How To Quantify Relevancy for Your Content Marketing Campaign

Relevance. It is a key component of any content campaign, which is why you see the word and its derivatives over and over again in tips on developing a strong content marketing strategy. Relevance is one of the three pillars of SEO, so it plays a role not just in connecting with customers, but also in them finding you. The complex algorithms of search engines review relevancy in the linking to your page, so you cannot rank for a certain keyword or topic if your overall website is not relevant. Facebook has also gotten into the relevancy game, making changes to its algorithm to ensure that relevant posts will show to users more often.

We can all agree it is important. But what does it really mean? And how do you actually measure how relevant your properties are? It is essential that you find ways to quantify relevance for your business to help you build a strong foundation on which to build your marketing campaigns. This helps you to recognize whether your marketing collateral is impacting your audience, and how you might be able to improve it if it is not.

The hard part is that relevancy is actually very subjective and relative to the consumer. That is why you cannot just rely on analytics and other measurement tools to quantify how relevant the information you include in your content campaign actually is. Instead, you must review the analytics and add in some of your human reasoning skills to create an accurate measure of relevancy for your campaigns.

Choose the Right Timing

Timing plays a key role in maintaining relevancy. You do not want to send out coupons that are expired or write a blog about Christmas planning in June. Plan your content marketing calendar based on the prescribed cyclical nature of your industry and business. To help establish your content and get ahead of the curve, you might want to publish somewhat in advance, depending on the situation. It might take some trial and error to determine whether something was sent at a relevant time, and that is where your analytics contribute.

Determine how successful your content campaign was by looking at certain metrics, including bounce rate, time spent on page, number of shares and similar tools. Then, compare it to the last time you developed something similar to see if you are concerned that timing might be an issue. This works very well for coupons, but it might not work as well for evergreen content. Another timing insight comes from looking at the search volumes for the particular keywords at particular times.

Measure Your Problem Solving Success

Customers come to you to solve a problem or fulfill a need. Your blogs might go into detail about a particular question or issue that your target audience faces. It might also demonstrate how your products or services fulfill a need. For example, if you sell vacuums, you might write a blog that tells customers how to change out a vacuum bag with step-by-step instructions and pictures. You are answering a question that your customers have about the practical use of the machine. This type of information is highly relevant to your consumers because it provides a solution.

There is no perfect measurement for whether you adequately answer a certain question, unless you directly ask your audience for feedback. Instead, you have to review trust metrics and look at related factors. Key measurements include unique page views and average time on site. The longer people spend on your site or blog, then the more likely they find value in the content you produce. This correlates to the content being relevant to the quandary for which they initially searched.

Are You Using the Right Keyword?

The keywords for which you optimize your page have a strong bearing on how well your page is ranked for its relevancy. You will find it hard to rank high for a keyword that has no real relationship with your business and industry, no matter how creative you were in developing content that appears to bring the two together. For example, writing a post about cars and trying to rank for a car-related keyword, such as Toyota Prius, when your company sells vacuums only works if you also sell portable ones made for cleaning cars. Even then, there will be limited relevancy ranking involved in your blog post, despite you demonstrating a correlation.

You can learn more about how search engines rank pages based on keyword optimization and other factors by reviewing certain tools, such as SCOT (Stickyeyes Content Optimization Tool). This provides insight into the type of content on a page and how well it works, including if it only provides short-term returns or will remain valuable in the long-term. This also helps you to determine if a particular keyword is actually relevant to the blog and your overall marketing campaign.

Use Your Customer Journey Metrics

Another way to quantify relevance is to follow your customers through the stages of their journey. Your content campaign is there to act as a funnel to take potential customers through different stages from lead to customer. It is most likely a multi-point journey, so you need content that adequately reflects all stages of this journey from initial inquiry to final sell. The more relevant the content, the more success you will have with your funnel. Bearing this in mind also helps you to develop relevant content beyond generic ideas and into specific queries customers might have.

Know Your Audience

A key component of any successful content campaign is knowing your audience. This makes it easy to create quality content that relates to consumers. Taking the time upfront to really understand the motivation, demographics, location and more will help you to develop content that speaks to them. No matter the quality and value of your content, it will fail to be relevant if it is written for a different type of audience than the one you are targeting.

There are some key analytical tools that help you determine if you are targeting the right audience with the right content marketing pieces. It is important to review your bounce rate, time spent on page, click patterns, heat maps, page views, comments and sharing metrics. When customers decide that a particular page is irrelevant, they will quickly leave. Heat maps and click patterns help you understand how users view and interact with your pages. Comments and sharing give you excellent direct insight into whether or not consumers find your pages interesting or valuable. This ultimately relates back to relevancy as well, giving you a quantifiable measurement.

Measuring the relevancy of your content marketing campaign starts by asking yourself certain questions so that you understand how you plan to define relevancy for your campaign. Then, review your key matrices to recognize the success of your content. Once you understand the connections between the analytics and your customers’ behaviors, then you will easily be able to use these as tools to tell you whether or not you are producing relevant content.