When it comes to shopper marketing for CPG brands, understanding your content performance metrics is almost as important as the content itself.
Without performance metrics, you’ll have no idea whether or not the content you’re creating or the digital marketing strategy you’re following is actually making an impact on your bottom line.
Measuring and monitoring your ongoing campaigns will allow you to better select a direction to focus for future campaign optimization. Part of monitoring marketing performance for CPG brands means having the right metrics in place to set yourself up for success.
At Cliffedge Marketing, we consider five important content marketing performance metrics when measuring success for our CPG brand clients.
1. Website Traffic
Getting found online is everything. Traffic to your website is an important metric to determine how your content is performing. A large amount of traffic is a great sign, as long as it doesn’t have a higher bounce rate than is expected for your website.
For visitors unfamiliar with the term, bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing just one page. If your bounce rate is increasing, your homepage is boring, irrelevant or off-putting, and your content isn’t good enough to convince visitors to stay.
Track your website traffic and, as it grows, optimize the conversion paths that turn them into leads. Some popular website traffic measurement tools include Google Analytics, Matomo, Open Web Analytics and Clicky.
2. Social Engagement
It’s a simple fact that if people find your content valuable, they will share it on social media.
And when the content you created starts making an impact on social media, it enhances your reputation, boosts traffic and brings in leads.
Since social media channels like Facebook and Instagram are where your potential customers may be found (depending on your target demographics), tracking your content’s engagement across your social media strategy is an excellent way to track your content marketing performance. So, ensure that your CPG brand continues publishing valuable content to continue to receive attention and keep mixing up your messaging, timing, etc. to see what performs better.
Some useful social media tracking tools include Hootsuite, Sprout Social and the Hive.
3. SEO Results
Search Engine Optimization is a critical piece of your digital marketing strategy. When you set up a foundation for getting found online, you have to measure what is performing well and what needs further optimization. From there, the ROI from your SEO efforts provides another birds’ eye view of the overall performance of your content strategy.
Chances are that the rank of your website will significantly improve because you have been optimizing the content on your website. Search engine optimization helps you start showing up organically in search engine result pages (SERPs) and increase organic traffic.
From there you can focus on creating long-form authoritative SEO content for faster results (or shorter form niche content for more long-tail results).
4. Brand Awareness and Reputation
When you measure brand awareness and how it relates to your content marketing campaign, you get a solid measure of how effective it can be. In other words, producing relevant, informative and useful content will boost your brand image and consequently grow awareness for your messaging.
If your target market or customers begin to identify your CPG brand as a leader or authority in your relevant industry, you can be sure content marketing is paying off. This ultimately benefits your company or brand by increasing business referrals, leads and sales.
You can tell whether your CPG brand is a leader in your industry based on your social media engagement and social listening (monitoring where your brand is mentioned, even if you aren’t present on those platforms). It also can be measured by awards won, guest speaking/blogging opportunities, SERPs, etc.
5. Conversions or Sales
Perhaps this goes without saying, but none of this matters if it doesn’t start converting into sales. This is the true measure of your return on investment.
Conversion tracking can include elements like form submissions, email subscriptions, CTAs clicked, count of qualified leads into opportunities, opportunities into customers, etc.
It also includes measuring how many people request a demo from your website or call into your business based on a blog they read, how many users sign up for a free trial from your SAAS tool based off an eBook they read, or check how many fill out your contact forms based off a referral landing page, etc.
If you tie your content to campaigns and measure the success of each individual campaign, you can make better data driven decisions moving forward. Outside of campaign tracking, a rise in sales of a particular service or product is typically an indicator of how well your content about that subject is performing.
Use Key Performance Metrics to Steer Your Content Strategy
Content directly affects digital marketing strategies since it’s a determining factor of how well your audience will view your business. Set up the KPIs (key performance indicators) that spell success and use content marketing reporting as a way to track the results of each campaign.
You’ll be able to measure and assess your content marketing efforts with the metrics listed above so you can close the loop on every dollar earned by attributing it to a specific effort. And if anything changes or no longer produces the desired results, that’s your cue to change things up!
Partner with a Content Marketing Strategist for CPG Brands
Cliffedge Marketing is a digital marketing agency with content marketing specialists who will not only build strategy for your CPG Brand but also track and report ROI based on your strategies. Stay focused on your business while we deliver results!
