How to Measure Your B2B Content Strategy (Without Drowning in Data)

So as I said, this episode is about measurement and knowing whether your content strategy is working.

So why is this important? Now you could have created a fantastic content strategy and be really clear on your messaging and your channels and your formats and your audience and your competitor analysis and all of that.

But if you don't have the piece where you look at how you're going to measure whether it's working, and as I mentioned earlier, you could be a busy fool.

You could be creating so much content, but it does not make a difference in terms of the business outcomes that your content strategy supports.

So why do we need it? Because we need to know that the content strategy is serving its purpose.

So then the big question is, how do you know what you should be measuring as part of your content strategy? I'd like to refer you to episode 355 on the Content 10X podcast, which was part two of this B2B content strategy series, because we looked at understanding your business goals and understanding how your content strategy supports those business goals and So that should give you a really good clear idea of what you should be measuring to determine whether your content strategy is working because it needs to be impacting upon the business goals that you support.

So that's a key indicator.

What are the key business goals? And therefore work out the metrics from your content strategy that are going to impact upon those business goals.

So, for example, let's say that your content strategy is to support the main business goal at the moment, which is to increase brand awareness.

Then the metrics that you may be looking at within your content strategy to see if that's working may be around the reach of your content.

and the impressions and the engagement you may get that data from the social media platforms or the social tools that you use to post content may also be from your website from google analytics it could be from the mentions that you hope to get as you increase brand awareness where do you expect to start getting mentioned ai citation as well so they're the kind of metrics that may support where the business goal is largely around brand awareness That's going to be quite different if the main business goal that your strategy supports is to get people through to the consideration phase.

So to get your audience from awareness to consideration.

In that case, the kind of metrics that you may be looking at could be things like increasing your email subscribers and then also looking at those email open rates.

or let's say that you run webinars, then looking at webinar attendance rates, or let's say you have useful lead magnets and downloads on your website, then data could be looking at how many people are signing up for those and getting those resources.

So all the actions that show people go from being aware of who you are to getting more into that consideration phase.

or perhaps your content strategy is largely focused on conversion and in that case you'll be looking at increasing sales and pipeline and those key conversion statistics or maybe your content strategy is more in support of conversion so in that case you're looking at pipeline data and sales and indicators there may be things like people booking in for demos for example So you have those lagging indicators, things like booking demos and the sales calls, etc.

And then more leading indicators, which is the reach and the impressions and the content consumption.

So when you're deciding what metrics are important, you want to be looking at, are you reaching the right audience? Are they engaging with your content? Are you sharing the content in the right format? So that will come through the engagement metrics if people are engaging with the right formats and on the right channels.

And also, are people taking action off the back of that engagement as well? Another important thing to consider is there are going to be quantitative metrics, but also qualitative metrics as well.

So quantitative will be more the hard, fast data And then you've got the qualitative, which isn't always as easy to measure, but it's still really, really important.

So make sure that you balance that quantitative and qualitative metrics and data.

And then you also need to consider within that vanity metrics and value metrics as well.

Don't get too focused on those vanity metrics.

For example, perhaps you've got 10,000 impressions on a LinkedIn post.

but that didn't really lead to anything.