Content marketing agencies can create a lot of usable content for your online sources, but without clearly defined roadmaps, success Metrics and thorough reporting you’ll never know if their content is actually making a difference. An increase in consumers and profit takes time when it comes to content; not only do you have to develop valuable writing, you have to grow your consumer base as well. Growth takes time, but you can see gradual quantifiable success with these three measurement tools.

Clearly Defined Roadmaps

A roadmap is a great way to plan out a detailed strategy for success with your Content Marketing Agency. A roadmap should provide direction for all your content, social media and marketing strategies that help you attain your goals. A useful (and successful) roadmap has a schedule, frequent communication and end goals to aspire toward.

Schedule

Get your strategy scheduled out! Whether it is a week at a time or on a monthly basis, a good roadmap provides scheduled strategy that extends past daily tasks. Scheduling helps get your team on the same page and provides a valuable way to visualize and solidify the content and projects your team has coming up.

Frequent Communication

A good content marketing agency will also keep in frequent communication with you regarding scheduling, metrics and steps taken toward your ultimate goals. Reports on metrics and scheduling should happen twice a month with face-to-face meetings or phone calls in the weeks between. Frequent communication is the best way to ensure everyone is kept up-to-date on progress and important data.

Goals

A roadmap should also have clear and actionable goals. These should be developed based on your business’s growth and engagement goals. Your goals should be kept in mind while creating your roadmap; every strategy should lead to the attainment of one of your goals. Communication and scheduling will lead to meeting these goals (and hopefully exceeding them) in a timely manner.

Identify Success Metrics

Metrics are a great way to show how content is actually impacting your bottom line. There are four types of metrics that you should keep in mind when setting goals and reporting results.

Consumption

Perhaps the easiest metric to measure is overall consumption of your content. This regards how many people are viewing, sharing, liking or following your content.

Sharing

This metric shows how popular your content is by measuring how often it is shared through consumers. Shared content lets you know that what you’re creating is so valuable because people feel the need to share it with their online following. .

Lead Generation

With this metric you learn whether the content you’re producing is making financial sense. If leads aren’t being generated the content isn’t producing a profit. This metric shows you how often your consumers and sharers actually turn into potential customers.

Sales

The last important metric measures sales, or actual profit for your business. Sales metrics gauge how often content consumers turn into customers, and the right tools provide the metrics that show how much and which types of content they consume before buying.

Thorough Reporting

Reporting success metrics is the most important communication point between yourself and a content marketing agency. These metrics display how your content is working toward your growth. A content marketing agency should be able to correlate all four of these metrics to the content pieces they’re creating for you and should utilize the results when making your roadmap.

To better understand how an agency operates, ask them some of the following questions:

• How do you plan and schedule your work?
• What are some of the normal success metrics you regularly check?
• What do you report on? How often?
• Can you send me examples of roadmaps and reports you’ve created?

Roadmaps, success metrics and thorough reporting are three areas where you can measure the achievement of your content marketing agency. If the metrics aren’t producing numbers you are proud of, then you can adjust your roadmap’s direction and execution in search of better outcomes. No matter what agency you choose roadmaps, metrics, and reporting should be expected during your partnership.

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