Using the Buyer’s Journey to Evaluate Content Marketing Success

With the abundance of analytics tools available, we have many different ways to track behaviors and develop attribution models. However, lacking a data analyst or a personal desire to dive into the numbers can leave us scratching our heads on where to start. To identify important data worth evaluating, and in turn, what KPIs to focus on, we need to dig into the goals of our content marketing strategy. One widely-accepted strategy is to follow the traditional inbound marketing methodology originated by HubSpot. Aimed at attracting new site visitors and converting them into leads, content pieces can guide individuals through the buyer’s journey to become qualified leads for the sales team. Establishing KPIs at each stage of the buyer’s journey The structure of this model can be simplified according to those primary goals for the content strategy: attracting new visitors and converting them into leads. The key part of this model is the final step of calculating new customers from these content marketing efforts—or, the number of buyers who completed the journey. Evaluating your efforts Once you have these metrics, you can understand how content strategy is performing as a whole and identify where it is driving value. Are your site visitors and new leads becoming profit-driving customers for your sales team? ROI can be broken down by the goals of each step in the buyer’s journey, identifying where the right traffic and leads are coming from to become new customers.