Content marketing is now a way of life for businesses. It’s one of the primary ways marketers generate and nurture leads, establish thought leadership, build their brands, expand their social following, and engage with and retain customers.
- Content marketing has certainly arrived. But with increased budget comes increased scrutiny from executives and higher-ups. It’s now no longer good enough to create engaging content, you have to be able to prove its ROI, and that requires the right data and tools .
- Measuring that data is a good start, but while those numbers are useful in understanding the types of content and topics your audience enjoys, they aren’t going to impress most executives.
The best marketing teams are the ones that can prove how those leads from content marketing are impacting revenue, using marketing automation and CRM tools.
Marketing automation tools enable you to capture leads from web forms and to tie those leads to the marketing source that referred them.
2. CRM systems
What’s more, when you integrate your marketing automation tools with a CRM system like Salesforce.com or SugarCRM , you can track each of those web leads through the sales cycle.
Call tracking tools – the missing analytics tool
Call tracking tools enable you to include unique traceable phone numbers in your downloadable and printed content, videos, trade show presentations, emails, ads, and direct mail blasts to measure the calls they generate. Even if a lead visits your web site before calling you, call tracking tools can still tell you how that caller found your site and the web page or blog posts they called from.
Integration is key as you can integrate call tracking tools with your CRM system to follow each phone lead through to revenue. By using all three analytics tools together, you can share detailed, accurate reports on the impact your content is having on the business’s bottom line.
Via: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/07/31/the-often-forgotten-ingredient-for-measuring-content-marketing/
Related articles
- Automate vs. Personal: The Marketing Automation Dilemma (business2community.com)
- Why You Need Marketing Analytics, Not Web Analytics (hubspot.com)
- Pardot is the fastest-growing marketing automation system, beating Hubspot, Marketo, Act-On (venturebeat.com)
