Over the past two years I’ve been principally involved in writing close to twenty content marketing strategies with Lush Digital. Each strategy seeks to accomplish different business goals, and each strategy addresses different organisational challenges that have thus far prevented a business from achieving its goals.
With these varying, unique factors at play, completing a strategy often feels like cracking a code or solving a puzzle. After weeks of researching every facet of a business, including their industry, audience and competitors, I’m elated to share my conclusions with a client and excited to explain what I found and how I arrived there.
However, these strategies are rendered effectively useless if I forget to address one key factor: measurement.
What’s it to you?
Take, for example, Company X, which wants to increase its brand awareness through a content marketing strategy. A content marketing strategy suggests a series of informative SEO-optimised blog articles answering common customer queries. In execution these blogs receive an unprecedented volume of organic search traffic to the Company X website. Yet Company X still feels as if brand awareness has not been achieved.
Why? Because to Company X, brand awareness meant social mentions and brand-specific searches.
Write it in stone
An effective content marketing strategy achieves business goals in a way that is meaningful to the specific organisation. In the above example, Company X was not wrong, the strategy was. Marketers must provide businesses with only the tools they are equipped to use.
For this reason, it’s imperative measurement metrics are agreed upon prior and documented in a content marketing strategy. The way goals will be measured can affect the entire approach of a strategy.
Track performance against metrics monthly
Beyond the planning phase, it’s near impossible to manage the implementation of a strategy without agreed upon measurement metrics. As a content strategy manager, you need to remain informed about how a strategy is performing month by month.
Keeping track of what’s performed well and what hasn’t allows you to modify a strategy accordingly. In this cycle of continuous improvement and refinement, more accurate means of measuring the success of your goals may be uncovered. These new metrics can, and should, be added to your content strategy. In doing this, your content strategy becomes a living document of best practice, specifically catered to your business.
If you’d like a content marketing strategy centred on measurement, contact Lush. We create bespoke content strategies for industries and businesses of all sizes.
Like what you’ve read? Sign up to the Lush newsletter for fortnightly advice to help you market your business better, tips from our video production gurus, and a podcast or two from our favourite podcasting team, Brand Newsroom. In the meantime, you might enjoy these:
Have you set the right content marketing goals?
Brand Newsroom: The biggest trends in Australian content marketing [podcast with show notes]
Why you need a content marketing editorial calendar
Direct sources for content marketing research
