Building a Successful Content Monitoring Strategy
When it comes to building an inbound marketing strategy, one of the most effective and important aspects to focus on is your content strategy – at the end of the day, you can’t have a successful inbound marketing strategy without a successful content strategy.
That’s because a well-planned, well-executed content strategy does a lot for you when it comes to establishing everything you need for a strong inbound marketing strategy: it helps you establish your authority, prove your expertise, build trust with your target audience, and a lot more. Without it, your audience won’t know anything about you, won’t know how you can help them, and won’t be able to find you in a way that you want them to.
But if you’ve been building your content strategy for a long time, and you have a lot of content, how do you know what’s performing well, what isn’t, and what needs to be changed?
That’s where building a content monitoring strategy comes in.
Content monitoring is where you set standards and track your content’s performance over a period of time to make sure it meets your strategy’s goals, and then, make changes based on what you’ve found.
But keep in mind, you have to give your content a chance before you determine if it’s effective or not. For example, depending on the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, you might want to allow your content to be published at least 6 months to a year before you measure it so you have a clear picture of the data, before you consider updating or deleting it. In a lot of cases, the most effective content is content that was written years ago, rather than days ago.
★ Want to learn more about building a content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
Getting started with content monitoring means looking at each piece of content and seeing how it measures up to the goals you’ve defined; and if you’re not sure exactly what that is yet, a good place to start would be to look at each piece of content that you have and define:
- Can your target audience find your content?
- How engaged are they with your content?
- Is your target audience interested in your content?
- Do they convert on your content, in the way you plan for them to (that could be reaching out, or even just clicking an additional link to push them through your funnel).
★ One of the best ways to measure the success of your content (and your digital strategy) is by looking at your engagement metrics. If you want to learn more, have a look at this post called: Measuring the Success of Your Digital Strategy Through Engagement.
If you’re finding that specific pieces of content aren’t meeting those goals above, and no one is finding it, reading it, engaging with it, or converting on it, then it’s time to make changes to it – and then begin the content monitoring process all over again.
Updating and making changes to your content, based on the findings of your content monitoring strategy, is key to seeing success. If you want to do a deeper dive into the specifics of how to audit your existing content’s performance, take a look this post called: How (and Why) to Audit Your Real Estate Website’s Content.
Much like your digital strategy, your content strategy is never done – it needs to be continually monitored, updated, and changed, based on what works, what doesn’t work, and what your audience is interested in.
More than that, updating your content regularly will also ensure you are providing valuable, insightful, timely information, which helps your content score higher with Google’s guidelines, resulting in content pieces that are more authoritative, rank higher, and in turn drive more traffic (and ultimately, conversions) to your site.
On a more technical level, monitoring and updating your content also gives you the opportunity to find any broken links or images, all of which can make your content look unappealing to readers and can impact your overall website health and authority.
By building a content monitoring strategy into your own day-to-day marketing activities, you’ll be setting the foundation for a content strategy that consistently attracts the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons; and eventually, turns them into people that trust your brand and want to work with you.
Want to improve your content strategy? Download our Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has practical methods on how to plan, implement, market, and audit a successful real estate content strategy that will deliver results as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
