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As they say, you can only expect what you inspect. So what content marketing metrics are you using to monitor your team’s progress?
While personally satisfying, higher ed marketing is difficult and complicated work.
And although it sounds crazy, marketing is difficult and complicated whether you’re making good progress or going backwards.
It is possible to stay busy creating and publishing content, and still fail to reach your goals.
The only way to know you’re making real progress is to measure your audience’s response to your marketing efforts.
Analyzing your audience’s behavior when they encounter your content will let you know whether your messaging is working…
Or if you’re just spinning your wheels.
So in order to help keep you and your team from wasting precious resources, here’s a brief guide to content marketing metrics.
This guide can help you gain clarity on the results you’re actually getting from your digital marketing and determine the right decisions for your messaging going forward.
Here are some content marketing metrics I recommend setting goals for.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it can serve as a good start.
A few great tools (some of which we’ve used and continue to use) to track website analytics are:
For more information on social media analytics, check out this post.
Once you know the kinds of content marketing metrics you’ll be tracking, it’s time to set up some goals.
If you already have some information on your marketing’s performance, you can use that data to help align your expectations.
But if you don’t have any metrics yet, no worries!
Here, we have to make an educated guess.
What can you reasonably expect to achieve with your current brand reach?
Some educational institutions will have greater brand reach, especially schools with larger student populations, long histories, or successful athletic departments.
These schools will need to set the bar high.
At the same time, smaller, more tightly mission-focused schools will need to begin setting their goals at a more reasonable level.
When you begin tracking your content marketing metrics, it’s unlikely that you’ll hit your goals perfectly.
You’ll need to analyze your results, adjust your goals, and then continue to monitor your results.
The point of setting goals is to keep you moving towards growth.
Grow the level of engagement on your site. Expand your brand reach. Improve your enrollment numbers.
The power of content marketing metrics is that they will give you hard evidence to show whether you need to make changes to your messaging or marketing strategy overall.
You’ve only got so much time and other resources available to you.
So if you’re going to tweak or overhaul your strategy, you’ll need some good justification to back up that decision.
Tracking metrics will also help clarify which components of your strategy need to be changed.
As you collect the metrics on your content, put some time on the calendar to take a break and analyze them.
Then, adjust course as you see how far you’ve come since you set your goals.
Personally, I recommend short monthly meetings of about a half hour to review the data.
But then hold longer analysis meetings quarterly to go deep into what the numbers are saying and make adjustments.
Believe me, the clarity you’ll get from these analytic meetings is an instant stress reliever as you’ll no longer be guessing how things are going.
And you’ll know better how to move forward.
That’s a great feeling.
For more help on advancing your education brand, contact us today!
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