Analysis

Evaluating how your system is working will be as complicated as you want to make it. You could spend every minute of every day evaluating individual social media posts, the performance of particular webpages, and the traffic to your website overall. You need to remember how reviewing your performance is enhancing or hindering the execution of the plan in the first place. Until you have a track record with Content Marketing, you really don’t know what will work and what won’t; this means that you need to concern yourself with simply producing content over the next 3 to 12 months to see how it will perform.
With that said, here are the metrics I recommend you use to ensure that your strategy is having an impact.

WEBSITE ANALYTICS

The three aspects of your website analytics that you need to concern yourself with are Sessions, Users, and Pageviews. These three pieces of information will tell you everything you need to know about your overall performance. While you could simply run reports on Google Analytics, I suggest that you create a spreadsheet to track each of these metrics on a monthly basis. You’re trying to find three month averages as well as monthly gains or losses in traffic; comparing your average against your current monthly results will ensure that you are staying on track.

EMAIL PERFORMANCE

In terms of your email campaigns, you are looking for three things: email list growth, emails viewed, and emails engaged. If you are incorporating sign up forms on your website correctly, you should begin to see a link between total visitors and total email sign ups. When you send your emails, you’re aiming for an open rate of 25% on average. In terms of engagement, you’re aiming for 25% of the people who view the email. If you send 20,000 emails, this means that 5,000 people should open the email, and of those 5,000 people opening the email, 1,250 click on something within the email. If you are not achieving these rates, you may want to review your methods and experiment with different techniques.

SOCIAL MEDIA PERFORMANCE

Each social media network has different ways to track results. In the case of Instagram, you have to use a third party provider like IconoSquare (http://iconosquare.com/). On each platform the metrics that you need to concern yourself with are followers/subscribers and how much traffic is being directed to your website through the platform. You could, of course, track the likes, comments, and shares of each post, but for the sake of executing this strategy in the first three months, just worry about traffic to your website and follower growth. As a general rule, you should concentrate on the social media network that is sending you the most traffic.