The Key Perception Change To Prove Content Marketing’s Actual Worth

First things first. We need everyone on your team to understand that indicators of marketing performance — such as brand awareness, likeability and trust — actually turn into business results, like sales and revenue.

To communicate this to non-marketers, we should probably scrap these elusive terms and put them under the bracket of “brand impact.”

Let’s use this as a measure of content marketing’s impact on business results.

What you should tell your friends about measuring “brand impact” 👇

1. Marketers need to develop a results measurement plan alongside their campaign plan. Give each piece of content trackable goals

2. Calculate the baseline costs involved in executing campaigns to track ROI

3. To measure brand impact, we need multi-touch attribution models. This allows us to see the non-linear paths buyers take. Google Analytics 4 allows us to do this

Read on to learn how to measure the “brand impact” of your content.

Track The Buyer Journey From Aware To Customer
(& Get Results-Based Metrics For Your Content)

All customers go through the “know, like and trust” buyer journey. Every legendary marketer — from Eugene Schwarz to David Olgivy — knew this, even before the internet days of data tracking.

Tracking when someone becomes brand aware, to liking the brand, to trusting the brand, will enable you to see the results of your campaigns.

Brand Awareness (Know)

Tracking brand awareness is a case of watching how much, and how often, your brand is mentioned online.

We find that Sparktoro is the best and easiest tool for this. Just run a “my audience frequently talks about [BRAND NAME]” search to see the size of your aware audience.

Brand Awareness Metrics:

• Quality of traffic as a % of total addressable market (TAM)

• Brand name search volume on Google

• Social media brand name mentions

• Audience demographics*

• Social content shares

• Website page views

*Pro tip: While it’s beneficial to be a household name, your brand needs to be known among the demographics most likely to engage with your product. Track who specifically searches and finds your brand. Do they belong to the demographic groups most receptive to your product?

Brand Reputation (Like)

When you see the size of your awareness audience, you can start to investigate how much of that audience understands and likes your brand.

One way to do this is with online polls. You can ask questions that relate to people’s perspective on your brand. And how people talk about your brand on social media and in communities.

This insight will let you know what brand image your content is creating.

User tracking platforms like Hotjar show how users engage with your site and landing pages, like in the click map example below which shows where people click: