Boost Your Content Engagement: How to Create Epic Results With the Right Metrics [Webinar Recap]

We need to talk about content.  

Specifically, good content. 

Content has long been the king of digital marketing. It is what we use to reach customers, share stories, and market our products or services. 

But, there's a good chance you've been measuring your content all wrong. 

What do we mean when we talk about content? I know we get a ton of sales folks here and some marketing people who might have different definitions of content. Think a lead gen blog post vs. brand awareness.

So, before we dive in deeper, let's talk about what content is. 

Content is information that has a purpose. It might be a blog post, a webinar, an email sequence. It might be a listing for your newest product or a case study from a happy customer. 

Content delivers three times more leads than traditional advertising — making it one of the most powerful tools not just for marketing, but also for your sales team. 

But there's a good chance that you aren't measuring the effectiveness of your content correctly, and that could lead to wasting a massive amount of marketing spend. 

In a recent webinar, Alicia from Leadfeeder and Timo Virtanen, CEO and Co-Founder of React & Share, discussed the power of content and the mistakes many brands make when trying to measure the effectiveness of their content.

Note: Make sure you're targeting the right audience. Try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to see which companies visit your website, the pages they visit, whether or not they’re in your CRM, and more.

The Problem WIth Traditional Content KPIs 

There are tons of tools you can use to measure or boost your website traffic. And a lot of them are very, very useful. 

But the problem is the metrics can be so scattered, so disjointed that it doesn't tell you much about how useful your content is. 

For example, you can easily track how many page views you get — but do you know how useful people found that content? If it answered their questions?  

When we use Google Analytics, etc., we aren't measuring if the content was any good. 

We measure how much traffic the page got. Does the form work? Did they watch the video to the end? How long did they spend on the page? 

If you want to measure content effectiveness, you need to understand if the content fulfilled its purpose. 

Let's say you go to a website. You go there with a purpose, to buy shoes. You're looking for information and knowledge about the product so you are confident enough to make a purchase.  

You want some kind of information; you came there for a reason.

That's what brands should be measuring. And it's tough to do with general content KPIs. 

Timo shared the moment when he realized that they weren't tracking the right KPIs.  

"I had great team… they made this great Excel sheet and it was filled with different kind of numbers which were telling these many people are coming from these channels, and these are paid and this is the time they spend, and this is the return from investments in marketing because this is the conversion that what we want them to do and stuff like this. 

And I was like, "Oh my God, this is so great." And I was looking at it with my boss. My boss, who wasn't that aware of anything coming to marketing or anything that has digital in it. 

And he was like, "Okay. Did they like the page? Was the content good?" 

...I really realized I wasn't actually measuring the content, I was measuring everything. I was dancing around the content, but I wasn't measuring the content itself."

Most marketers are very good at measuring the traffic, time on page, and other metrics like that. 

But figuring out if the content is actually good? That is a challenge. 

The real thing you want to know is whether the content fulfills the reason the customer came to your page.  

And you don't get that information by measuring traffic.

4 Ways to Measure the True Effectiveness of Content 

So what should you be using to measure whether your content fulfills its purpose? 

I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is — there's no one magic KPI you need to measure. 

The good news is, there are several ways you can tell if the content you create is serving its purpose. Here are a few ways Alicia and Teemu discussed in the recent webinar. 

Understand Who Is Reading Your Content 

We're going to toot our own horn here just a little bit. If you want to know if your content is any good, you need to understand exactly who is reading your content. 

And you need more information than you'll find in GA. 

This is where Leadfeeder's Website Visitor Tracking tool comes in handy. 

For example, React & Share wanted to know what companies were coming to their sites. They are a B2B software company, and they wanted to know, "Do they like the content? Do they like our product? Who are they? Who shall we be contacting?" 

Leadfeeder gives them all that information and can even help track those folks on other channels like Linkedin. 

If people connect with the content on a specific page, Leadfeeder is also very useful, because it helps them understand, "Oh those companies visiting this page, they are not even our dream clients, so that's why this doesn't make sense for them." 

Leadfeeder gives you a better idea of what kind of companies are into your content — and how they are finding you. 

Let Users Rate Your Content 

Say you are giving a live speech —- how do you know if people liked your presentation? If they get up and clap, you know they liked it. If they are snoring away, you've got a good indication they didn't love the content. (Or maybe they were just out late the night before. 🤷)

But the point is that people have the opportunity to engage with your content in a live format, and it's usually pretty clear how they felt about it. 

On your site, though, it's a little tougher. 

But you can get that feedback by asking for it. 

For example, you might ask a user, "How helpful was this content?" or "Did you find what you were looking for?" 

It's very natural for us to react to things or to leave ratings. 

Most of us can't even remember how many things we have liked or reacted to on Facebook, Amazon, or even random websites. 

Or, you can just ask users to rate the content with a star or a thumbs up or thumbs down. 

When users go to a webpage with two or three ratings and both say five stars, they think, "Okay, I'm not the first person here. I might give my rating. I like it, too." 

You see that other people have given their opinion, and you're more willing to leave yours and stay to read the content. 

Share Buttons 

When there is a lot of engagement on content, you've got a pretty good idea the content is landing well with your users. Low-level engagement like likes and comments usually indicates that sales will go well. 

But if you really want to maximize engagement on content, make it super easy to share it on social media, email, or even on chat apps by adding a "Share" button. 

You can even combine share buttons with the rating feature we covered above to really get a good feel for how well the content served its purpose. 

The format you use will depend on the website, but here's an example. 

The rating might ask, "What did you think?" with the answers of "I'd like more content like this, This wasn't useful, and I don't understand." 

If they say it's useful or convincing, you can give them the option to share on social media. 

If they don't understand, you can connect them with a live chat representative or have a salesperson reach out. Maybe they want what you offer but are having trouble finding the information they need to make a decision. 

Or maybe they aren't your ideal customer, but either way, you know you've done all you can to ensure your content is useful. 

Include Comments 

More and more prominent sites have turned off comments, which might make you wonder if you should bother with them. 

For news sites and massive sites with millions of page views, it makes sense to turn off comments because they get tons of trolls and comments that are totally unrelated to the content. 

But for smaller sites, having some kind of a commenting tool on your page is an easy, simple, fast way to get feedback about your content. 

Even if you have a smaller amount of traffic, you might get hundreds of pieces of feedback on the content. That feedback is handy and easily understandable for the people who create content. 

And, as we mentioned before, seeing feedback is excellent for building customer trust. If you have trouble managing comments, consider using a content moderation tool to block spam. 

Final Thoughts 

Measuring traffic and other popular KPIs won't give you the type of in-depth information you need to know if the content you create is any good. 

Measure all elements of the content, not just how many people you reached and where they came from, but also the information and purpose. Did people get what they needed? Was the information helpful? This will help you create better-performing content. 

Want to learn more about measuring the effectiveness of content? Watch the full webinar here. 

Note: Make sure you're targeting the right audience. Try Leadfeeder free for 14 days to see which companies visit your website, the pages they visit, whether or not they’re in your CRM, and more.