Part 5 completes this 5-part series and now it’s time to look backwards to evaluate, measure, and improve your strategy and content resources. While you’ve undoubtedly made progress by initiating these steps, there’s most certainly room for improvement.
Part 5: Evaluate, Measure, and Improve
What you’ve done so far is implement a strategy for online content marketing success. However, done is never done. It’s imperative that you gain and maintain momentum. Content marketing is anything but one and done. Consistency is critical.
Evaluate
- Are you hearing anecdotal stories that tell you your content is making its way to your customer?
- Are your sales teams providing feedback about customers having read your information or watched your videos?
- Are your salespeople using the content as part of their sales process?
- Consider bringing your teams together to discuss how the first round of content marketing is going and solicit new and refined ideas.
- Have your customers provided feedback about the value of your content?
- Measure
Measurement can be very tricky. There are a variety of metrics you can decide to use, often provided by the social media channel or the email management provider you use; however, most are centered on clicks, likes, views, watches, and downloads. While these are numbers that are easy to gather, they don’t always tell the whole story.
Consider using these metrics to evaluate reach of your messages, but not necessarily the effectiveness. It may be best to use these metrics to determine how well one message or post resonates over another. It will help determine which day of the week or even time of day are best to send your messages. There’s no silver bullet, and you should expect to experiment from day one onward.
Depending on your campaigns, you may be able to directly tie your online messaging to actual sales or even appointments. However, if your content is running in parallel with a variety of other messaging, then it may be tough to pinpoint effectiveness with simple numbers.
Improve
- Have you created a variety of resources to tell the story from different perspectives to different target customer types?
- Does your content or your resources need to be refined or modified?
- Is it time to add a resource that wasn’t in your budget before like a Case Study, Whitepaper or Use Case?
- Are you leveraging content from your manufacturer partners?
- Have your customers provided feedback about the value of your content?
- Are the tools you have in place enough to create quality resources?
- What new ideas do you and your team have for topics or content types?
Enable Your Sales Team
Now is the time to plan, act, and execute these exciting, new plans. The year is only two months old and there’s time to implement and refine the 5 steps necessary to launch your marketing strategy and impact your sales for 2020.
Get started today by contacting our team for advice.
