Since the ROI of content marketing is not just about the revenue it generates, you'll have to determine other indicators. In this article, we are going to help you identify some KPIs to measure your content marketing efforts.

Two key elements to determine the Content KPIs

1. Specific objectives for a relevant ROI

It is impossible to carry out a content strategy without determining its objectives very precisely. Why do you want to create content? What do you expect? If your answer here is "Money", you are making a mistake! Your content can have an impact on your entire business: marketing and sales naturally, the general management, but also human resources or accounting.

Your goals may be, for example, to increase traffic to your website, thereby improving your visibility, or improving your brand image and reputation.

2. Is my message past the audience?

Let's not forget the primary function of content: getting a message across. Before you launch body and soul into content marketing, you've worked on the message(s) you want to get through. So why not integrate this work to the extent of your return on investment?

Determine 3 types of KPIs

Now that you have answered these two questions, you are able to determine the performance indicators to follow to accurately measure the ROI of your content marketing. Concretely, the KPIs of your content strategy can be grouped into 3 categories: visibility, resonance and the relationship established.

1. KPIs related to visibility

These indicators are the most obvious to define and follow. They actually come back to defining who has read your content. To measure the visibility of your content, you just have to analyze the traffic on the website concerned and its origin, including social networks (the reach):

• Number of visits

• Sources of these visits

• Number of clicks on social networks

2. KPIs related to resonance

This is to analyze the resonance generated by your content, in other words, the echo it has had on social media:

• Number of shares: Retweet for Twitter

• Repin for Pinterest or sharing for Facebook

• Number of I like, like, favorites, + 1 etc

• Number of mentions on social networks, forums, blogs

3. The KPI related to the relationship created

These KPIs are very interesting but also more complex to analyze. The point here is actually to determine all the indicators to measure the interest in your brand/product generated by your content.

Here, it is about studying the leads generated by your content marketing.

In this process, we talk about Inbound Marketing. Inbound Marketing is a strategy of attracting traffic, loyalty to generate new hot prospects that will then be converted into a customer.

Content is the core of Inbound Marketing. The KPIs here are the marks of interest more or less for your brand/product:

• The number of members of your communities: Facebook fans, Twitter subscribers

• The number of comments generated by your content

• The bounce rate

• The rate of returning visitors (those who visit you more than once)

• The number of pages per visit

In conclusion, by analyzing these different indicators, you will gather a significant amount of information enabling you to improve your content marketing.