traffic is coming from is key. Are people finding you through search engines? Social media? Links from other websites? Knowing this helps you understand which channels are working best for you.
2. Engagement Metrics
Once you’ve got people to your content, the next step is to understand how they’re engaging with it. Are they sticking around, interacting, and finding value?
Expected Results: For blog content, an average time on page of 2-3 minutes is generally a good benchmark. If users are spending less than 30 seconds, it’s often a sign the content isn’t engaging them effectively. For social media, a share rate of 5-10% indicates strong engagement, while a high bounce rate above 70% may mean you need to revisit the content's relevance or call-to-action.
Time on Page: This measures how long people are spending on your content. If they’re only staying for a few seconds, that’s a sign they’re not finding it interesting or relevant.
Bounce Rate: This tells you the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing just one page. A high bounce rate might mean your content isn’t grabbing attention or delivering on what people are expecting.
Comments, Shares, and Likes: These are your classic social engagement metrics. If people are sharing your content, commenting on it, or liking it, that’s a good indication that it’s resonating with them.
3. Conversion Metrics
Ultimately, content marketing should be driving results for your business. Conversion metrics help you understand if your content is moving people to take meaningful actions.
Expected Results: Average conversion rates for lead magnets, such as e-books or newsletters, tend to fall between 2-5%. If 100 people view your sign-up form and 4 sign up, that’s a 4% conversion rate—meaning you’re doing well. As for sales, content that directly leads to purchases often shows a return on investment (ROI) of 4:1, meaning for every $1 spent on content marketing, you earn $4 in sales.
Lead Generation: Are people signing up for your newsletter, downloading your e-book, or filling out a contact form after engaging with your content? This is one of the most important metrics because it directly ties your content efforts to business growth.
Sales and Revenue: Ultimately, the goal of content marketing is to grow your business. Are people who engage with your content eventually buying from you? If you have an e-commerce site, track whether visitors who read your blog end up making a purchase.
4. SEO Metrics
Search engine optimization is what helps your content get discovered organically. Tracking SEO metrics helps you understand how well your content is ranking and whether it’s driving traffic from search engines.
Expected Results: Improving your keyword rankings can take time, but a good goal is to see steady growth in your target keywords over a period of 3-6 months. For backlinks, a strong content piece might earn 10-20 quality backlinks within a few months of publication, indicating that it’s being recognized as a valuable resource.
Keyword Rankings: If you’re optimizing your content for certain keywords, track where those keywords are ranking on search engines. Are you moving up the rankings, or is there room for improvement?
Backlinks: Are other websites linking to your content? Backlinks are a great sign that people find your content valuable, and they also help boost your SEO.
Tools to Help You Measure Success
Alright, so you know what metrics to track, but how do you actually track them? There are a ton of tools out there, but I’m going to give you a few that are user-friendly and won’t break the bank:
Google Analytics: This is the go-to tool for tracking website traffic, engagement, and conversions. It’s free, and it gives you a ton of information about how people are interacting with your site.
Google Search Console: If you want to understand how your content is performing in search, Google Search Console is your best friend. It helps you see which keywords are bringing in traffic and whether there are any technical issues holding you back.
Social Media Analytics: Most social media platforms have built-in analytics. Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and LinkedIn Analytics can give you a lot of useful information about how your content is performing on those platforms.
HubSpot: If you’re ready to invest a bit more in your marketing efforts, HubSpot is a great tool for tracking everything from traffic and leads to sales and customer engagement. Plus, it integrates well with your email and CRM efforts.
Evaluating and Adjusting Your Strategy
Once you’ve gathered all this data, the next step is to use it to refine your strategy. Measurement is only half the battle—taking action is what will ultimately drive your success.
Expected Engagement Benchmarks: For small businesses, a good initial benchmark is to see at least a 5-10% increase in key metrics like time on page, social shares, or conversions within the first few months of consistent content updates. These small wins can indicate that your strategy is headed in the right direction.
Identify What’s Working: Look at your top-performing content and ask yourself why it’s doing well. Is it because of the topic, the format, or the distribution channel? Once you understand what’s working, you can double down on it.
Identify What’s Not Working: If you have content that’s not performing well, don’t just let it sit there. Maybe it needs a better headline, maybe it’s not optimized for SEO, or maybe it’s just not resonating with your audience. Make tweaks, update the content, or consider repurposing it into a different format.
Experiment and Test: Content marketing isn’t an exact science, and sometimes the best way to learn is to experiment. Try different content types, different headlines, or different distribution channels. Use A/B testing to compare results and see what resonates best with your audience.
Set Realistic Benchmarks: When you’re just starting out, it’s easy to get discouraged if you’re not getting hundreds of shares or thousands of views. Remember, everyone starts somewhere. Set realistic benchmarks based on where you are right now, and aim to improve incrementally. Celebrate small wins along the way.
Wrapping Up
Content marketing isn’t about instant results. It’s about building relationships and trust over time. You won’t always see immediate returns, but the key is to keep at it, keep measuring, and keep adjusting. The more you understand your audience and what resonates with them, the better you’ll be at creating content that drives real value for your business.
Think back to the soap operas we talked about in the last article. Those companies didn’t sponsor shows expecting viewers to run out and buy soap during the next commercial break. They understood that brand awareness takes time, and they were willing to play the long game. The same goes for your content marketing strategy—measure, adjust, and stay consistent.
In the next article, we’ll look at emerging trends in content marketing and how small businesses can collaborate with others to amplify their reach. Stay tuned, and keep creating!
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