Top B2B content marketing metrics for 2017

A new year brings new metrics. Or maybe it’s just a good reminder that you need to evaluate your existing KPIs.

Which B2B content marketing metrics should you add in 2017?

It’s the perfect time of the year to evaluate your content marketing strategy and focus on the latest trends that will take your B2B marketing plan to the next level.

How about starting with the metrics that you need to pay closer attention to from now on?

Unique visitors

A content marketing strategy starts from your site and the unique visitors indicate the actual traffic you gained through your content.

It may not be enough to measure all your content marketing efforts, but it’s still the starting point for you to examine whether you managed to increase the interest towards your site’s content.

Bounce rate

If the site’s traffic indicates the interest towards your content, then a high bounce rate indicates the exact opposite. If your site’s bounce rate is high, this means that visitors are not interested enough to explore more pages of content.

If you want to lower your bounce rate, you might need to examine the content that led to the highest rate of engagement.

What differentiated it from the rest of it? How can you improve your content from now on to maintain your audience’s interest?

Along with the bounce rate, you can also monitor the time spent on your site, in order to examine the length of the average visit.

What can you learn from your bounce rate or the time spent on your site? Is it time to re-evaluate your content strategy?

Location

If you’re aiming for a local content marketing strategy, then it’s crucial to pay attention to the location of your visitors.

Do they reflect your target audience? How can you make your content more locally-focused?

What if there’s a new opportunity to expand your business to a new location?

Device

Mobile marketing is only getting bigger, which means that the analysis of the devices that the users visited your site are becoming more important.

First of all, is your site optimised for all the devices?

If it is, is your content’s formatting mobile-friendly?

If it’s not, how about adding it to your new year’s priorities?

After all, a mobile-optimised site brings more chances to reach a new audience that consumes content on-the-go and despite the challenges of their habits, they are still eager to explore new ideas.

Email

Email clicks

Email marketing is not just about the number of opens your campaigns achieved, as the actual clicks indicate a more precise interest towards your content.

Did you convince the recipients to actually click on your content, or did they leave without proceeding to any action?

It may be time to pay more attention to your CTA and the way you add links to your email campaigns, in order to increase your click rate and thus, the traffic back to your site (or any landing page).

Unsubscribes and opt-outs

As with bounce rate, unsubscribes and opt-outs mark the lack of interest from recipients to keep receiving your email newsletters.

This may be due to:

• lack of relevance
• frequency problems
• lack of personalisation

If there is an increased opt-out rate in your email campaigns, then this may be a warning sign that you need to reconsider your email marketing strategy as sound as possible.

Social media

Comments and shares

Engagement is important in social media and the best way to measure it is through the comments and the shares on each post.

Likes may still prove that your content was appreciated by your audience, but as they are more common signs of approval, the other two are appreciated more, as they require further actions.

It’s not just about clicking on the Like button, as users proceed to additional steps, whether they want to express their opinions over the topic through comments, or share the post to their own feeds.

This is the best type of approval and it shows that your target audience appreciates the content enough to feel the need to be involved in it.

Conversion

Lead Generation

If you’re serious about increasing your leads through content marketing, then your CRM may help you keep track of the new leads your generated through every platform.

This can be extremely useful when trying to understand the most effective types of content and the best distribution platforms for your marketing strategy.

Moreover, this may help you calculate how your existing leads react to your content, giving you a better understanding on the evaluation of your content marketing strategy.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate gives you further insights on the pieces of content that helped convert your leads into the sales funnel.

What types of content work better for your target audience? How can you convert the prospects into clients?

No matter what goals you set for the new year, these metrics can be very useful for the measurement of your efforts. Pick the ones that work better for you and get ready to update your KPI spreadsheet.

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