Hi! Lauren Kaye, here, with this week’s Content & Coffee with Brafton. As much as I love content marketing, I bet you’re not sweating over articles – or even watching this video – just for fun. There’s a payoff, an end-result, a return on your time investment. Click play to watch the full video, or read on below. 

But do you know whether your content’s on the fast track, or in the breakdown lane? MarketingSherpa just released survey data that might serve as a benchmark. According to marketers, the average conversion rate for organic traffic is around 16 percent. Not bad, right? This figure was pulled from a cross-industry sample of respondents, but the numbers aren’t the same across verticals.

Those in B2B media and marketing fields see that 20 percent of organic traffic converts on average. Brands catering to B2C audiences? Not so much. Retail and ecommerce companies report conversion rates of around 11 percent.

Now, this doesn’t mean they’re doing something wrong or that their content marketing strategies are broken. It’s really more about what they’re asking customers to do – what counts as a conversion. Most B2Bs don’t expect prospects to buy right then and there. They want people to request demos or provide their contact data for lead generation databases. B2Cs are making that hard sell and looking for prospects to complete transactions on the spot.

Businesses need to build strategies that map to their goals, or the content they create will grow stale, rather than drive readers toward conversions. But marketing teams may not even know if they’re clocking impressive results at the finish line, if they don’t know what to look for under the hood.

Content analytics reporting is something a lot of marketers still struggle with, and they need these skills to clue into some factors that can greatly improve or diminish results. Does topic A convert more than topic B? Do certain kinds of headlines bring in more qualified traffic? What information’s in high demand and how can their content provide solutions.

In a world where web marketing’s becoming more sophisticated, brands must be able to answer those questions to create highly convertible content.

Catch you next week, and happy content marketing!

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.