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Probably you do social media and you have been involved in a couple of blog posts before, then you are already familiar with what content marketing is.
Doing content marketing for your business isn’t as technical as some people view it. All it takes is a careful planning and knowing the people you are marketing to.
You also want to learn how to use the most potent weapon in your marketing (content) to nudge these people into action.
Some go the SEO route to give their content wings, but the whole idea of marketing is the content itself. After all, “content is king!”
Before we proceed on how to do content marketing for your business. Let’s look at what the concept really means itself.
So,
What is content marketing?
Here is how Google defines it that will help you better grasp the concept:
Content marketing is the type of marketing that involves the “creation and sharing of online material (blogs, videos, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”
This definition is apt because, 1) it tells you what content marketing is, 2) it tells you what content marketing is not, and 3) it describes how content marketing works to achieve your business goal:
“Stimulate interest in products or services”
Any marketer who has ever dotted the content lane knows how effective content marketing is in getting people to engage and interact with a business.
In fact, in their 2017 B2B survey on the state of the content marketing industry, Content Marketing Institute CMI asked marketers “which content marketing tactics that your organization uses will be most critical to its content marketing success in 2017?”
The overwhelming majority (52%) selected Blogs as their top tactic for 2017.
It is by no mean a secret that blogging has become a dominant factor in online marketing in recent years.
People are now creating more blogs than ever before. According to WordPress, its platform now has over 74 million blogs publishing 76.9 million new posts every month.
One thing that is increasingly becoming obvious by this is the fact that businesses now have to work harder for each lead than they ever used to before. The user’s attention span is on decline.
Perhaps, you don’t have a Halo effect yet to build a loyal fan base for your business.
Your best bet yet is content
So, which content type is the right one to pique interest from your business’s target audience?
This depends on so many things, but the obvious is to look at your existing content space for insights into what your audience already likes.
With Google Analytics, you can uncover bite-sized nuggets that are helpful to scale your content marketing efforts in the areas of your competitive strength.
So here are 10 Google analytics metrics to inform your decision about doing content marketing successfully for your business, even if you are low on budget.
First off,
Set your goals
Goals are what keep you focused on the progress being made in your content marketing journey, so it is good to monitor them religiously.
Not only good, it is mandatory to have your goals tracked because it makes it easy to compare each content funnel with the measured goals.
This way you can see which content the user reads before going ahead to sign up to your mailing list, watch the video on your sales page, purchase your product, etc.
So if you want to create a goal for your email list subscribers, for instance, you will go to “Goals” under ADMIN tab in your Google analytics, click the big “+New Goal” red button to begin your goal setup.
Choose one of the prefilled templates that match your goal, in this case, we have selected “Sign up”
Then click Continue,
Consider giving your goal a descriptive name that you can easily remember in your analytics reports, in this case, we name it “Social Media Verve Email Signup.” Then select destination as your goal type. This will allow you to input a page or metric in the next stage.
To avoid messing up your data, make sure it is a page that is only accessible to users after they successfully signed up to your newsletters (it will automatically redirect them to it).
You don’t need to type in the whole page URL, just input the unique part of the URL preceded by a forward slash. For example, /thankyou.html instead of www.socialmediaverve.com/thankyou.html
You can go further to add a value for your goal. If you deem each subscriber worth $30 (hypothetically), go ahead and put that in. It will show up later in your analytics. While this may not provide the true value that each subscriber brings, you can use it as a quick estimate of your business’s worth in future.
When you are done configuring your goal, click “Create goal” to begin tracking your email signups.
Make sure you also create goals for other milestones that are worth tracking in your content marketing. I will recommend you set up at least 2 goals to keep a close eye on your business conversions.
Now that we know where we are headed in terms of conversions, it is time to poke around your Google analytics for insights into what content you should produce to deliver on those targets.
Starting with the depth of information provided through audience insight
First of all, the basic audience demographics will show you their gender balance and age bracket.
You can find this under the Reporting tab in your analytics, go to Audience > Demographics > Overview
And you will see this
Many marketers don’t know they can also do a psychographics research for their audience in the analytics.
This is basically based on their interests.
In the same section under the Reporting tab, go to Audience > Interest > Overview. You will find 3 groups of data comprising many topics each:
Affinity Categories
In-market Segments
Other Categories
Let’s look at each group one after the other.
Affinity
Affinity basically tells you about the topics that your audience likes.
It is worth paying a close attention to because it shows how your audience interacts with businesses around the web, in diverse niche areas.
Google collects this information through their third party cookies and other advertising related sources.
So there are two configurations that you will have to make in your analytics to see these reports:
Enable Advertising Reporting Features for your property
Enable the Demographics and Interests reports for the view
In-market
The users in this group are in the later stage of their buyer journey, meaning, they are more ready to buy from you. So the revelations here are what you would expect your audience to make a purchase of.
Other Categories
This further breaks down into specific areas what your audience has shown interest in.
For instance, where Affinity Categories contains “Foodie,” then Other Categories may have “East Asian Cuisine”
Next,
Take a tour of your top performing content
There is a reason why they have the most page views, sessions, average time spent on a page, organic clicks from Google, and more.
People interact with content because it helps solve problems for them.
If you can connect with these problems with more indepth and problem-solving content, then that will be a huge lift.
Or even branch out to related topics that are equally great in solving problems for your audience
With the help of a little keyword research, you can uncover most of these hidden opportunities.
But before that, let’s see the metrics that tell a story about what users are considered great content from you.
In the Reporting tab, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Let’s quickly touch on each metric that is important here:
Pageviews: The number of times a page was viewed regardless of how many repeated views were counted in the process. Don’t dwell too much on this metric.
Unique Pageviews: This calculates pageviews in a specific interval as 1 for a user. So frequent visits to your page within a session duration will not bloat your analytics data. This metric is more reliable.
Average time on page: The average amount of time users spent viewing a page. You can use this as a reliable measurement of user engagement. If a page is enjoying a relatively high on-page time but low traffic, that signifies that users love the content but they seem to be having problems navigating to the page. So you should spend more time promoting the page and improving your site navigation.
Entrances: The number of times visitors entered your site through a particular page.
Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds. Keeping your bounce rate down is a sure way to boost your Google organic traffic.
Exits: This indicates how often users exit your site from a particular page when they view the page, usually calculated in percentage: %Exit is (number of exits) / (number of pageviews)
Pro tip: while exits might sound like a negative metric, it actually provides a good measurement of the page(s) users are considered valuable. Because it is customary for people to go for exit door having found the information they need on a page. So you also need to pair the number of exits with pageviews to get the actual content users want more of from you, – high pageviews with high exit rate are a good number.
Optimize conversions with Content Drilldown
Until you take a deep dive, there is not much sense you can make of your analytics data than the Bounce Rate and Pageviews that will be staring on your face.
And it is easier to do this than you can imagine.
In the Reporting tab, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels
You won’t see much data this way, but these are default channel groups through which users are visiting your site.
You can go further to analyze your page by these channels and drill your way down to the destination pages and exit pages to see if the users completed any conversion in the process.
Click on the channel you want to see the traffic from, say “Social”
Then go further to see if the number of users who viewed a page is as a result of direct visits from the social channel, or after the users have viewed other pages on your site.
Click on “Landing Page” at the top-left in the “Primary Dimension” area. This will bring up the top pages with social referral traffic
Then click on a particular page you want to view landing page(s) of. If users first viewed this page, it will show up as its own landing page.
You can move down to the “Secondary Dimension” area to see where users headed after viewing this page. Under “Behavior,” select Destination Page, and then Exit Page.
Depending on their level of engagement, you will see how many pages users viewed on their journey to conversions.
This is a broad topic that I can’t cover all here.
We have a course coming up tagged ‘Online Marketing Professionals,” this topic has been broadly discussed in one section and other online marketing tactics.
Make sure you REGISTER for the course to get the full gist on our online marketing discoveries.
Go in-depth with a query research
Now, there is a reason why I didn’t call it a “keyword research.”
Because you are not expected to reinvent the wheel here.
You are simply going to build upon your existing content structure using the materials that you have engineered through user queries!
Before we proceed, I hope by now you have linked up your Google analytics with Search Console. If you haven’t yet, you can quickly do so from your Admin tab
Go to Admin > Product Linking > All Products
There is a bunch of products you can link to here. One, if any, is Search Console that provides a blow by blow account of your site performance in Google search.
It also saves you the stress of switching between the two products for your Google data, so that you can mine all your information in one dashboard.
Now go back to the Reporting tab, navigate to Acquisition > Search Console > Queries
These are the queries you should focus on in producing your next batch of content.
It doesn’t stop here too, you can take a step further to analyze the user intent behind these queries by searching for them using Google Keyword Planner or by conducting a manual search in Google.
Finally,
Optimize for geography with most visits
If they actually come visiting and engaging more often, it means there is something that attracts them to your business.
Maybe the topic is more tailored to their need and there are a few better options elsewhere.
Or you have even done a little optimizing for them without you knowing it.
Whatever the case may be, you should consider optimizing your content for geography where most of your site visitors reside in. Simple as it sounds, but most marketers still miss this side.
You can hover over your analytics to see where most of your traffic originated from.
Using the Search Console, you can filter by Impressions and Click-through Rates to see which geography drives a significant portion of these two metrics.
These are the metrics you should focus on to drive more visitors to your site.
Then go over to Google keyword planner to research based on countries that are bringing most of these metrics.
Of course, it doesn’t mean you should focus your entire marketing on one national. But it helps you to have deeper knowledge of the people that constitute the largest visits to your site in order to create better content.
Conclusions
Content marketing is a heartbeat of any sustainable online marketing strategy.
For every ad dollar spent on traditional advertising, content marketing costs 62% less and generates about 3 times as many leads.
But you are not in for quick wins. It is a long game.
The important thing is to clarify your marketing activities with a benchmark that you have set.
You also need a focused strategy down the line to realize the future benefits of your content marketing.
To help out, here is a recap
Set up a goal for each milestone in your content journey.
Understand what your audience likes, their age, and in-market journey.
Discover your best performing content pieces and develop a future content strategy based on those.
Uncover more conversion opportunities through content drilldown.
Solve problems for users strategically by answering their specific queries.
And, if possible, leverage your content geographically.
curatedcontent
Probably you do social media and you have been involved in a couple of blog posts before, then you are already familiar with what content marketing is.
Doing content marketing for your business isn’t as technical as some people view it. All it takes is a careful planning and knowing the people you are marketing to.
You also want to learn how to use the most potent weapon in your marketing (content) to nudge these people into action.
Some go the SEO route to give their content wings, but the whole idea of marketing is the content itself. After all, “content is king!”
Before we proceed on how to do content marketing for your business. Let’s look at what the concept really means itself.
So,
What is content marketing?
Here is how Google defines it that will help you better grasp the concept:
Content marketing is the type of marketing that involves the “creation and sharing of online material (blogs, videos, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”
This definition is apt because, 1) it tells you what content marketing is, 2) it tells you what content marketing is not, and 3) it describes how content marketing works to achieve your business goal:
“Stimulate interest in products or services”
Any marketer who has ever dotted the content lane knows how effective content marketing is in getting people to engage and interact with a business.
In fact, in their 2017 B2B survey on the state of the content marketing industry, Content Marketing Institute CMI asked marketers “which content marketing tactics that your organization uses will be most critical to its content marketing success in 2017?”
The overwhelming majority (52%) selected Blogs as their top tactic for 2017.
It is by no mean a secret that blogging has become a dominant factor in online marketing in recent years.
People are now creating more blogs than ever before. According to WordPress, its platform now has over 74 million blogs publishing 76.9 million new posts every month.
One thing that is increasingly becoming obvious by this is the fact that businesses now have to work harder for each lead than they ever used to before. The user’s attention span is on decline.
Perhaps, you don’t have a Halo effect yet to build a loyal fan base for your business.
Your best bet yet is content
So, which content type is the right one to pique interest from your business’s target audience?
This depends on so many things, but the obvious is to look at your existing content space for insights into what your audience already likes.
With Google Analytics, you can uncover bite-sized nuggets that are helpful to scale your content marketing efforts in the areas of your competitive strength.
So here are 10 Google analytics metrics to inform your decision about doing content marketing successfully for your business, even if you are low on budget.
First off,
Set your goals
Goals are what keep you focused on the progress being made in your content marketing journey, so it is good to monitor them religiously.
Not only good, it is mandatory to have your goals tracked because it makes it easy to compare each content funnel with the measured goals.
This way you can see which content the user reads before going ahead to sign up to your mailing list, watch the video on your sales page, purchase your product, etc.
So if you want to create a goal for your email list subscribers, for instance, you will go to “Goals” under ADMIN tab in your Google analytics, click the big “+New Goal” red button to begin your goal setup.
Choose one of the prefilled templates that match your goal, in this case, we have selected “Sign up”
Then click Continue,
Consider giving your goal a descriptive name that you can easily remember in your analytics reports, in this case, we name it “Social Media Verve Email Signup.” Then select destination as your goal type. This will allow you to input a page or metric in the next stage.
To avoid messing up your data, make sure it is a page that is only accessible to users after they successfully signed up to your newsletters (it will automatically redirect them to it).
You don’t need to type in the whole page URL, just input the unique part of the URL preceded by a forward slash. For example, /thankyou.html instead of www.socialmediaverve.com/thankyou.html
You can go further to add a value for your goal. If you deem each subscriber worth $30 (hypothetically), go ahead and put that in. It will show up later in your analytics. While this may not provide the true value that each subscriber brings, you can use it as a quick estimate of your business’s worth in future.
When you are done configuring your goal, click “Create goal” to begin tracking your email signups.
Make sure you also create goals for other milestones that are worth tracking in your content marketing. I will recommend you set up at least 2 goals to keep a close eye on your business conversions.
Now that we know where we are headed in terms of conversions, it is time to poke around your Google analytics for insights into what content you should produce to deliver on those targets.
Starting with the depth of information provided through audience insight
First of all, the basic audience demographics will show you their gender balance and age bracket.
You can find this under the Reporting tab in your analytics, go to Audience > Demographics > Overview
And you will see this
Many marketers don’t know they can also do a psychographics research for their audience in the analytics.
This is basically based on their interests.
In the same section under the Reporting tab, go to Audience > Interest > Overview. You will find 3 groups of data comprising many topics each:
Affinity Categories
In-market Segments
Other Categories
Let’s look at each group one after the other.
Affinity
Affinity basically tells you about the topics that your audience likes.
It is worth paying a close attention to because it shows how your audience interacts with businesses around the web, in diverse niche areas.
Google collects this information through their third party cookies and other advertising related sources.
So there are two configurations that you will have to make in your analytics to see these reports:
Enable Advertising Reporting Features for your property
Enable the Demographics and Interests reports for the view
In-market
The users in this group are in the later stage of their buyer journey, meaning, they are more ready to buy from you. So the revelations here are what you would expect your audience to make a purchase of.
Other Categories
This further breaks down into specific areas what your audience has shown interest in.
For instance, where Affinity Categories contains “Foodie,” then Other Categories may have “East Asian Cuisine”
Next,
Take a tour of your top performing content
There is a reason why they have the most page views, sessions, average time spent on a page, organic clicks from Google, and more.
People interact with content because it helps solve problems for them.
If you can connect with these problems with more indepth and problem-solving content, then that will be a huge lift.
Or even branch out to related topics that are equally great in solving problems for your audience
With the help of a little keyword research, you can uncover most of these hidden opportunities.
But before that, let’s see the metrics that tell a story about what users are considered great content from you.
In the Reporting tab, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Let’s quickly touch on each metric that is important here:
Pageviews: The number of times a page was viewed regardless of how many repeated views were counted in the process. Don’t dwell too much on this metric.
Unique Pageviews: This calculates pageviews in a specific interval as 1 for a user. So frequent visits to your page within a session duration will not bloat your analytics data. This metric is more reliable.
Average time on page: The average amount of time users spent viewing a page. You can use this as a reliable measurement of user engagement. If a page is enjoying a relatively high on-page time but low traffic, that signifies that users love the content but they seem to be having problems navigating to the page. So you should spend more time promoting the page and improving your site navigation.
Entrances: The number of times visitors entered your site through a particular page.
Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds. Keeping your bounce rate down is a sure way to boost your Google organic traffic.
Exits: This indicates how often users exit your site from a particular page when they view the page, usually calculated in percentage: %Exit is (number of exits) / (number of pageviews)
Pro tip: while exits might sound like a negative metric, it actually provides a good measurement of the page(s) users are considered valuable. Because it is customary for people to go for exit door having found the information they need on a page. So you also need to pair the number of exits with pageviews to get the actual content users want more of from you, – high pageviews with high exit rate are a good number.
Optimize conversions with Content Drilldown
Until you take a deep dive, there is not much sense you can make of your analytics data than the Bounce Rate and Pageviews that will be staring on your face.
And it is easier to do this than you can imagine.
In the Reporting tab, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels
You won’t see much data this way, but these are default channel groups through which users are visiting your site.
You can go further to analyze your page by these channels and drill your way down to the destination pages and exit pages to see if the users completed any conversion in the process.
Click on the channel you want to see the traffic from, say “Social”
Then go further to see if the number of users who viewed a page is as a result of direct visits from the social channel, or after the users have viewed other pages on your site.
Click on “Landing Page” at the top-left in the “Primary Dimension” area. This will bring up the top pages with social referral traffic
Then click on a particular page you want to view landing page(s) of. If users first viewed this page, it will show up as its own landing page.
You can move down to the “Secondary Dimension” area to see where users headed after viewing this page. Under “Behavior,” select Destination Page, and then Exit Page.
Depending on their level of engagement, you will see how many pages users viewed on their journey to conversions.
This is a broad topic that I can’t cover all here.
We have a course coming up tagged ‘Online Marketing Professionals,” this topic has been broadly discussed in one section and other online marketing tactics.
Make sure you REGISTER for the course to get the full gist on our online marketing discoveries.
Go in-depth with a query research
Now, there is a reason why I didn’t call it a “keyword research.”
Because you are not expected to reinvent the wheel here.
You are simply going to build upon your existing content structure using the materials that you have engineered through user queries!
Before we proceed, I hope by now you have linked up your Google analytics with Search Console. If you haven’t yet, you can quickly do so from your Admin tab
Go to Admin > Product Linking > All Products
There is a bunch of products you can link to here. One, if any, is Search Console that provides a blow by blow account of your site performance in Google search.
It also saves you the stress of switching between the two products for your Google data, so that you can mine all your information in one dashboard.
Now go back to the Reporting tab, navigate to Acquisition > Search Console > Queries
These are the queries you should focus on in producing your next batch of content.
It doesn’t stop here too, you can take a step further to analyze the user intent behind these queries by searching for them using Google Keyword Planner or by conducting a manual search in Google.
Finally,
Optimize for geography with most visits
If they actually come visiting and engaging more often, it means there is something that attracts them to your business.
Maybe the topic is more tailored to their need and there are a few better options elsewhere.
Or you have even done a little optimizing for them without you knowing it.
Whatever the case may be, you should consider optimizing your content for geography where most of your site visitors reside in. Simple as it sounds, but most marketers still miss this side.
You can hover over your analytics to see where most of your traffic originated from.
Using the Search Console, you can filter by Impressions and Click-through Rates to see which geography drives a significant portion of these two metrics.
These are the metrics you should focus on to drive more visitors to your site.
Then go over to Google keyword planner to research based on countries that are bringing most of these metrics.
Of course, it doesn’t mean you should focus your entire marketing on one national. But it helps you to have deeper knowledge of the people that constitute the largest visits to your site in order to create better content.
Conclusions
Content marketing is a heartbeat of any sustainable online marketing strategy.
For every ad dollar spent on traditional advertising, content marketing costs 62% less and generates about 3 times as many leads.
But you are not in for quick wins. It is a long game.
The important thing is to clarify your marketing activities with a benchmark that you have set.
You also need a focused strategy down the line to realize the future benefits of your content marketing.
To help out, here is a recap
Set up a goal for each milestone in your content journey.
Understand what your audience likes, their age, and in-market journey.
Discover your best performing content pieces and develop a future content strategy based on those.
Uncover more conversion opportunities through content drilldown.
Solve problems for users strategically by answering their specific queries.
And, if possible, leverage your content geographically.
curatedcontent
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