Content marketing is directly proportional to brand awareness, planned leadership and metrics engagement that stand to be the three most important objectives for any B2B marketer this year. However customer acquisition and lead generation is also important as per the CMI’s report 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends. Here are some techniques that can help you measure your marketing effectiveness regarding the content we ideally create.

Create multiple levels of opportunities for conversion

It is important to know that not every marketing strategy is designed to drive immediate sales. There is a certain spectrum of these marketing assets that are in relation to business objectives and prospective goals.

The vital message from this was that the marketers must improve and track the performance of content assets across search objectives and buyer behaviors. As noted, 50% survey respondents answered they visit a website four to five times before getting in touch with the vendor.

To give your content marketing strategy a chance to prove it worth investing, it is important to track the conversion types through reporting software, divided into sales readiness level. The best way to do it is through Goal tracking from Google Analytics.

Some recommended conversions based on readiness of sales include

• Demo requests and sales evaluations

•  Premium content and white paper requests

•  Views on your content (PDF downloads, videos, etc.)

•  Subscriptions (offers, newsletters, etc)

Event tracking and content marketing activity

B2B marketers cannot pull off all their assets besides pay walls and form submissions, no matter how good this might prove for customer acquisition and lead-gen efforts. For measuring your marketing effectiveness, Google analytics is an ideal solution.

Adding a simple code to links related with navigation tabs, images, hyperlinks and graphics, marketers can create effective reports on how online visitors interact with your content assets and website. This is necessary for understanding whether the published content is being accessed beyond “entrances” or “page views”.

What you can measure with an event tracker? Check the following:

• Video playbacks

•  File downloads

•  Landing pages to click-through ( vent registrations, web registration pages, etc)

Report of visitor prospects and activity of content marketing asset

According to the customer standpoint, prospect report of marketing automation is among the best tools for learning what site and pages assets a visitor as seen. It gives the perfect report for presenting how impactful the content is in turning those visitors into consumers.

Report like this help marketers understand the number of times a visitor viewed the content developed by a company. Once changed to closed sales, strong analysis can be done to make the most of the content marketing strategy used.

Navigation performance of the marketing assets

Another Google Analytics report that can be helpful to the marketers is navigation summary that is demonstrated below.

Navigation summary tells about the pattern of the visitor’s visit of the web page. It demonstrates the next page on the website that visitor went after the first session. Here is a screenshot that highlights the pages viewed the visitors that were precise to product and service page, along with the form submission page.

The report doesn’t confirm completion of goal, but it allows the marketers to understand the relation between various marketing assets and materials that are sales oriented.

Targeting social media

Social media plays an important role in helping you understand your online marketing performance. At times, social share is consider as a vanity metric and doesn’t explain how well social media was to generate leads. B2B marketers can use social sharing for consumer engagement and deeper evaluation of how and why people are sharing their content which eventually leads to planned leadership.

Here are some ways to track your performance for content marketing:

1.) Keep note of Twitter users who mention, share or retweet updates made by you. It is not just a bookmark but you can view their activity and this more like thanking someone which leads to better engagement.

2.) Make a list of your competition on Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to enable strong focus. This is important to understand the market trend and if you are trying to manage high interaction and large network on social media.

3.) If everything seems to be failing, get a screenshot of your marketing performance and do a detailed study.

B2B marketers do not make use of real commercial software to the track the social media performance, besides some handful tools available online. In the specific case of content marketing, these social media tools are not powerful enough to evaluate the social mentions.

Most of the content performance monitoring is handled manually. We are sure some comprehensive reporting platforms allow certain kind of archiving and tracking of engagements and conversations. The key here is to define the objection and understand what exactly you are looking for.

At the end of the day, the marketing tie ups with customer journey and sales process are critical. There measurement strategies and tactic will help you demonstrate success in the efforts you have taken for your content marketing ingenuities.