Generating more ROI from your content is impossible without analyzing your content marketing results
You wouldn’t pay $10 a month for Spotify if it offered you only 5% of the songs you wanted to listen to, right? That wouldn’t make sense. How about if you paid for the first month and realized this after? Would you continue paying for the service then?

The same goes for most things. At some point in a process – whether it’s before or after the actual investment was made (be it time, money, efforts, etc.) – you decide based on analyzing the results whether or not the investment was worth it. This is called ROI.

Yet, over 50% of marketers are still unclear on this basic metric. Which begs the question: is your content marketing effective? According to CMI/MarketingProfs’ 2016 benchmark, only 30% of B2B marketers say they’re effective at content marketing.

A simple analytics model to understand the impact of your content on ROI
Analyzing your content marketing results means knowing what performance metrics to monitor. To do this, you need to figure out which KPIs (the ones identified earlier in the strategy phase) you want to focus on so that you can effectively monitor them.

To visualize this, we’ve created a content marketing analytics model (VSTL) that measures the following KPIs: Volume, Shares, Traffic and Leads:

In other words, you start with content, which you need in volumes to simply exist. Ideally, this content will be shared or amplified by your audience, which in turn will drive traffic, a part of which will eventually convert into leads.

– Volume: the number of individual pieces of content that exist on your destination sites and by channels on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Because content marketing has compounding returns that build over time, it’s essential to leverage your team and curate regularly to sustain your content efforts.

– Shares and traffic: the total number of times your content was shared and the traffic it generated. This measures the quality and the impact of your content on your audience and can be tracked as a time-based chart or post by post:

– Leads your content generated. Lead generation is a key objective for a majority of B2B content marketers and the trend is steadily increasing. Ultimately, you want your content to convert your visitors into subscribers, prospects or customers. This can be easily tracked in a time-based chart or post-by-post using Scoop.it Content Director (check our free content marketing analytics framework to understand why this is important and how to take data-driven actions on your content strategy).