Measuring B2B Online Content Success

As a B2B online marketer, you’ve already realized that while the channels are the same for reaching the everyday consumer, your strategy in reaching YOUR target audience is distinctly different. That’s not to say you can’t still be successful in creating and delivering valuable content to your target audience.

Like most businesses with an online presence, your goals fall somewhere in these areas: brand awareness, lead generation, customer acquisition, thought leadership,  engagement (customer loyalty and retention), and increasing website traffic. But does telling the C-suite how many likes, retweets and shared messages you had in the past six-months mean anything to the bottom line? This great article from Content Marketing World gives basic advice for how you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing content.

For brand awareness, metrics from Google Analytics show strong indicators of content marketing success, but it does not always illustrate the reach of the content that’s developed and promoted. More effective benchmarks for analyzing your brand awareness include keyword reports, webmaster tools and social media post performance.

The Google Webmaster Tool suite improves your ability to review traffic, especially with lack of keyword referral data from Google Analytics. For an overview of the clicks and impressions your site is generating, use Webmaster Tools navigate to Search Traffic – Queries – Top Pages. You’ll want to record the impressions, clicks and keywords from organic search results these web pages have received. **NOTE: this data is only accessible for 90 days, so you should export info periodically to build out trending data.

Bing Webmaster Tools provide similar data in association to Bing search engine results. Once registered, you can use Reports & Data- Page Traffic to monitor visitor trends.

Social Media platforms also offer a variety of tracking data which help prove reach and engagement of your online content. When reviewing this data, significant metrics for post performance include:Facebook – individual post performance and comprehensive data exports
Twitter – performance activity (favorites, replies, retweets)
LinkedIn – visitor types, impressions and engagement percentages of company updates

As we move onto the most effective ways to monitor thought leadership and engagement are similar, first, consider your social shares. Paying attention to the volume of sharing across your platforms can be an important indicator for establishing improvements in thought leadership and broader engagement levels. Other resources like SharedCount and RavenTools provide simple-to-evaluate dashboards for insight on shared posts and mentions.

Also inbound link performance helps establish the ties between quality content and attribution by third parties. Inbound link reports from Webmaster Tools enable you to review third-party sites linking in, as well as specific inbound links on individual pages. So what does this mean to you?? When relevant audiences and influencers share and link to your content, you will be able to see how many additional likes and reach your message has among targeted audiences.

Finally, web page referral reports can help identify the specific sources of traffic to your site from various landing pages. The “Secondary Dimension” filter helps define the source and specific domains that sent traffic to that web page.

There are many other methods and metrics that can be recorded and tracked from your website and social media platforms. These should give you a good place to start when evaluating your content marketing goals.