Ideally, each of the elements under the gambit of marketing including content marketing should be tied up with your long-term company goals. Which means, instead of hopping from one blog to another, it helps to think of ways to align your content with high-level, high-growth business objectives. 

Content creation demands time and resources. Creating content is not the only objective; content is in fact, a means to an end. You need to first find your end goal. Before we dive into some of the top tools to track your content marketing metrics let’s see what brands have done with their content to create a difference:

1. SlideBean drove nearly $200,000 within a year only with the help of their content marketing strategy. Content became their major growth driver for their SaaS start-up. Read the full-story here.
2. Groove, a help desk company built an empire with the help of their content marketing strategy. They publish no ads, indulge in no other kind of marketing. It is only content. Read their case here.  

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These examples mean one thing –> You need to focus on content marketing initiatives that drive serious, real and measurable business objectives. However, it doesn’t happen automatically. It is a step-by-step process that a content marketing teams needs to breakdown to execute. Here are a few tips:

• Define and prioritize your business goals

You have planned to invest in content marketing, and it is because you want to gain some tangible benefits. Your goals would sound similar to objectives like: increasing traffic, drive event registrations, generate more users, improve brand awareness and so on. It is important to be cognizant towards content marketing goals and eventually, it will generate traffic, boost sales and company revenue. 

• Understand your metrics – Tools that help

The next step is to determine your key metrics. You have set forth your business goals, but now these goals should be translated into metrics that have to be tracked over time. Goals such as organic traffic, number of leads coming to your website are easier to track. Some other metrics are less direct, such as brand awareness, branded search traffic and so on. 

Whatever the case is, you need to have specific KPIs to measure these indices directly.

Some tools that can help are: 

• HubSpot Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software

The better access to the data you have, the easier it is to run the business. HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software does this. With this tool, your marketing and CRM is organized at one place, pulling insights from the multiple campaigns you run.

• Buffer

Buffer is another popular content marketing analytics tool offering options to build reports according to specific goals. The tool updates these reports daily and these reports are very easy to export and share. The analytics of Buffer are so designed that marketers can observe their detailed performance on the dashboard. 

• Google Analytics

We have known Google Analytics for quite long. It is an ideal and expansive system of tools meant to improve the end-to-end content marketing game. It offers an intuitive interface, which is easy to navigate and it can be used to understand the performance of content across various platforms. 

• SimilarWeb

This tool offers insights on your web traffic and customer engagement. You will always know where you stand against your competition by looking at the insights from SimilarWeb. Some top features of the tool are counting daily active users, sessions per use, rank and use-time. 

• Identify tactics that work for you

In this step, we need to identity particular activities that need to happen. In short, we have to find means to the ends. If your business goals are properly aligned with relevant metrics, your content marketing strategy can be built around the goal of improving the metrics you have identified. The more goals you set, the more strategies you will have to put in place to achieve those. 

• Tag and track

How do you organize your plan? Write it down, and you will have a clear framework of how things are going to be. To ensure that things are working well, you need to deploy the right technology and tracking to make sure that you can clearly and accurately measure and attribute that data you need. 

• Measure and learn

After you set up everything, the next important cycle to follow is to measure everything and learn. Setting up is a trial, the entire film is yet to be created with the help of evaluation, which is a never ending process. 

Today, nothing compares to great content, but your investment should create value over time. Do it correctly and turn every content marketing initiative into a smart investment. 

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