Tracking a Content Marketing Strategy

Consumers rely on content that is delivered on time with consistent quality.

“Content marketing success requires consistency and predictability because it projects a professional image and builds comfort, familiarity, and trust,” writes Content Marketing Institute‘s Roger C. Parker.

Companies should use editorial calendars and schedules to keep to this rule. Without measurements and proposed goals in place, it’s impossible to determine how effective content is.

If content isn’t engaging the target audience, why waste time producing it?

To find out if content is interesting to the customers, it should be posted on sites like Facebook and Twitter and measured in likes, comments, shares, and retweets.

“The goal here is to create a content marketing process that resembles a well-oiled machine — one that works reliably and consistently, with few gaps or procedural breakdowns,” writes Parker. “Ideally, your efficiency will increase each month, as you continue to tweak your processes to make up for the shortfalls you find through this analysis process.”

Success starts from within. If the people producing the content are bored or uninspired, that is a huge problem for the company.

Ideas can be found anywhere if marketers think differently. The employees’ talents can become the inspiration for content. For example, as Business 2 Community‘s Joe Pulizzi puts it, if an employee has a wealth of information about a certain subject, but can’t write, he or she can be interviewed on camera. The company can then release it as an educational video.

Parker says, “Content marketing should never become so routine that your staff members fail to challenge themselves by addressing new topics and ideas. Predictability can be deadening, and if your staff is bored because your content constantly readdresses the same topics, your audience is probably bored, too.”

Ideas for content can also be found by searching for popular keywords on Google, latching onto a hot news item or trend, and looking up what people are talking about on social media sites, as suggested by Search Engine Watch‘s Bob Tripathi.

There are a number of methods to keep both employees and consumers interested in a company’s content. The company just needs to figure out where to start.

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