How do marketers measure content success? Retention? Page views? Revenue? It’s actually a little more complicated than that.

That’s why Contently created the industry’s first Content Measurement Maturity Model.

The backstory on content marketing ROI
Marketers respect the value of good content. After all, it impacts every stage of the customer journey and can single-handedly sell your product or service — or not.  But how do you know if it’s really working and if you’re investing your marketing spend in the right place?

Last year, Contently reported that only 36% of marketers were satisfied with their content measurement abilities. Thus, the Content Measurement Maturity Model was born to connect content marketing efforts to their tangible business value.

Step by step to content success
Consisting of four stages — crawl, walk, run and fly — the model requires a mastery of measurement at each stage before you can progress to the next. It’s a brilliantly simple framework to follow if you want to level up on your analytics.

Here’s a quick overview:

Crawl. This step is key to attracting and building your audience. Because if you can’t get them to your website with good content, there’s no one to convert. Audience growth is measured in three segments:

• Audience reach — unique visitors and page views
• Audience engagement — average attention time, return visitors and shares
• SEO effectiveness — keywords, ranking and backlinks

Walk. At this stage, your audience is looking to learn more with content that will encourage them to take action. This is where you can measure:

• Leads generated — leads are broken down into content leads (e.g. those who sign up for an email list or watch a sales demo) and people who are ready to talk to sales, also known as marketing qualified leads
• Lead engagement — pages visited, click-throughs and any other way they’re interacting with your brand
• Share of voice — how well you’re pushing them toward the ultimate goal — a sale

Run. At this point in the framework, you can pinpoint where your content attribution leads to revenue. For example:

• SEO value — in terms of cost-per-click and organic search traffic, how much is a piece of content really worth?
• Lead value — Contently determines this metric by multiplying the number of leads generated by the traditional cost per lead
• Single-touch content attribution — refers to content pieces that were 100% responsible for a sale (AKA the holy grail of content marketing)

Fly. This stage measures multi-touch content attribution, revealing which pieces of content and which campaigns brought in the most revenue. Each piece is broken down on a weighted scale based on which touchpoints are deemed most impactful. According to Contently, multi-touch attribution is rarely applied, despite its importance.

Create to convert — now you’ll know if you actually are
Did that webinar move the conversion dial? Was your latest email campaign worth the investment? In marketing, we rely heavily on data to know what’s working, and to ensure time and resources are spent on content that generates results. If you’re looking to take your content measurement to the next level, this could be the framework for you.

Take a deeper dive into Contently’s Content Measurement Maturity Model.