How do you know if your content is making an impact?

2 Choose your key performance indicators

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to measure the success of your content in achieving your goals. Depending on the purpose of your content, you may want to track different KPIs for different channels and types of content. For example, some common KPIs for content impact are reach, engagement, traffic, leads, conversions, retention, and loyalty. Reach measures how many people see your content across different platforms and devices; engagement is about how many people interact with your content by liking, commenting, sharing, or clicking; traffic looks at how many people visit your website or landing page from your content sources; leads evaluates how many people provide their contact information or sign up for your offer or newsletter; conversions measure how many people take the desired action on your website or landing page; retention looks at how many people return to your website or content sources and consume more of your content; and loyalty examines how many people become repeat customers, advocates, or promoters of your brand or content.

3 Use analytics tools and platforms

In order to measure and monitor your KPIs, you need to use analytics tools and platforms that can collect and display data from your content sources. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that can track and analyze your website traffic, behavior, and conversions. It can measure metrics such as page views, bounce rate, time on page, sessions, sources, goals, and events. Additionally, you can create custom reports and dashboards to visualize your data and insights. Social media platforms have their own analytics features that can show you how your content is performing on their networks. You can use third-party tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social to manage and analyze your social media content across multiple platforms. If you use email marketing as part of your content strategy, you need to use an email marketing tool that can track and analyze your email campaigns. Email marketing analytics can measure metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, conversions, and revenue. Popular email marketing tools are Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and HubSpot.

4 Analyze and optimize your content

Once you have your data and insights from your analytics tools and platforms, you need to analyze and optimize your content based on your findings. Ask yourself questions such as: what are the best-performing and worst-performing content pieces, channels, and formats? What are the trends and patterns in your content performance over time and across segments? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and execution? What are the opportunities and threats for your content in the market and among competitors? What actions should you take to improve your content impact and achieve your goals? By answering these questions, you can identify the gaps in your content strategy and execution. Then, use the data and insights to optimize your content by creating more of what works, experimenting with different topics, formats, styles, headlines, images, calls to action, landing pages, segmenting for different audiences, promoting on the right channels, repurposing existing content, etc.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?