Is multichannel marketing the key to a successful campaign? Or is it a waste of time and effort? If you don’t have an answer then chances are your content marketing effects are hit and miss, because you don’t have a way fine tune them. Content performance is how you know what works and what is a waste. Learn to approach your metrics holistically to get the most benefit.
Why Go Holistic?
Most individual channels have an analytics platform, but are your really getting the whole picture if you break your campaign into pieces? Creating a content marketing campaign is a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle – there are many individual pieces and each one matters, but to get the real picture, you have to put them all together. That connection is how you know if:
- Your keywords are effective
- You are hiring the best content writer
- You are targeting the right audience
- You are leveraging active marketing channels
How do you even make comparisons when each channel uses a different metric? Twitter focuses on impressions and retweets while Facebook measures likes and shares. A holistic content assessment looks at each piece as it relates to the whole. The holistic approach to analyzing data removes the silos and evaluates the success of the content across all platforms.
Defining Your KPIs
To make things equal in the marketing world, you must define KPIs for each campaign. Key performance indicators are what connect the retweets to the likes and shares. There may not be a cookie cutter way to piece it all together, so you develop your own system. Start by looking for similar metrics.
- Shares are the likes, retweets and blog recommends
- Traffic is visits and video views
- Follows are page likes, fans, favorites and blog subscriptions
From there, you can start to compare apples to apples when measuring performance. You create a common ground between the different channels to generate a holistic performance metric system.
Pulling It All Together
Even with standardized KPIs, you need to find ways to pull all the details together.
- Create common tags for everything – The whole system falls apart if you use different keywords for different platforms. As part of your creative strategy, assign global keywords to use on each channel.
- Set up metrics for each platform – You need to analyze data from every platform. As you collect the data, plug it into a custom spreadsheet, so you can see the overall performance via your personalized mashup system.
- Make sure to use all the tools at your disposal – Go beyond the standard metrics and look for real-time listening tools, too. You can set up alerts that notify you when someone mentions a keyword on any social media platform or plugs it into a search engine.
With a comprehensive assessment, you eliminate the hit and miss factor, so you really know how well a content marketing campaign is working.
Darla F spends her time writing and tackling artistic projects like painting. Her first novel was published in 2009 and she is working on a second and third while still creating engaging content for her clients.
