Content Marketing is a key component to company marketing plans. Creating content is often a top priority and many hours are devoted to creating, editing and maintaining it. But how do you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing?

There are many ways to track your key performance indicators (KPIs) as they relate to content marketing. Those high level metrics you have chosen to measure performance of your content (sales lifts, new subscribers, completed online forms, etc.) will only get you so far – you have to look at all aspects of your content marketing to determine what is working and what is not.

Tracking all of your content can be helpful to start. Creating a spreadsheet with each piece of content can help you decide what information you would like from each blog, tweet, video, or white paper. You can see which posts garnered the most responses, comments, or likes. Determining averages and creating a baseline for each piece is also important, such as how many new subscribers on average are collected from a blog or article. Tracking across months can also help to compare one quarter over another. When tracking month to month, make sure to give each piece a chance to gain traction before determining if it worked or not.

Making changes to your content marketing based on solid planning, metrics, and tracking will help you make improvements where needed, increase customer engagement in the right channels, and generate sales.