I?ve championed the use of blogs for marketing for long enough – now we need to look at whether the blogs are actually working.  As with all marketing tools, you must measure their effectiveness, tweak and re-measure as you go along.  A key activity you need to undertake is assessing whether your content marketing efforts are reaching the right audiences.

It?s relatively simple to analyse your business blog metrics, via your website traffic (Google Analytics provides this info).  Dig deeper into this information to find out if the visitors to your site are people who are genuine customer prospects.  Here?s a few ways you can assess this.

Traffic sources – analyse and identify them

The majority of B2B companies will see their website traffic coming from the same sources: referring sites and social media.  Consider the common audience demographics of your referral traffic sources: If you run a business-to-business site, does traffic from individual-focused sites like StumbleUpon and Digg fit your mission, or should you focus your promotional efforts on business networking sites like LinkedIn?  While exposure to a large audience can often boost your site?s SEO rankings, relying on such sites for traffic isn?t an effective long-term strategy when you?re searching for qualified leads.

Focus instead on promoting your content to related industry blogs, and through your company?s existing social media channels: Though traffic rates may not always be as impressive, visitors from these types of referral sources are more likely to engage with your content and achieve the conversions you?re looking for, such as newsletter sign-ups.

Look at your keyword search results

Whilst looking at your site analytics, have a look at the search terms that are driving traffic to your site.

If many of your most popular website search terms are for terms that are tenuously related to your core business, it?s time to start thinking more strategically about creating content that relates to your business goals.

Pay attention to user engagement measures

Are visitors bouncing away from your site within a few seconds, or do they tend to linger for a while, browse through your archives, and maybe even sign up for your newsletter? If your website visitors rarely view more than a single page at a time, it?s a sign that they?re either not your target audience, or that the content you?re producing isn?t compelling enough to entice them to stay.

At Appletree we specialise in planning and delivering quality blogs that perform as they should for you – as an effective marketing tool.  Get in touch  if you like to discuss how we could deliver blogs for you.