How to Build a Content Marketing Dashboard

Content marketing is a groundbreaking strategy currently dominating the digital marketing world. Research states that approximately 53% of digital marketers use content marketing to attract new clients to their business sites. 

But what is this marketing strategy, exactly? Content marketing involves planning, sharing, developing, and publishing content on different platforms. 

That sounds pretty straightforward. However, breaking it down further, you find it involves things such as blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, and other forms of content that customers can read or view and use in decision-making. 

To ensure your content marketing strategy is working well for you, each piece of content should be based on the sales funnel stage you are dealing with. It’s also important to understand the question you are answering, the ultimate goals, and your business’ KPIs. 

That sounds a bit more complicated, but fortunately, the top content marketers have developed a great way to keep every detailed aspect of your content strategy in one easily accessible place. 

This is known as a content marketing dashboard, and if you’re looking to utilize a content marketing strategy for your business, you should never be without one.  

Let’s look into what a content marketing dashboard looks like, the most important metrics you should be tracking and what your content dashboard can do for you.  

What is a Content Marketing Dashboard?

A content marketing dashboard is a visual reporting tool that highlights your content marketing metrics.

You can utilize this tool to measure the effectiveness of your efforts, such as your content's performance and engagement. You can then draw conclusions based on your dashboard's metrics that tell a particular story regarding your data. 

Measuring the ROI of Your Content Marketing 

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Identifying the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing efforts is a crucial exercise that needs to be handled carefully since it determines your business progress. 

For instance, you compose eBooks and distribute them to readers. How do you identify how readers interact with your eBook after uploading them to the internet? 

The truth is that you can’t know how they are interacting if you do not track the movement of your products.

This is where the content marketing dashboard comes into play by helping you evaluate the eBook’s search volume, organic traffic, and engagement rate. ROI is among the most important metrics you should continuously monitor on your dashboard. 

The return on investment gives you a concise picture of your business progress, such as the amount of revenue that you have collected within a particular period. 

It also gives you exact figures regarding the amount of money you have spent since when you began generating the content until publishing it on different sites. 

Once you realize that your consistency and hard work in content marketing increase revenue, you will automatically have a better focus to elevate your business performance and increase revenue generation. 

Building a Content Marketing Dashboard 

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Building a content marketing dashboard seems to be a complicated task that needs you to have an expert understanding of technical jargon. However, this is not the case!

All you need to do is state and define the KPIs and the business metrics you intend to visualize. Check out the metrics below! 

Metrics Used by Content Marketers

1. Page view per session 

This metric tells you the number of pages visitors look at per session from an average perspective. 

The page view per session gives you insights into whether the reader explored your content beyond the initial page they landed on. Regardless of your business, the benchmark for the pages per session is five. 

Upon realizing that your metrics revolve around this figure, you should be assured that the content you are creating is getting attention across the audience. 

Besides, you can opt to segment this metric based on channel or the user type. All these segmentations will give you a more straightforward analysis of your performance. 

     2. Organic search traffic 

If you have been in the content marketing field for a while, you’ll realize that organic traffic is crucial for any digital marketing campaign.

You can only reach this milestone if you focus on SEO and get a clear grip on the terms that people search to enable you to generate high-quality content. SEO allows you to create the exact content that your audience wants. 

If you tailor your content by focusing on offering valuable search results, the organic search traffic metric will also impact the bounce rate on your site.

Ensure that you generate quality content that focuses on answering questions people ask across the internet. 

    3. Average time on page 

A visitor may find your blog post on the web and decide to read it, but does the visitor sticks around and peruse your website after finding what they want?

The average time on page is one of the best metrics to use while measuring engagement with your site. It’s a clear cut to help you understand if your content is interesting or not. 

When evaluating this metric on your site, a typical benchmark for the average time on a page is fifty-two seconds. If your content marketing report delivers a number close to that figure, then your strategies are yielding fruit. 

   4. Conversion rate 

When creating content and publishing it across different platforms, you automatically aim to make the readers take action after reading.

It doesn't matter whether you need the reader to fill out a form or engage in a particular trial; the goal is to ensure that the reader has taken action. It is essential to track your conversion rate at every stage. 

Remember that the conversion rate detects the amount of revenue that you are likely to pocket after a particular period. On every step you make in business, ensure that you track your conversion rate to increase your chances of success. 

  5. Backlinks 

Backlinks are mainly used as a vote of confidence in your content. Besides, they play an essential role in enhancing the SEO status and ranking on search engines.

Note that the more backlinks you have, the more confidence you build among your readers. It is always advised to use backlinks to authoritative content, as this impacts the success of your content marketing strategy.

Once you have all the above essential content marketing metrics in your hands, it becomes easier to build a content marketing dashboard for your business that tracks all the most valuable metrics.

You only need to begin by defining your goals and choosing your business KPIs wisely. At this point, you need to select the most efficient business intelligence tool that will take over the responsibilities.

The BI tool is meant to track your defined content marketing metrics and use interactive data visualization such as Likert scale chart to deliver easy-to-read content marketing reports that define the progress of your business in the long run.

Conclusion 

Content marketing is defining the future of the business industry. For those that know how to leverage SEO and other promotion tactics, it can prove to be a highly effective strategy.

However, part of understanding the best practices for leveraging content marketing is tracking your ROI. According to a study from the Content Marketing Institute, 72% of successful marketers regularly track their ROI. 

Ensuring you’re tracking your ROI is one of the best ways to learn how your content is being received and how leads are interacting with it.

Utilizing a content marketing dashboard is a great way to keep your KPI’s organized, so you can guarantee that all your content marketing efforts are paying off.