CHAPTER 13
Progress, Refinement, and Success: Measurement
Armed with goals and a plan, the fruit of our integrated search and social media content marketing efforts must be determined through proper measurement. There are many dimensions to assessing an optimized and socialized content marketing program, enough to fill several more books. A good foundation for success will be to emphasize the role of measurement according to the influence of content across the buying and customer life cycle. From awareness to advocacy, content plays an important role and through an adaptive process of hypothesis, benchmarking, assessment, and refinement, businesses can create competitive advantages and value for their relationships with customers.
Whether you’re trying to attract more customers through search engines or social networks, the relationship between setting goals and measuring performance must be in close alignment for a successful effort to reach overall marketing and business goals. Organizations have many reasons for publishing digital content, and while our attention to goals has focused on marketing and sales objectives, it also extends to other communications, audiences, and business benefits. In Chapter 4 we discussed setting goals for increasing leads and sales as well as to improve media coverage, attract talented employees, and serve online customers more efficiently. In this chapter I will explore some of the key considerations for measuring content marketing performance ...