When content marketing is done properly, it makes people stop, pay attention, think, and ultimately, behave differently. That is the power of content marketing.

You’re a company and you’ve made the wise decision (congratulations) to invest some big money in a content marketing strategy and campaign. Now you need your investment to be measurable. You need to make sure you’re getting adequate return on investment (ROI), in line with your overarching business goals. ROI isn’t simply about sales and profit. It’s also about engagement, awareness and conversions. The transient and unpredictable nature of these metrics can be intimidating for companies who want simply to be able to track the effectiveness of their content marketing campaign on a month-to-month basis, as you can with revenue.

Alas, this is the multifaceted content marketing game we’re playing, and the pay-off for not investing in traditional ads that 86 per cent of people skip is that the effectiveness of the campaign is harder to trace. There are, however, metrics worth paying attention to that will make measuring your content marketing ROI even more meaningful.

Consumption metrics

The use of programs like Google Analytics help you track measurables, such as total visits, unique visits, bounce rate and time on site, which in turn determine how often your content is being consumed. If the data is measured weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly, it can give an authentic indication of the strength of your content marketing strategy.

Awareness metrics

Social media tends to be an integral tenet of any content marketing strategy, with 88 per cent of B2B marketers ranking brand awareness as a principal goal. Shares across social media channels, comments and ‘likes’, all provide a cohesive method of seeing whether or not your brand has grown, and whether or not people are engaging with it. It’s also invaluable for seeing which parts of your content strategy work better than others. So despite being a harder metric to quantify for ROI purposes, tracking awareness and engagement are crucial.

Sales metrics

Perhaps the easiest way to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, sales metrics such as close rates and conversion rates tell you in black and white whether your strategy is generating paying customers, which is ultimately why you implemented it in the first place (second and final congratulations.)

Business intelligence metrics

Paying close attention to business aspects such as number of leads, amount of revenue generated, customer lifetime value and cost per acquisition will really home in on the value of your content marketing strategy to your company’s performance as a whole.

Ensuring that programs are in place to track the success of your content has never been so important. Paying attention to metrics when assessing and calculating ROI means you’ll gain a far better understanding about exactly what generates results for your business.

Oh, and just a heads up: content marketers who measure ROI are more than 12 times more likely to generate a greater year-over-year return.