One of the most important aspects of any marketing program is monitoring and evaluation. Careful monitoring of the implementation phase and ongoing evaluation of the efficacy of your overall marketing strategy are the only way to determine benchmarks for your marketing programs. Benchmarks that can be used to improve your content marketing tactics, and deliver better results than ever before.
The easiest way to get the most from your content marketing program is to use content marketing monitoring and evaluation tools. With the content marketing industry set to burgeon in 2015, there are plenty of content marketing monitoring and reporting tools on hand to make your life much easier.
Many of these measure different components of content marketing. Some measure social media engagement, others measure search engine results, or email marketing performance, or even on-site engagement. The right content marketing monitoring and evaluation tool (or tools) for you will depend on the objectives of your campaign to begin with.
1. Google Alerts (www.google.com.au/alerts) A handy tool from the Google Gods for monitoring mentions online. Extremely easy-to-use, Google Alerts will deliver a report on the use of any keyword direct to your inbox. You just need to register, and then enter all the keywords that you want monitored. For instance, you might want to set up alerts for your company’s name, the name of your company’s CEO, or your company’s biggest products. You can even use this tool to monitor competitor brands or products.
2. Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) This monitoring tool is particularly powerful when it comes to social media, scraping more than one hundred social media platforms. Best of all, it’s totally free and easy-to-use – you just need to enter your search query, click on ‘go’, and voila, it reveals a whole range of in-depth data. Social Mention measures influence through four unique categories: Strength, Passion, Sentiment, and Reach. It also generates quite a comprehensive list of the most popular keywords, users, hashtags and sources.
3. Hashtracking (www.hashtracking.com) A great way to track the success of self-contained content marketing campaigns (such as a program for a new product launch, or a particular event), is to create a unique hashtag and use it as a part of all social media updates. That way, you can track the campaign’s success using hashtracking. Another easy-to-use monitoring tool, you simply enter the hashtag into the search box and then Hashtracking provides in-depth analytics, including the number of tweets, re-tweets, likes, shares and so much more. There is a 30-day free trial, and then prices range from $29 per month, up to $399 per month.
4. BuzzSumo (https://app.buzzsumo.com) This tool is perfect not only for monitoring and evaluation, but also for ideation. It can be used to analyse what type of content performs best for any topic or any brand under the sun, making content curation simple and straightforward. It can also help to determine who the most important influencers are within your particular industry, and who of these great influencers are most likely to share and promote your content. There is a free option available, as well as more premium options, ranging from $99 per month, right up to $499 per month.
5. SumAll (https://sumall.com) So much more than simply a monitoring and evaluation tool, SumAll combines analytics on social media, website traffic, and even sales metrics. The end result: an online tool that enables you to track business and social media metrics, and their inter-connectedness. With SumAll, content marketing professionals can get a handle on the bigger picture, encompassing all the major social media channels, Google analytics, and even email marketing software such as Mail Chimp. Plus, as an added extra, SumAll’s website is super user-friendly.
6. Cyfe (www.cyfe.com) If, for any reason, you’re not a fan of SumAll, but want a tool with the same sort of functionality, then have a gander at Cyfe. It offers just about all of the same features and benefits; you can create a custom dashboard and integrate all the usual suspects, including the major social media channels, email marketing platforms, SEO tools, and even e-commerce and bookkeeping software. There is a free option, which allows you to integrate five different platforms, otherwise, unlimited access is just $19 per month.
7. Sprout Social (http://sproutsocial.com) Another social media management tool, Sprout Social has quickly become another all-round content marketing tool that captures data from all the major social media platforms to monitor growth, engagement, and influence. Prices for Sprout Social start from $59 per user, and go up to $500 per month for three users.
8. Marketing Grader (https://marketing.grader.com) Created by the digital marketing gurus over at HubSpot, Marketing Grader is quite a nifty little tool. All you need do is enter your website’s URL, and the marketing grader gives your website a score out of 100, as well as justification for the score. The score is based upon a variety of criterion: the number of social media shares and likes for the last five blog posts, the number of indexed webpages on your site, the number of inbound links, and degree of mobile optimisation.
9. SEM Rush (http://www.semrush.com) Competitive data for digital marketing professionals, or so their website proclaims. SEM Rush collects massive amounts of SERP data for more than 106 million keywords and about 100 millions domains, including: AdWords (both ad copy and position data), organic positions for domains and landing URLs, search volumes, CPC, competition, number of results, and so on and so forth. All the search engine data you could ever need to improve your content marketing strategy.
10. Majestic SEO (https://majestic.com) This platform provides a number of unique features. Using Majestic SEO you can check backlinks, and explore websites for citation flow, keywords, and anchor text. You can even compare backlinks for up to five domains simultaneously. There is even the ability to link webmaster tools to a Google Webmaster Tools account. There are three different price plans (silver, gold and platinum), depending on what your needs may be.
11. SEOMoz Pro (http://moz.com) Moz is one of the biggest, most well-recognised names in the SEO industry. One of the many products offered by Moz is SEOMoz Pro, which offers a whole range of tools to track your search engine rankings, analyse the engagement of your social media followers, check and compare backlinks and crawl errors, and even perform keyword analysis. Prices for SEOMoz Pro range from $99 per month, right up to $599 per month.
If it’s content marketing tools to help with ideation, image and graphic curation, writing copy, and content distribution and amplification, then take a look at my Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools
