Brand awareness. Consumer engagement. Thought leadership. These are the returns of content marketing. And while they are extremely valuable to both B2B and B2C businesses, the coveted, quantifiable return on investment remains elusive. It’s out there–there are statistics that prove businesses value content marketing and numerous reasons to invest in content marketing. But marketers continue to struggle with how to measure content marketing ROI.

Often, senior executives define success in terms of converted leads, but that is not always the most accurate metric to measure content marketing ROI. Content marketing provides a long list of benefits that cannot be reduced to a single statistic. Check out our tips for evaluating content marketing success. These pointers will help you decide how to measure content marketing ROI and determine the effectiveness of your own content marketing strategy.

1. Identify Your Content Goals First. How you measure content marketing ROI depends on the content’s purpose. Is your goal to increase website subscribers? Make a sale? Generate leads? It is impossible to accurately measure content without first answering these questions. The goal will determine the content’s format; for example, ebooks often serve to generate leads while webinars foster thought leadership, according to Hubspot. Based on the identified goal and chosen content format, you can choose appropriate metrics to measure ROI. That can mean landing page visits, social shares, sign-ups etc.

2. Have an open mind. Do not use only one metric to measure ROI. Content serves a brand in multiple ways and you need to look at more than one metric to evaluate its success. Content may not immediately spike conversion or boost you to number one in Google, but it could drive traffic, increase page views, or generate leads. Outside of on-site analytics, content often generates social signals such as Facebook likes, retweets, followers, links back and comments which are also extremely encouraging, according to Mashable. These are all signs of success and prerequisites to conversion.

3. Focus on Trends. Measuring the short-term performance of a single piece of content is not an effective indicator of your content strategy’s overall performance. Do not measure how many more retweets a post got today versus yesterday. Instead, tracking average monthly retweets over multiple content channels is a more effective way to analyze progress, says Mashable.

4. Be Patient. Conversion is a concrete indicator of ROI, but it can take months before you begin to see these results. Other metrics mentioned earlier like page views and social shares are equally valuable. They show people respond well to your content, that you are building brand awareness, and your strategy is working. These metrics may not immediately translate to conversion, but are key steps on the path to turning visitors into customers. It may not happen overnight, but content will generate satisfying ROI.

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