Is content marketing an art or science

Across the globe, many content marketing campaigns fall flat due to lack of point of view and measurable goals on the content that they churn out. With no clear goals in place , there's no purpose behind the content being produced.

The problem measuring content marketing ROI and deciding upon the metrics to measure it is that it isn’t as black and white as some people make it out to be.

So where do you start? To prove ROI, your content goals should align closely with metrics your CEO cares about: driving revenues. customer retention, and loyalty among others.

This doesn’t mean you make your content too salesy. The key is to build trust with your audience through helpful content that showcases thought leadership. This ensures you are creating better mind share which will translate to market share in the long run.

But you do need to tie content to revenue. If you’re a B2B company, there are a couple of easy places to start.

Demos

A lot of your inbound enquires are for demos or seeking more information from your sales teams. Track conversion metrics to see how many people read your content/ watch your explainer videos before requesting a demo. Then see if there is a higher conversion ratio for such leads. Identify the key drivers that attract and engage the right audience with your content.

SEO

Measure traffic being generated to your website or content for identified target key words and ensure you fine tune the same periodically to improve your search rankings.

Email Newsletter

Newsletter still continues to be one of the most consistent channels to engaging customers. Data shows that email newsletter is 40x more effective at attracting customers over social media channels. Hence conscious effort needs to be put to grow the list. Also track open rate, click rate, and overall percentage of engaged subscribers & fine tune your content accordingly.

Social Media

How are your followers engaging with content across channels? Look to metrics like video views, likes, reach, share and comments.

Earned media

Original research & content can earn press. A thought leadership campaign I did for my company Pink Ladder around “Prevention of sexual harassment at the workplace” caught a lot of press attention & thereby generated pipeline of business enquires.

So to answer the question if content marketing is art or science? I would say, the science comes from setting SMART goals in each of the marketing channel and the art comes in interpreting the data, figuring out which metrics are most impactful for your business, and ensuring that your content marketing is closely aligned with these goals.

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