Every Tuesday and Thursday I help teach a Digital Marketing course at General Assembly, and one of the classes was on Content Marketing — a topic that I love. When I was planning out what I was going to teach, it was hard for me to determine the best place to start because I had a lot of ground to cover.

I started the class with what is going on in content marketing now, how to start creating content, and then, what I think grabbed my students attention, how to measure your content. It’s not about just writing some thing to go on your homepage, creating copy for an ad, spinning up pretty infographics, or producing a blog post.

As a marketer, it’s your job to measure how well these pieces of content performed and what to create next. Even though producing the content can amount to a lot of the work, producing and promoting the right content takes even more of an effort. It’s not always the quantity that breaks through the noise, it’s that quality piece of content that resonates with your audience. The aftermath is then how you determine if a piece of content is successful and how you measure a piece of content.

1. Longevity

I’m a big proponent of creating content with higher rewards in long-term value than a quick, timely win. In some cases, the latter may outperform the former at first; however, it can be very challenging to come up with the right long-term messaging in the moment.

Measure how long you can incur value from a piece of content. Whether it’s only going to reap in value this week or over the course of the year, you need to set an expectation for the value of the piece.

Another point in longevity occurs in SEO. Are you targeting specific keywords to your audience in that piece of content? Is your audience searching for those keywords? Where do you rank for those keywords? What is your rank? Global marketers rate SEO as a valuable measurement in determining ROI. Ranking number one for a keyword doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s a strategy that will determine how long your content will last or its longer-term success.

2. Traffic Metrics

Users, average time on page, unique page views, and bounce rate are still valid and important measurements to look at for content. There are a lot of debates going as to what to look at in your Google Analytics and the metrics to discard, but I think it’s increasingly imperative to look at the whole picture.

I read an article a couple months back about how every metric should have a BFF, meaning it’s difficult to look at just one measurement to determine success. The mentioned metrics above shouldn’t be measured alone, but they should be looked at in conjunction with each other.

For example, your blog posts may have a high average time spent on page… but your readership consists of just your loved ones. Well, that’s where you look at uniques to determine if you are matching your audience to your content. Or compare it to average pageviews. Unless, of course, your loved ones are your target audience, or you only have one page up at a time…

Together, these metrics show a clearer picture. There are extenuating factors, like someone’s attention on the actual tab (think about how many tabs you have open right now), but these traffic metrics are still significant to show your content’s performance.

3. Audience Relationship Building

Does your audience care? This is a question that must be answered by all marketers and can be directly measured from your content. This may be a more qualitative metric at some points in the reactions that you may get from your audience, but still measurable nonetheless. Look at the number of comments, downloads, link clicks on your blog and website, page views, and the subscribers to your blog over time to see if you are maintaining the people from your audience.

A quick birds-eye-view you can try is to look at a few of your sale opportunities or marketing qualified leads, see how old they are, and then look in your marketing automation to then see if they have engaged in your content recently. Now, if they haven’t, you might have bigger problems on your hands in terms of nurture campaigns, but you can then see what pieces of content brought them in and if they have consumed more in order to build that relationship with you.

4. Shareability

Are people sharing your content? And how much? With over dozens of different social media platforms that audiences (and marketers) are using at all times, if your content has the right messaging, you should see some type of sharing on these different networks. Granted, there is some manual grind that will take place in terms of promoting your content, but you’ll be able to see and measure the shares on these platforms if you gained the proper traction.

5. Research and Planning Before Execution

You can’t just create a piece of content on anything your heart desires because what if it doesn’t align with what your audience wants? Creating content requires research and planning before you even execute. And much of that researching should look at where it will fit in your overall landscape. Will it be effective? Is it something new? Will the content cut through the noise and make an impact?

You need to predict and be agile by answering those questions before you take the leap and potentially waste time creating a piece of content that really won’t have any affect on your audience. There are some other metrics to look at to show if a piece of content is successful, and you may have other KPIs that determine performance.

Ultimately though, for marketers, it’s important to always measure your marketing efforts to show if you are making an impact or not with your content marketing.

PS. Want to see how impactful your content marketing is? Take a look at our new Share of Interactions graphs to see where you stack up with your competition.