There is no handbook for doing content marketing right.

The world of content is ever-changing. Trends keep coming and going and marketers need to be fast at adapting in order to stay afloat.

To understand whether your content marketing strategy is really working, you need to evaluate it using the right KPIs. These KPIs should be directly linked to your goals.

Here are some of the common marketing goals and the related KPIs that you can track.

Improving Brand Awareness

Although high brand awareness won’t directly impact sales, it is the first stage of any sales funnel and is necessary to generate leads.

Brand awareness indicates how many people know of your brand. When they’re in need of the product you offer, would they think of your brand?

Good content can help you achieve just that. Content that improves brand awareness, is about educating the audience and helping them remember your brand.

To find out whether your content is promoting brand awareness, you can track KPIs like views, site traffic, social shares, engagement rate, inbound links, and brand mentions.

Generating Quality Leads

You may have a large customer base and steady sales.

But, are you really content with that? No, right?

Every business strives to achieve higher targets every day. Lead generation can help you bring in new customers and expand your business.

You can use content marketing for generating quality leads,  especially if your content is engaging, relevant, and valuable.

To gauge if your content is bringing more leads into the sales funnel, track relevant KPIs. Some of the common ones are click-through rates and cost-per-lead.

Driving Sales Conversions

If your content marketing strategy isn’t translating to dollars, you won’t get the desired ROI. Using content marketing to get conversions may take time as building your online presence is not easy.

However, eventually, part of your traffic should convert to money-paying customers.

In this regard, you need to take a closer look at your conversion rate. You should then find out which platforms and which types of content are good at getting conversions.

For businesses that are well-established, monitoring the length of the sales cycle is also valuable. This can help marketers identify the channels that can close leads faster.

Tracking the right KPIs is a great way to polish your content marketing strategy, and get more bang for the buck.If you want to delve deeper into the world of content marketing KPIs, check out the infographic below. You can also check out my post on the topic at shanebarker.com.