3 Ways To Track Your Company Achievements In Content Marketing

 
Content marketing is one of the most popular trends in marketing today as businesses both large and small are finding new and more creative ways to utilize the online world. Many organizations are spending quite a lot of money hiring writers and marketers to draw new traffic to their product or service through newsworthy articles and other online content. This marketing trend can be highly productive, however, there are several things to think about should you be considering the content marketing game.

 
Define success for you

The most narrow way to define success for your business is to equate everything to the bottom line. There are a lot of other ways that your efforts can pay off, though they may not directly seem to affect the money coming in. Just as traditional marketing efforts talk about how many times a customer needs to see an impression to make a buying decision, each one of your content marketing pieces counts as one of those impressions. You can also use reader analytics to learn a great deal about your customers, their purchasing habits and which content is driving your customers to make a purchase. Once you have this information, you can easily use it to assess and improve your future marketing efforts.

 
Create strong content first

Though it may seem counter-intuitive, you should focus your content marketing on articles, educational content first. A mention of your product or service or any mention of a tie-in should be secondary to an actually well-written article. This is important, as you'll want to present your business as an authority when it comes to the product or service you sell. Once you've established your content as reliable and credible, you'll begin to see your customers responding as they become active members of your organization's community.

 
Target everything

One of the best things about social media these days is the wonderful ability to use it to reach a very specific audience. You should spend just as much time targeting your audience when you post new content online as you do actually writing that content. After all, it doesn't matter how smart, witty or engaging that piece is if your intended audience never knows it's out there. It would be as if you were whispering into the wind. Instead, spend some time targeting boosted posts and spend a few dollars making sure your content is getting into the hands of those who will benefit from it the most.

 
This article was written by Deborah Flomberg for CBS Small Business Pulse.