I recently wrote an article discussing ways to measure content marketing performance in association with brand awareness, thought leadership, and engagement metrics — three important goals for B2B marketers in 2014. But lead generation and customer acquisition are also important goals for content marketing programs; in fact, they are second and third on the priority list, according to CMI’s 2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends report. This tie-in is particularly critical when aligning marketing to the broader sales initiative.

In this article, I plan to dive into techniques for measuring the marketing effectiveness of the content we create for these critical goals, and discuss a model for establishing lead generation and customer acquisition performance metrics that my company uses in the campaigns we run. Hopefully you will find these ideas and tactics to be helpful in your organization’s evaluation of B2B content marketing campaigns, as well.Continue Reading

You’ve no doubt reviewed one of the Content Marketing Institute’s research reports on Content Marketing Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends. As a B2B online marketing strategist, my focus is with its B2B Content Marketing Research report, and one of the more important points I found lies within the organizational goals set for content marketing initiatives. Content marketing clients want to make sure their objectives are satisfying similar criteria as their peers’ efforts.Continue Reading