Content marketing has become an inseparable part of the low-cost digital marketing strategies making waves these days. Well-crafted content produces numerous benefits for the brands savvy enough to use it:

• Improved brand authority and thought leadership by way of addressing cutting-edge industry issues
• Increased opportunities for revenue growth by addressing consumer pain points and helping them down the
  path to conversion
• Improved SEO potential by increasing the number of pages, keywords, and tags that can be found by search
  engine crawlers

Unfortunately, content marketing often suffers from the same drawback as many other marketing initiatives: Proving its ROI. The whole point of marketing is to increase the value of a business, and naturally, most businesses have CEOs, shareholders, or other C-Suite executives who are responsible for ensuring that marketing efforts are paying off.

Measure the Metrics

The number of methods available to track content marketing ROI are enough to fill an encyclopedia, but the following rundown will give you a good place to start:

• Google analytics – Free tools by Google can be used to monitor page traffic, determine which pieces of
  content have high engagement levels, and which of your calls-to-action drive the most clicks
• Social media measurement – Including all social-based metrics such as likes, shares, retweets,
  impressions, and all other mentions of your brand
• Link tracking – Monitor your dashboards to see which pieces of content are gathering attention and are
  being linked to by other sites
• Feedback software – Consider using customer feedback software to test specific pieces of content against
  target groups and get an idea of how you’re performing.

Get an idea of where these metrics stand before your content campaign begins, and monitor the changes over time. The specific ROI of content marketing can be hard to prove, but with the right data behind you, it can be done.