Don’t Waste Your Time and Money on Content Marketing

How Can you Measure Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is crucial to the implementation of a truly successful content marketing initiative. What is the saying? If a tree falls and no one hears it… If your content development efforts are not eaten up by your target audience, you are wasting your time and money.

I have been thinking a great deal about customer engagement lately. I said it before, but for me, customer engagement simply boils down to whether or not your customers (and potential) customers find value in the content your company is producing. One question that keeps running through my mind is: How should a company or brand measure customer engagement to understand if they are hitting the mark?

Think about using the following customer engagement KPIs to determine if you are wasting your time on content marketing:

• Web Traffic
  • Time spent on site
  • # pages/visitor
  • % new visitors
  • Traffic sources
  • % of content viewed “below the fold“
  • Traffic patterns
  • Traffic conversion or downloads for content assets
• RSS/Newsletter
  • # of subscribers
  • Click through rates
  • Open rates
  • Traffic
• Social media
  • # of followers (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, etc)
  • # of mentions
  • # of RTs/Likes
• Word of Mouth(Online and offline)
  • Feedback (i.e. comments or inbound emails on content efforts)
  • Inbound links

It is difficult to set a good general benchmark for each of these metrics, especially for different companies. It is important to review your company’s progress over time and set your own benchmarks.

What metrics do you track to ensure you aren’t wasting your time and money on content marketing? Tell me what I have missed!