You’ve got your content presented, ready for people to benefit from it, and you’re marketing diligently. So… how do you know your content is being effective? That is the golden question, and one that’s very difficult to answer, simply because information marketing hits so many different places. Unless you ask your customers directly (which isn’t always practical), it’s hard to know how many times they were exposed to your content and from what directions. Your customers may not even know themselves.
So how can you tell if any one kind of content you’re presenting is as effective as it could be?
The following tips may help:
Make a simple marketing chart
Your information content is meant to steer the market to buy what you’re providing. If you’ve communicated effectively, then purchases will happen. A simple chart with three columns can give you the general idea of whether or not you’re going in the right direction.
Create a three-columned chart. In the first column, list the month and year of your business activities. In the second column, list any and all marketing activities you did. In the third column, list your sales figures.
It’s best to begin with specific content in place, and track results for at least six months before you draw any conclusions and make any changes. This is business research. If you were working on a science experiment, you know that changing the control part of the experiment will keep you from understanding the results. Too many changes will muddy your marketing results. If the sales figures increase or decrease as a result of changes, you won’t know why they happened if too many factors changed too quickly.
While seasonal changes and other economic factors are too complicated to achieve really specific results, this process can help you to get a ballpark idea of the impact of your content in the marketplace.
Feedback from customers
Other factors to consider are your bounce rate (“bounce” meaning how many people click on your site and then immediately click away, instead of interacting with your content). A high bounce rate could indicate that either the content of your site needs improving, or the layout needs to be manipulated to optimize the impact of your existing content. A low bounce rate could mean a higher customer interaction with your content, and could potentially lead to greater sales figures.
The great thing about doing business online is that feedback can be set up to be immediate. If your customers don’t like something, the anonymity that the computer provides will provide you with lots and lots of recent, raw feedback.
If you want to know where content can be improved, looking for patterns in the feedback your content receives can be very eye-opening and, if acted upon, can lead to greater customer satisfaction, which leads to greater sales. It can also create new, specific ideas that can lead to the creation of great new content, which is what your market is hungry for.
Ultimately, remember that the main feedback you’re looking for is the monetary kind. Who’s buying? When? Why? Would they buy again? How could you entice them to buy again?
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