The best metrics to use for content marketing? #ChartOfTheDay

Less than half of marketing know their ROI from Content marketing

For the past 3 years that we have been asking Smart Insights readers which is the marketing tactic which marketers that will give them the most incremental growth. In each of those 3 years, Content Marketing has been identified as the trend which will have the most impact.

Given the popularity of content marketing as an activity and increased investment in this area, using the right measures to assess return on content marketing is essential. We asked this question in our recent report on content marketing in Europe asking marketers based in Europe about the content marketing techniques they have used.

In the question on KPIs used for content marketing summarised in the infographic below we asked which measures are used for measuring content marketing effectiveness.

You can see that although a range of metrics are being used, assessing effectiveness is a challenge. The most important measure is the overall ROI of content marketing and this measure is used by less than 50 percent of businesses. It is positive that many businesses are trying to isolate the impact of their inbound marketing with other half using segments in analytics to see the impact of SEO and social sharing and its impact on lead generation.