How to Measure the Value of Your Digital Content (And Make It Work Harder)

On average, people are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 content marketing messages per day. This includes websites, emails, social media, videos, podcasts, you name it. Let’s break it down:

• 500+ hours of vieo are uploaded to YouTube every minute, yes…you read that right…every minute!

• There are over 347 billion emails sent every single day

• Instagram images and videos rack up a whopping 95 million per day

• According to a 2023 study done by Statista, the average internet user is exposed to about 74 GB of written content a day…that’s like over 2 million Word document pages!

  
  

People are drowning in content and struggling to figure out what they should and shouldn’t be spending their time and attention on. With so much potential for misinformation and digital content fluff, ensuring you have built a strong digital brand who’s content is targeted, valuable, and well-optimized is essential to business success.

How Do I Make My Content Stand Out in Such a Crowded Digital Space?

When creating digital content, it isn’t about being louder but rather being more clear, relevant, and valuable to your target audience. Some tips for standing out in the digital content crowd include:

Knowing your target audience

Generic content doesn’t cut it anymore, you’ll need to do a deep dive into who your target audience is and know exactly what they want and what their interests are. Take the time to learn about your consumer and use past performance and feedback to guide your messages.

Focusing on value over volume

More doesn’t always mean better, in fact, it can often mean too much! Putting content out for the sake of putting content out is a waste of everyone’s time so reign it in and start solving real problems, providing unique insight, or educating your audience. Think high-quality here! Ask yourself: Does this content help? Will someone learn something from this? Is the content inspiring? If the answer is no, push rewind and start again.

Creating a brand voice and perspective…and use it!

Take the eQuil Digital Marketing blogs as an example. If you look at some of our older blogs I admit, they’re pretty robotic and bland sounding. Then, we did some research on how blogs were intended to be written and learned that they’re supposed to have personality. So we changed out tune, now our blogs are written with our own tone, telling our story and giving perspective from our experiences and knowledge. Give your business a personality, it’ll help build trust and show readers that there’s a human behind the keyboard.

Humans over algorithms always

Speaking of humans…SEO matters, but engagement matters more. Sure it’s important to write content that’s easy to scan but UX needs to be at the forefront as you answer the question all readers are asking “Why should I care?”

Following logical and organized content formats

Let’s be honest, most of our thoughts are a jumbled mess, it isn’t until we take the time to organize them that they come out more easy to understand. The same goes for your content. Break up long paragraphs with headers (appropriately labeled in the backend of course), bullet points, images, and appropriate CTAs.

Noone likes stale bread or content, so keep it fresh

Truth of the matter is, if you aren’t updating your content you’re actually losing trust with your audience and with the algorithms. Try repurposing old posts or refreshing high-performing posts with new data or examples; your audience and search ranking will thank you.

How Can I Measure the Real Value or Impact of the Content I’m Producing?

Determining the value of the content you’re using for your business involves looking at its impact on your brand goals, audience engagement, and bottom line. Truly evaluating what’s working and what isn’t can help avoid mistakes and save time. Here’s a pretty straightforward process that can help you measure value:

1. Define Your Content Goals

Begin by asking: What do you want your content to achieve? 

• Brand awareness

• Lead generation

• Customer education

• Sales conversions? 

Different goals require you to track different metrics. Once you’ve determined your goal move on to the next step.

2. Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or SEMRush to track these KPIs:

• Traffic Metrics: Page views, unique visitors, and session duration.

• Engagement Metrics: Click-through rates (CTR), likes, shares, comments, and time spent on content.

• Lead Generation: Form submissions, downloads, and inquiries generated by your content.

• Sales Impact: Track conversions and revenue directly attributed to content interactions.

3. Analyze Audience Feedback

Listen to your audience and balance this with perspective, people like to be heard but often they don’t know what they want or need until you provide the information or opinions.

• Collect qualitative insights from customer comments, reviews, and social media interactions.

• Use surveys to understand how your content resonates and whether it meets your customers' needs.

• Look to what has been successful in the past

• Identify your winning patterns, make these your default baseline, and then innovate

4. Calculate ROI (Return on Investment)

Creating content isn’t free, even if your a Digital Media company that writes their own content, at minimum time is needed and often this is your most valuable asset.

• Possible formula: (Revenue Generated from Content – Cost of Content Creation) / Cost of Content Creation x 100

• Include costs like writing, design, promotion, and tools.

5. Content Attribution

This step is a bit out of my scope, as I’m responsible for content creation, but eQuil DM is lucky to have a Director of Technology and Digital Innovation who understands how to distinguish traffic sources and differentiate between organic vs. campaign driven traffic.

• Use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters and attribution models to analyze user behavior.

• Identify which pieces of content are touchpoints in conversions.

6. Competitive Benchmarking

No one likes a copycat, but who said anything about measuring your businesses performance against competitors or industry standards?!

What should you benchmark?

• Highlight gaps and opportunities.

• Publishing frequency and content types.

• SEO performance.

• Social engagement.

• Content value and depth.

• Audience interactions.

Why does benchmarking matter?

• It can identify gaps in your content.

• Help spot opportunities in undersserved niches and keywords.

• Provide insight into how you can improve and stand out in tone, visuals, and expertise.

• To keep up with trends and avoid falling behind.

By measuring how your content is performing, you’ll be able to tweak your digital content strategy to get better results. It’s all about combining the numbers with audience feedback and your own innovative perspective.

Cut Through the Noise: Turn Your Content into a Click-Worthy Powerhouse

Standing out isn’t about being everywhere, it’s about being meaningful where it matters most. There’s not a person out there that needs more content but I can guarantee everyone does need content that speaks directly to them, on a more personal note, that’s reliable, authentic, and relevant. 

What’s great is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, take what you’ve got and use it in as many formats as your marketing plan outlines: social posts, video script, email, Google Business post?! The bonus is that this will also help keep your messaging consistent and unified. Consistency builds trust and shows professionalism but here’s the most important thing to remember from this blog post:

Invest in QUALITY over quantity.

We can’t emphasize this enough, who cares if you’re posting every single day and noone is clicking or engaging; if this is the case, you are the fluff. Also, remember to use tools like Google Analytics and even your choice of AI-powered language model. In the end, you need to be sure that your digital content is easy to read and share, people scroll fast so make sure you give them a reason to stop…for at least 15 seconds (that is according to Chartbeat).

Clicks, not clutter, drive results.

Let’s collaborate! At eQuil Digital Media, we offer customized digital media packages for your business. CONTACT US to elevate your digital brand as we work together to boost your online presence and drive tangible results.