Tag Archives: content marketing in 2018

How to analyze your content marketing performance in 2018?

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Analyzing your content marketing performance in 2018

Analyzing your content marketing performance in 2018

As we are on the verge of entering 2019 it’s the right time to analyze how your content marketing effort performed in 2018. Were you able to meet your goals?

There must have been many hits and misses. You achieved some things, and some things were left less than satisfactory.

Evaluation can only be done if you have data to compare. If you want to know how your content marketing performed in 2018, then you need to know how it performed in 2017 so that you can make out if there was a difference.

Though, even if you don’t have the 2017 data about your content marketing campaigns, if there has been a marked improvement in your leads and sales because you did content marketing or you also started investing in content marketing along with traditional marketing, even then you can see if there was some noticeable improvement.

This Skyword blog post lays down some guidelines that you can use to analyze and audit your content marketing effort in 2018.

The blog post suggests that before you begin to analyze your content marketing performance, you need to know if you are measuring the correct metrics.

In the beginning of 2018, what did you have in your mind?

What did you want to improve?

Did you want to get more subscribers for your newsletter?

Did you want to raise your engagement levels on your social media profiles?

Did you want to educate your audience about the product or service you are offering?

Did you want to expand your brand presence? Did you want to improve your search engine rankings for particular search terms and keywords?

Do you observe improvements in these metrics?

Was there an increase in the number of subscribers in 2018?

Did your search engine rankings improve for your selected search terms and keywords?

If you don’t notice these improvements, what do you think was lacking?

It is very important to know what was lacking because unless you know that, you cannot know what you need to do in the coming year.

Read the blog post. Nothing much extraordinary, but it is good to revisit actions and things that you need to perform to get better results from your content marketing.

5 content marketing trends in 2018, according to Salesforce

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5-content-marketing-trends-in-2018-according-to-salesforceAlthough the fundamentals of content marketing are unchanging, the trends keep changing every year. This is because new content sharing platforms keep popping up and the line between various formats (text, video, image) is constantly being blurred.

I will have my own take on this sometime in the future, but this Salesforce blog (accompanied by a podcast) throws some light on the 5 content marketing trends in 2018.

Summarily, the 5 content marketing trends in 2018 (according to the Salesforce post) are:

  1. The job profiles of content marketing teams are changing: With content marketing (on the web) blossoming into a complete realm in itself and being recognized as one of the most vital marketing tools, it no longer means writing blog posts and articles and hoping to generate traffic from them. It’s a complete discipline. You need to have an expertise. You need to have a knack for creating killer content and then statistically distributing that content.
  2. Adaptable, contextual content: In the coming years content will no longer be simple blog posts and Facebook and LinkedIn updates. Devices will be interacting with each other without human interaction and lots of content would be changed between them. Quality AI-powered voice-interfaces are making an impact on how content is ranked and used by search engines like Google. More content is written the way people speak. More content is written in the form of answering questions rather than ongoing monologues. Contextually, content will need to learn to exist independently so that the central communication is not failed even when a small chunk of content is picked by a random device.
  3. Transparency and credibility is going to matter more: There is lots of content on the Internet. Whom do you trust? If a particular company is making some claims through its content, since everybody is producing content, it is very difficult to believe who is telling the truth. So, complete transparency will be demanded – from whom the content is coming, who is publishing it and from where the data is being picked.
  4. Content is going to be the fundamental building block for all types of marketing: There are many companies that are already building their entire marketing strategy on the foundation of their content. Coca-Cola for example. Their official website is called Journey, which is nothing but pure content. When companies and organizations start using stories to promote their products and services instead of advertisements, content is obviously going to be at the center of all promotional activity.
  5. There is going to be little difference between paid, owned and earned media: First, here is a blog post on the Differences between Owned, Earned and Paid content marketing channels. What this means is, these days your content can exist on multiple platforms. In traditional sense, owned content is whatever content you publish under your own blog or domain name. But then what about content that you publish on Facebook or Medium? People are also publishing blog posts on LinkedIn? Although the content is published by you, it belongs to a different medium.

It’s always good to know about the emerging trend in your field, in this case, content marketing, so that instead of following, you lead at the front.

Trends change from year to year but what remains the same is the quality of content that you produce and distribute.