After producing a series of excellent stories, videos, or social media posts, you may think your job as a content marketer is done. But high-quality content — no matter how much effort went into creating it — doesn’t automatically equal success.
Is the content you’re making increasing sales? Visits to your site? Growing your audience? To put it simply: Is your marketing achieving your business’s goals? One of the biggest challenges any content marketer faces is coming up with a way to determine whether their content is actually working.
There may be some easy marketing wins hidden in plain sight that you are overlooking in your strategy. With that in mind, here are six ideas to refine your content marketing — and create the desired effect on your target audience.
Six Content Marketing Easy Wins You Don’t Want To Miss
1. SEO Optimization
Consider this: 40% of consumers regularly receive irrelevant content, according to a 2024 report by marketing platform Marigold. That leaves a lot of room for your content to break through — if you can get it in front of the right eyes. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the way to do that.
It may sound complicated, but good SEO practices are simple. Think about which keywords your audience will use to search for what you’re making — then research them on SEO software platforms such as Semrush to see which words and phrases are the most effective. Use those prominently in the content. Ideal places for these keywords to appear are in the page and site titles, headers, first few paragraphs, and metadata.
Make sure the keywords match both the content and your business. After all, if someone clicks on your story, then immediately decides to go do something else, how can you possibly say you’ve given them an experience that will inspire them to think differently about your brand? Search engines like Google see that behavior and punish you for it, too.
Start with the low-hanging fruit. Look for articles that are almost ranking in top positions, and prioritize updating and promoting those first. Then you can move on to other content on your site.
Finally, how your site is structured and how transparent it is matters, too. If you optimize keywords, but still are struggling to get search traffic, check your site’s loading speed, mobile friendliness, and “About” pages.
2. Click-Through Rate Improvements
One way to measure how relevant your content is the click-through rate or CTR — i.e. how often someone goes from the content or ad to your site. A high CTR — generally hovering at the 2% to 5% mark— can deliver impressive results at a lower cost than other forms of advertising. Look at CTR in these three ways.
First, think about how a customer is encountering your brand and work to make that encounter as seamless and engaging as possible. This includes repetition, as people tend to have more favorable views of brands that are already familiar to them. It also includes being platform friendly: The vast majority of people use the internet through their phone, so make sure all of your content (and the websites they link to) is optimized for that experience.
Next, ask yourself which medium is best for your message and audience. For example, video content continues to work well across platforms, with a 2019 study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau reporting nearly 80% of digital viewers are willing to watch advertising in exchange for free video content.
Then, focus on which strategies increase CTRs with your most loyal visitors. Typically, super users are the ones most likely to check out what your brand offers when it’s time for them to make a purchase (and perhaps recommend it to their friends).
As MailChimp, a leading email marketing platform, states: “A high click-through rate means that the [copy] was engaging and relevant, the call to action was clearly defined, and the overall engagement was good.”
3. Calls to Action Geared to Your Audience’s Stage of the Buyer Journey
So you got a customer’s attention. What’s next? The call to action (CTA). Instead of strictly focusing on sales, think about whether a piece of content is effective in moving a consumer along the path to purchase.
Along a buyer’s journey, there will be big and small CTAs. Did one of your readers sign up for your email newsletter? Did they click a link to a product landing page? Did they watch a product tutorial video? All of these actions can make a consumer more likely to make a purchase once they are ultimately targeted with a direct sales offer. That’s particularly true if the CTA is personalized to where the customer is in their buyer’s journey.
When and how you make the CTA is important. It’s helpful to think of your audience as coming to you through a funnel: The majority of people may see an ad or piece of content and never click through. A smaller amount will click through, but never shop. A still smaller amount may put stuff in their cart, but never buy. And at the bottom of the funnel are the golden eggs — the people who go through with a purchase.
Make sure your CTAs aren’t overly aggressive for the top-of-funnel users — and, conversely, that high-intent visitors are given clear CTAs to purchase.
4. Increased Scroll Depth
Once the reader makes a decision to visit your page, every second matters. So, the next step is to optimize scroll depth — often measured as the percentage of the page or content a person views before clicking away. A good scroll depth is considered to be 60% or more, according to researchers at UXtweak, although it depends on your specific content and medium.
Even if your user is not at the 60% point yet, this measure can still help you. Look at how far users are scrolling and make sure sticky elements and CTAs appear just before the average person exits the content. Quality matters here, too. Put your biggest effort into making these messages aesthetically beautiful and frictionless.
5. Engagement Leading to Loyalty
Research shows it takes just a minute for users to engage with content enough to understand the thesis and recall important information. That’s why it’s important to look at the engaged time and finish rate — ie. how long someone stays on the linked content and whether they read or watch your content all the way through.
This tells you whether the people you’ve attracted to your work are enjoying it enough to stick around — and indicates how likely a customer is to read your content again in the future. Tracking pixels can help you analyze which of your target consumers are making a habit of engaging with your brand over the long-term.
6. Brand Lift Analysis
Consumers usually do not make a purchase immediately after watching or reading a piece of content, so you may have a harder time showing impact than, say, a direct-response marketer (who can just point to their sales conversions). Measuring brand lift gives key insights about the impact your work is having on your audiences and helps you home in on what you should do more of.
Brand lift looks at how much your relationship with consumers has changed as a result of your content. It’s common to hire a survey firm to perform this work. The survey will ask two groups of people what they think of your brand — one who hasn’t seen your content-marketing work, and one who has. For example, they may ask: “Would you consider purchasing Brand X cookies the next time you’re shopping for snacks?” or “Do you see Brand X as trustworthy?” This comparison allows you to see how much — and which type — of your content is moving the needle with your target audience. (If you don’t have the resources to hire a survey firm, you can conduct your own research among your customer base.)
Keep in mind: Analytics alone don’t tell the whole story. Today, researchers can look at a host of physiological reactions — from eye movement, to brainwave and heart rate, to nonverbal facial expressions —to understand how content and customers interact. If the project and budget are big enough, you can hire researchers to actually test physiological responses to your messages. Then, make sure to implement what the researchers suggest!
Key Takeaways
As a content marketer, you’ll always need to prove your work’s value if the company is going to give you the budget to create more in the future.
When discussing content marketing with your peers and supervisors, it’s important to remember that the purpose of content is to build relationships for the long term. Even if content does not deliver immediate ROI, it very well could pay off exponentially over several months or years.
By using these five tips, you should not only increase the efficiency and value of your content, but also be able to communicate your success to the relevant stakeholders.
Learn more on what content format to choose for your marketing campaign
