The marketing scene today is tough. There are millions of products and services online vying for the consumer's attention. Which company will stand out among the rest? Which product will customers choose? More importantly, how do you know if your company marketing strategy is on the right track?

You have done all the hard work and necessary research to bring attention to your business. Your company has the tools to succeed, but how do you know if your company's marketing strategy is successful?

Here is a list of the tools you need to measure content marketing success:

Direct sales

This definition is direct and to the point. This is the number of your products or services that you have sold business to business. Usually businesses receive direct sales through holding a demonstration, meeting or presentation to sell their products or services.

Lead quality

Anyone can produce thousands of leads with content marketing, but which of those leads are the best leads for you and your company? You can:

• Find out how much time it takes to produce and sell to your leads
• Analyze the leads that buy from you, and buy quickly
• Go after leads that have the traits of "buyers."

Think of Pareto's Principle, where eighty percent of the results come from twenty percent of the work. Finding quality leads can be difficult for some businesses, but that's why content marketing is so effective. If you need additional lead tips, check out our lead generation ebook.

Website visits

Content marketing helps you draw visitors to your site, so you need to know how many times customers (or potential customers) go to and stay on your website? More importantly, what is your conversion rate? In today's digital age, anyone can browse your website without buying a single product or service.

You need to think about how to convert those browsing visitors into paying customers. Consider creating calls-to-action to view additional relevant content, or adding pop-up plugins so people can sign up for your newsletter to keep engagement high.

SALs (sales accepted leads)

When you have engaged your leads with content for a while, your marketing team should eventually qualify certain leads based on the level of nurturing that lead receives and engages in. Now, the sales team has their turn at working with the lead to qualify them. When a sales team member accepts a lead and believes the lead is within their budget, that leads becomes a sales accepted lead, or SAL.

You need to keep track of marketing qualified leads as well as SALs, ensuring they are of the highest quality. Here's why: If your leads are qualified by the marketing team, but are not qualified by sales, or if sales is not able to sell to these leads, the marketing team may need to tweak their process and hold on to the leads a bit longer to increase engagement.

In the same way, the marketing team may need to pass leads over sooner, when they are most engaged at a lower score, instead of waiting to hit a threshold. Getting SALs is an art that takes communication between sales and marketing teams, as well as a lot of testing.

Inbound links

Inbound links are links from other websites that direct to your website. You want more links coming back to your website through multiple channels. An easy way to build inbound links is by producing great content, allowing other websites to link directly to that content. Another way to increase inbound links is to ask other websites to insert a link for your company on their website. You can do this by guest blogging, or even using sites like StumbleUpon. As you build out more inbound links, you'll increase your SEO rank. That leads us to the next term.

SEO rank

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an algorithm that sees which websites will appear first on Google (or other search engines) without paying for that prime real estate. The higher the SEO rank, the sooner your page is seen by search engine users; this means you increase your chances of generating more visits to your website.

Social interaction

Social media is a huge part of quality content marketing because it helps you build and maintain your relationships. It's tough to put a number on quality relationships, but you can prioritize your relationships by optimizing your company's time and budget towards the prospects, customers and companies that matter to you most online.

Customer loyalty

How many times do customers come back for more of your products and/or services? One good way to measure loyalty is to find your true fans. These true fans, or evangelists, will tell their friends about you and refer your business to others, creating a huge web of connections. All these connections point back to you.

A happy customer is more likely to come back to your business and ask for more. To keep these true fans happy, you need to make sure you continue to provide them with quality content. This also means that you should give them exclusive content that others may not have access to, or give them a first look at a product or service before anyone else. This will keep the buzz going and will encourage others to become brand evangelists as well.

Looking for more information on how to measure your content marketing? Check out our Content Marketing ebook, or contact Milwaukee content marketing agency, Accelity Marketing.