The New Emphasis on Measuring Content Marketing: Why It’s Needed; How It Helps

As attracting online viewers’ attention becomes more competitive amidst rising amounts of content from brands, government, and not-for-profit organizations, measuring the impact of content marketing has become far more important, reveals a Curata survey of almost 600 marketers.

Leading marketers are most concerned with measuring the impact of content as well as finding the best sources to create high quality content and promoting content, states the Curata study, Content Marketing Tactics & Technology Study.

“As the majority of marketers focus on improving their ability to scale their content supply chain through editorial calendars and better workflow, only the best of the best content marketers are working to measure the impact of their content on their sales pipeline,” writes Curata CMO Michael Gerard in a guest post for WebDAM. “This allows them to better manage their investment and demonstrate the impact of content marketing to upper management and across the organization.”

More advanced marketers focus more on analyzing metrics from the middle and bottom of the sales funnel, with the help of software and content marketing platforms.

Which Half of Content Marketing Works?

Measuring content marketing efforts enables marketers to become more efficient by determining what content strategies are successful and which ones are not. John Wanaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” “Advertising” can now be replaced with “content marketing,” Gerard comments

Some of the key findings of the survey are:

• 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did a year ago.

• 76% of participants will increase content marketing investment in the coming year.

• 68% of content marketing leaders are increasing marketing technology investment in 2015.

• 29% of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content.

• 49% of companies have an executive overseeing content marketing. That figure will increase to 60% by 2016.

• 83% saw an increase in awareness building in their content marketing efforts, or top of the sales funnel, during the past 12 months.

Marketers’ top two concerns are limited budget and resources to create enough content and creating enough content on a regular basis. To that end, marketers turn to repurposing and content curation, or finding, organizing and sharing relevant content.

The Content Paradox

A survey by the Content Marketing Institute last year found that 73 percent of marketers are now producing more content than they did in the previous 12 months. A TrackMaven study, The Content Marketing Paradox, reported that content per brand increased 78 percent from 2013 to 2014, but content engagement decreased 60 percent. Almost across the board, engagement rates are decreasing for content created by brands.

Internet audiences may have reached a saturation point and are avoiding blog posts, images and videos brands are producing. Some pundits predict a “content shock” or “content apocalypse” as the ever-growing amount of content meets the finite time of audiences to view it.

Although the alarmist content apocalypse theory remains controversial, many marketing experts agree that social media monitoring and measurement can help brands counter the content overload. Social media monitoring and measurement helps brands better understand their audiences, learn what content they most appreciate, and what types of channels their audiences prefer.

Bottom Line: As companies invest more in content marketing, astute marketers are increasing their measurement efforts to improve the likelihood of success. As the abundance of content starts to overwhelm viewers, social media analytics and social media listening can help marketers better understand audiences, produce more relevant content and attract larger audiences.