A new survey from Unisphere Research states that “Seven out of ten executives report they are employing social media to distribute content … with Facebook and Twitter being the leading platforms for customer engagement and content marketing”.  This information may not be surprising news to most marketing executives, but the reality is  “only 25% actually measure the results of the individual pieces of content they produce and distribute.”

If a company is going to allocate time and resources to content marketing strategies, there must be an equal focus on gathering and measuring the return on that investment.  It’s not enough to capture information on customer engagement driven through the various social media channels when the ultimate reason for reaching out to those customers is increasing brand awareness, reducing costs and growing sales.

In the book Managing Content Marketing by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi measuring the impact of your content marketing strategy is determined and outlined by creating a “Content Marketing Pyramid”, which includes the following three sections.

• Primary content indicators: Primary indicators are the types of measurements that you want to capture (e.g., sales, costs savings, retention rates).
• Secondary content indicators: Secondary indicators are the types of measurements that help make the case for primary indicators (e.g., lead quality, lead quantity, shorter sales cycles).
• User indicators: These are the types of measurements that the content “doers” need to look at to help drive the secondary indicators (e.g., web traffic, “likes,” page views, search rankings).

The authors go on to explain how to segment the pyramid, with user indicators at the base (for the analytics team), the secondary content indicators in the middle (for managers reporting) and the primary content indicators at the top (for C-suite reporting).   The specific metrics depend on the organization’s individual objectives, but everyone has the same goal – improve the process.

Spending the time to pull together this information and putting that data into a format that everyone can relate to will help the organization to understand how well their content marketing strategy is working and where adjustments need to be made.   Developing a game plan to measure the impact of that strategy should be at the top of your New Year’s resolution list!