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Real People, Real Results: Why authenticity trumps AI on TikTok, Instagram, and beyond
Visual content marketing is here to stay. After all, visuals such as images and videos are known to boost audience engagement and drive brand awareness.
For example, unlike posts without visuals, Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement. And tweets with video get 10x more engagement. These stats prove that posting visual social media and website content is better for connecting with audiences.
However, posting visual content is not enough to guarantee content marketing success. You also need to track the performance of each visual content to identify if your content is reaching the right people and converting them.
Keep reading to discover crucial visual content marketing KPIs you should monitor to verify if your content is getting the best results.
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Content marketing goals typically vary between businesses. Your business goals may be to boost brand awareness, website traffic, lead conversion, or customer retention. Knowing how well you are nailing your specific goals requires monitoring the right KPIs.
KPIs (key performance indicators) measure your company’s performance and progress toward achieving a specific goal. With the right KPIs for content marketing, you can verify if your content is:
Besides showing what’s working, tracking the right KPIs can provide insights into underperforming aspects of your content strategy that you can improve.
For example, you can identify your video content with the highest engagement and conversion rates and use the insights to optimize your underperforming posts. Identifying what works best also reduces the likelihood of creating underperforming content that leads to undesirable results and wasted resources.
There are so many KPIs for content marketing out there. Yet, you don’t have to track and measure every one of them. If you track unnecessary KPIs, you'll only waste resources without gaining insights that can help improve your content marketing.
Selecting the right visual content marketing KPIs to track requires first defining the goals of your content marketing campaign. Knowing what you want to achieve will give you a clear picture of the metrics and KPIs to monitor.
For instance, if your goal is to boost brand awareness, KPIs to monitor could include reach, engagement rate, and shares. These metrics will provide insights into how many people have seen, shared, and engaged with your content. More people engaging with your content means more prospects now know your brand exists.
On the other hand, if your goal is lead generation and conversion, KPIs to focus on include click-through rate, cost per click, and conversion rate. Without these metrics, you'll have trouble identifying how many leads your content strategy generated and converted and how much the process cost.
Let’s now take a closer look at the content marketing KPIs we’ve mentioned and others you can track to measure the performance of your content marketing campaign.
The engagement rate is a crucial KPI for content campaigns aimed at boosting lead conversions and sales in social ads. The metric allows you to measure if viewers find your content interesting and how well they engage with it.
The more engaging your content is, the more likely it is to convert traffic and generate returning viewers. Also, social media posts with high engagement typically appear in more feeds and get more visibility because algorithms prioritize broadcasting such content.
You can identify the engagement rate by looking at how users interact with a post. For instance, sharing, liking, commenting, or even clicking on a post indicates high engagement.
If you have a content type that consistently generates high engagement, create and publish more of such content to win over more of your target audience and achieve your content marketing goals.
You can measure impressions to identify how many people came across your content or the thumbnail for your content. It’s different from views which require people to watch your content for a minimum amount of time before it counts as a view.
Besides measuring your traffic, tracking impressions can help measure your brand awareness because more people seeing your content equals a higher brand reach and visibility.
It's also useful for calculating ad spending if you're running an ad that charges per impression. However, knowing your number of impressions won’t provide insights into if viewers converted or found your content engaging.
Contrary to what you might have heard, reach and potential reach aren’t the same thing. Reach (or actual reach) refers to the number of users who saw your content, while potential reach covers the number of subscribers or people following you on social media.
For example, if you have 1,000 followers on Instagram, your potential reach is 1,000. Even though you have 1,000 followers, there's no guarantee every follower will see your post when you publish it.
On the other hand, if 800 people view your post, your reach for that post is 800. The 800 viewers could include your Instagram followers and people who saw your post because your followers shared it with them or the algorithm recommended your content.
Knowing your potential reach can help you anticipate the amount of visibility to expect when you publish a post. The actual reach can help you measure the success of your campaign by identifying the number of followers and non-followers that engaged with your content.
Conversion rate is the percentage of people who took your desired action after viewing your content. Depending on your content marketing goals, your desired action may be for viewers to submit their email, subscribe, click a link, buy a product, or watch your content to the end.
If you have a low conversion rate, your content marketing campaign is failing to fulfill the primary purpose you created it to accomplish. You can boost your conversion rate by optimizing your content to engage viewers and offer value.
The value desired by your target audience may be entertainment or information. Also, add a powerful call-to-action (CTA) that guides viewers toward taking your desired action.
While measuring your conversion rate is important, don’t forget to keep an eye on the bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who viewed and left your post without interacting with it. For example, a user seeing your content and moving on without clicking any links or scrolling to see more has bounced.
Users typically bounce off a web page or social media post if the content isn’t relevant, engaging, or valuable to them. If your bounce rate is way higher than your conversion rate, you may have targeted the wrong audience or posted unattractive content.
Frequently measure your bounce rate to verify if your content campaign is on track to engage and convert enough people to achieve your marketing goals.
The more followers you have, the higher your potential reach will be. A successful social media content marketing strategy will help you acquire new followers, increasing the potential reach of your future content. Keep an eye on your new followers, so you will know if your potential reach is growing at an acceptable rate or slowing down.
A large following will boost your brand reputation on social media. If your follower growth is slowing, you can fix it by updating your profile and posting more high-quality visual content that keeps viewers returning for more.
Website traffic refers to the number of users that visit your website daily. You can divide your traffic into new and repeat traffic. New traffic consists of the users visiting your site for the first time, while repeat traffic is users who’ve visited your site before. Engaging content brings in new traffic, while consistently posting quality content helps retain visitors.
Most successful brands execute content campaigns that generate new traffic and turn new visitors into repeat visitors. Your web traffic will never grow if new visitors do not convert into repeat visitors.
Measure your web traffic to identify how many new and repeat visitors you have, and determine if you should focus your strategy on acquiring new visitors or retaining current visitors.
Clicks are the number of times users click on your social media post. The clicked link could be to your website or more content on another page. A high number of clicks can indicate that your visual content has successfully engaged viewers by driving them to interact with your content and convert.
Profile visits are the number of times users have viewed your social media profile. A high number of profile visits indicates that your content has generated interest in your brand. More people taking an interest in your brand is a good indicator that your content is winning over prospective customers.
Cost-per-click (CPC) is how much it costs when a prospective customer clicks your ad. Measuring the metric allows you to monitor ad spend and ensure that your content marketing stays within your budget.
Also, CPC monitoring helps you calculate the efficiency of your marketing campaign and identify ways to improve your visual content strategy for a better return on investment.
Knowing how many likes and comments each social media post receives is essential for measuring the likability and engagement of your posts. More likes and comments mean users find your content engaging and valuable.
You can also use this KPI to understand how your target audience interacts with your content. For instance, viewers who resonate with your content may comment or share, while viewers who enjoy your content may click the Like button.
Video views are one of the most crucial visual content marketing KPIs for measuring the success of a campaign that relies on video assets. Video views indicate the number of times people have seen and engaged with your video. If people see and like your video, they are more likely to share it, leading to even more views.
You won’t know if your video has generated enough interest to convert your target audience if you don’t track your views. However, note that what counts as a view varies between social platforms.
For instance, YouTube only counts views if the viewer watches the video for at least 30 seconds. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram require watching a video for at least three seconds, or it won’t count as a view.
A high number of social shares indicates that your post is popular. Also, more shares will help your post go viral, increasing its potential reach.
For example, if you have 100 followers, and each follower has 100 followers, your potential reach will be 10,000 if each follower shares your post on their page. If each person who receives your shared content shares it again, your potential reach will keep growing.
Measure your social shares to identify the total potential reach of your content. The metric can also help you understand how your content spreads online, who talks about your brand, and what type of posts resonate best with your audience.
Marketers track social mentions to identify who is talking about their brand or product. Measuring the KPI requires identifying the number of times users used the term or phrase you’re tracking in social media posts. The tracked term or phrase could be your brand or product name.
Tracking social mentions allows you to gain insights into what users think about your brand. These users will mention your brand or product in their posts when sharing their good, bad, or ugly opinions about your company. You can use the insight to create content that responds to the opinions shared by users.
View-through rate measures how many people watched your video ad to the end. A low view-through rate means people found your content uninteresting and skipped it.
If a video ad with a low view-through rate is on social media, the platform will still charge per impression or click, leading to paying for paid advertising without any return on investment.
Are most viewers skipping your content? If so, avoid losing money by taking down the content and replacing it with more engaging content that can convert viewers. Alternatively, modify your ad by targeting people who need your content and are more likely to convert.
Tracking KPIs for content marketing is only the first step in understanding and gauging the success of your published visual content. Analyze your KPIs to gain insights into what parts of your content marketing are working and underperforming.
You can discover what works by comparing your KPI insights with your current business and content marketing goals. Doing so will reveal the underperforming aspects of your content marketing. You can then use the information to improve your existing content to get better results.
Use your existing KPI insights to optimize your future content creation and distribution. Start by performing social content testing to discover which of your past content styles delivered the most desirable results. You can then create new content with the same style to achieve similar results.
With this approach, you increase your chances of creating only quality content that resonates with your target audience and delivers desirable engagement and conversion rates.
Testing your content will also help you understand how your target audience perceives your brand so you can improve your image to engage and win over more of your target audience.
As you’ve seen, tracking the right content marketing KPIs can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful content strategy. However, identifying relevant visual content marketing KPIs and tracking them can be more work than you want. Avoid overburdening yourself and make the most of visual content KPI insights by partnering with Cohley.
We connect brands with creators that can provide them with visual content that engages, enlightens, wows, and converts their target audience. Our vast network of photo and video content creators ensures you won’t have trouble finding creatives that match your brand voice and content marketing goals.
Contact us for a consultation today to discover how Cohley can make achieving your content marketing goals less tedious and expensive.