According to research by the Content Marketing Institute, 50% of marketers have little to no clarity about how effective their content marketing efforts are. Measuring the impact of your law firm’s content marketing strategy can be a complex task, but it’s an essential one. It helps you direct time and resources to tactics that are producing the best results.
Before you dive into tracking metrics, it’s important to note that there are no universal standards to measure content marketing success. What works for one law firm may not work for yours. That’s why it’s crucial to start with a clear idea of your content marketing goals. Content marketing can meet many goals, but it is important to outline the goals that are most relevant to your law firm.
Does your law firm want to focus on retaining old customers, or on generating more leads? Is brand awareness a more suitable goal instead? Keeping in mind your larger business goals and audience, develop a clear mission statement to guide your content marketing efforts.
With this as a reference, you can build a set of metrics to measure the performance of your content marketing strategy. Here’s a list to get you started:
Conversions
Tracking conversions helps you understand what percentage of visitors are taking some meaningful action on your website. This action could be anything that is meaningful to your marketing campaigns. Submitting a form, downloading a piece of content or registering for a consultation are all conversions.
Conversions are the ultimate goals of your campaigns, and your marketing efforts must nudge people towards them.
Engagements
When you track engagements, you understand how people are responding to your content. Engagements include things like shares, likes, and comments on social media, and comments/reposts on blog posts. These are more helpful than looking at how many followers your firm has, because they point to an audience that is actively interested in your content. These metrics are valuable in refining your content plan. They can help you understand what topics resonate with your audience, what content formats draw your target clients, and what channels they’re active on.
Growth velocity
Tracking the same metric at different points in time can help you glean some valuable information. How fast is your online presence growing? Are some dimensions declining while others rise? Which areas are stagnant and need renewed tactics? Investigating further into what is causing a rise or decline can help you streamline your marketing efforts.
On-site behaviour
These metrics help you understand how visitors behave on your website. Do they stay and carry out the actions you want them to? Or do they read a page or two and leave? These metrics can be valuable in unearthing problems that are driving visitors away. Your site may feature poor web design, unclear calls-to-action, unappealing content, or any number of other issues. Examining behaviour may help you narrow it down.
Tracking only one metric isn’t enough to gauge the impact of your marketing efforts. To tell if your content marketing strategy is working, build a basket of metrics that are aligned to your marketing goals. Paid tools can help you get an in-depth view of a wide range of metrics, Google Analytics is a great tool to begin with.
If this is too overwhelming, consider getting a professional on board to craft and execute a data-driven content marketing strategy for your law firm.