When it comes to business, marketing plays a critical and decisive role in a brand’s success. That’s why it is so important to do your research well and plan and execute a powerful marketing campaign.
One of the most important factors that will influence your campaign’s success (as well as the success of your future campaigns) is how well you track your content’s performance and then analyze it. Hence, here’s a guide to branding and analytics for digital marketing and how to track your content correctly.
#1 Set Goals for Your Marketing Campaign
First and foremost, you need to set goals for your marketing campaigns. If you don’t set goals for your campaigns, you won’t be able to decide which metrics you want to track, how you want to track them, and what success looks like to you. Your campaign goals will be guiding you when you start deciding how to track and analyze the performance of your content.
The best way to set goals is by using the SMART approach. Your goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. If all the goals you set for a particular campaign fit these characteristics, then you can be certain that you set your goals correctly. In turn, you will be able to track and analyze your content correctly.
Keep in mind that you can have general goals for all your marketing activities as well as goals specific to the different types of marketing you use and the marketing campaigns you launch. For example, one of your general goals can be to build a brand image characterized by casualness, friendliness, and approachability. On a smaller level during a single marketing campaign, you can have a goal related to it about utilizing giveaways to create a more positive and friendly image for your company.
It’s important to set goals before you launch a marketing campaign because you will also be choosing which metrics to track before you create and publish your content. For a future campaign, you can use the experience you get from this campaign and set goals while considering a wider variety of factors.
#2 List the Metrics You Want to Track
After setting goals for your marketing campaign, you will need to list the metrics you want to track. There are many different metrics you can choose from depending on which marketing techniques you will be using and which platforms and types of content you selected for launching your campaign. Here are some of the most commonly tracked types of metrics:
- Page Performance Metrics – As the name suggests, these are metrics that are related to a specific page on your website. These include page views, average time on page, bounce rate, page loading speed, and others.
- Engagement Metrics – These are the metrics that indicate how and how much your audience engages with your marketing materials such as content and ads. These can include retention rate, screen flow, social media metrics, subscriber or follow count, and others.
- Click Metrics – These are the click-through rate (e.g. on ads or links) and the open rates (for emails).
- Other Metrics – These include unique visitors, quality leads, traffic sources, backlinks, return on investment (ROI), etc.
These are not all the metrics you could possibly track, but they can be a good starting point for you if you are choosing which metrics to track for your first campaign. Moreover, you don’t necessarily need to track all of them. If you think that tracking some of these metrics won’t give you any valuable information about your marketing efforts, then you don’t need to track them.
#3 Choose the Right Tools for Tracking
The next step is to choose the right tools for tracking your content and its performance. The tools you choose will help you track everything correctly and gather data about your marketing campaign’s performance with no extra effort. You just need to find the right tools for the type of marketing you are using and the metrics you want to track.
There are many different tools available online for free, a one-time payment, or a subscription. You can start with tools such as JotUrl which can help you track leads and convert more customers by using an all-in-one link management platform. In addition to that, you can also try tools that are used for content creation rather than tracking (e.g. Grammarly which can help you proofread and edit your texts).
#4 Create and Publish Your Content
Once you are all set and ready, you can actually create and publish your content. Of course, this is only the right step now if you planned your marketing campaign well and you know what you are doing. You need to have a content strategy and schedule to keep your style and quality consistent while publishing content regularly.
In some cases, you may be struggling with the process of content creation. That’s when you can check writing service reviews at All Top Reviews and find professional writers who can create your content for you. This way, you won’t have to worry about creating high-quality content consistently that you can keep publishing on different platforms and channels.
Remember that the quality of your content directly impacts the success of your marketing. That’s why you need to be particularly dedicated when creating your content. Make it relevant and interesting to your audience, try to engage your readers (or viewers), encourage content sharing, and promote the content yourself as well (more on this later).
#5 Start Tracking and Collecting Data
When your content is published, you can start tracking its performance and collecting data about it. Use the metrics you chose beforehand to collect the right data for further analysis. Utilize the tools you chose for tracking, but make sure that you understand how to use them correctly and benefit from all their features.
If you make any mistakes while tracking your content’s performance, you could end up with inaccurate analysis which could lead you to believe that your content performed either worse or better than it actually did. You need to avoid this at all costs – the more accurate your tracking and analysis are, the more precise and correct your conclusions about your campaign will be. In turn, you will be able to design and launch better campaigns in the future.
Consider creating a content tracking guide so that you can be consistent when tracking your content’s performance. Think of it as your content strategy, but rather than guiding you during the process of content creation, it will be guiding you during the process of content tracking and performance analysis.
#6 Adjust Your Posting Schedule If Necessary
As mentioned earlier, you need to have a content schedule to be able to post content regularly and at a good frequency. If you post content too often, you could end up annoying your audience. If you post content too rarely, you will have a poorly-performing campaign and low engagement rates overall.
That’s why your schedule is so important. Moreover, you should align your posting time across multiple channels and platforms in a way that will maximize the impact your content can have on each respective platform. If you are posting on YouTube one day, it might make sense to post on Instagram and Facebook on the same day to notify your followers on those platforms about the new video you uploaded to YouTube.
If you need help creating a new schedule for your content publishing and distribution, you can hire an expert writer from the custom writing website Trust My Paper. A good writer will help you decide when to publish which content and on what platforms. It might take some time for you to figure out the best times to post content, but you will definitely find the best options eventually.
Beware of changing your schedule in the middle of your campaign unless you can clearly see that your campaign is failing due to a poorly-designed schedule. It’s best to adjust your schedule for the next campaign rather than trying to change the one you have for this campaign because it might make tracking content performance harder.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
#7 Promote Your Content Properly
Speaking of your campaign’s success, if you truly want to see good results, it’s not enough to create good content and post it at the right time. If nobody sees your content, then there was no point in creating it in the first place. That’s why you need to also promote it properly if you see that it requires promotion.
This is particularly important for brands that are just starting out and don’t yet have a follower base on social media or a steady stream of traffic on the website. However, content promotion could also be a helpful tactic for relatively established companies as well. It can give your campaign an additional boost if you think about it.
For example, consider having a native ad campaign on Instagram to promote your content there and invite more users to check out your brand account. Native ads and promoted posts alike can be great for promoting content on social media because they look almost identical to regular, unpromoted posts.
#8 Use Different Metrics for Different Channels
Obviously, you will be using multiple channels for publishing and distributing your content. This means that you will also need to be using different metrics for different channels and platforms. And even when you are tracking seemingly identical metrics (e.g. video views), you should still take into account the peculiarities of the platforms you are tracking them on (e.g. YouTube vs TikTok vs your website).
When you start analyzing your metrics, you will need to make conclusions about your content’s performance based on a wide variety of factors – not just what you see in numbers. When you posted the content, on which platform or channel you posted it, whether you promoted the content or not, whether you posted content on other platforms at the same time, and so on could all influence how a particular piece of content performed.
#9 Know Your Priorities and Stick to Them
Do you still remember the goals you set for your marketing strategy? And what about the ones you set for this particular campaign? If you remember what your goals are, then it will be easier for you to determine whether your campaign was successful as well as where you failed for one reason or another.
In addition to your goals, you need to get your priorities straight. Even if you have several goals, you might be prioritizing one of them over all the others. That’s why failing to achieve one goal out of three might not be as big of a failure as failing to achieve your prioritized goal. Keep these nuances in mind when analyzing your content’s performance and deciding how successful your marketing campaign was.
#10 Continuously Improve Your Content
Last but not least, don’t forget to continuously aim to improve your content both throughout your campaign and during any future campaigns you launch. In fact, this advice is also applicable to the way you plan your campaigns. You need to learn from your past mistakes and successes to plan and execute better marketing campaigns in the future.
If you noticed that something didn’t work, find out why that happened and what you can do about it. If your content underperformed in specific metrics, try to find the reasons why that happened, and don’t make the same mistakes again when creating content for your future campaigns. Only by actively improving the way you create content and organize and execute your marketing campaigns can you have multiple successful campaigns one after another as your business grows and prospers.
Wrapping Up
All in all, tracking and analyzing your content correctly should definitely be one of your priorities, so don’t underestimate the importance of setting goals and tracking content. Use the tips in this article to help you plan, execute, track, and analyze your marketing campaigns effectively and efficiently.
