It probably does not shock you to learn that recent content marketing performance findings reinforced what you probably experience all the time - that marketing measurement is hard to do, and often grinds to a halt, leaving you to wonder how to identify, lock down and explain how well your company's marketing goals are being met.

From Lee Odden at TopRank Online Marketing comes a review of a report authored by Rebecca Lieb and Susan Etlinger from Altimeter Group called "Content Marketing Performance: A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact." They put together a collection of case studies in this report that highlights six major problem areas most marketing executives struggle with.

The Altimeter Group surveyed marketers, and a whopping 67% said that measurement was the biggest area they needed to invest in for improvement. They probably would all agree that the six areas listed below are their biggest headaches.

Here's the 6 things that are stopping your marketing efforts:

  1. Brand health - how healthy is your brand with your target audience? This measures the conversations, attitudes and behaviors concerning the brand. Creating content to communicate and raise awareness is good, but how well does content create audience growth and generate views and social sharing?
  2. Marketing optimization - the collection of components you implement to improve your marketing efforts beyond the current levels.
  3. Revenue generation - how can the impact of any marketing activity - content, social, etc. - be measured? This is the one that's near and dear to my heart. This part of the report nails down the issue - with so many browsers, apps and different platforms audiences use, it's difficult to correctly and accurately measure performance across the board. The confidence level marketers have in other initiatives such as A/B testing is often low, because it's not always clear what exactly success is for these methods.
  4. Operational efficiency - how well does your marketing program work? Do you have a marketing program that's separate and measurable from the sales program, or is sales running your marketing department? How do you make separate, measurable goals within both programs, and more to the point, what's a good reporting tool or multiple tools you can use that actually work and play well together?
  5. Customer experience - people buy our products and services, not search engines, not software programs and certainly not websites. How much does your customer experience cost, and are you converting prospects into customers efficiently?
  6. Innovation - how can you solicit ideas from customers and engage prospects to become customers? How can you measure innovation to figure out if it's worth the effort? Developing, tracking and measuring realistic metrics can be challenging.

You can use this report to compare business metrics and raw metrics for each of the six areas listed above in an easy to read format that allows you to easily match them up for comparison.

Finally, the authors offer some recommendations for each of the six parts of their report. Measurements must be the foundation of the marketing strategy, each strategy should focus on a specific business outcome, as well you should know your metrics and data.

While it's not easy to articulate, define and develop concrete measurements, the effort is worth while since you'll end up with a much better idea of how to determine ROI.

Measured Results Marketing can guide you through this journey or any other marketing challenge you're stuck on. We go to your marketing and sales front lines and see exactly what's being done and where the disconnects and overlaps are. Then, we help you design a custom action plan to move forward with real goals and the skills to use marketing automation tools to measure and report on progress made.

Take a look at our services page, then contact us to get the conversation started.