The content game has changed. And if you’re like most B2B marketers, you’re probably wondering why you're still stuck on the hamster wheel. Despite consistently creating content with good information, you aren’t getting the engagement you need to convert audiences to leads.

In this guide, we’ll share practical strategies to help you ensure that your content not only reaches the right audience, but also compels them to act.

Content engagement refers to the level of interaction and interest that your audience has with your content. It goes beyond views and clicks to include factors such as social shares, comments, time spent on page, conversion rates, and more.

Good content is no longer good enough. In a sea of competition, you need an effective strategy for getting your content in front of your audience in a way that makes them want to engage.

Let’s dive into why and how to measure content engagement across channels.

Measuring content engagement is important for a few reasons:

• Know what works: It helps you figure out what content your audience not only likes, but actually engages with. This way, you can create more of the good stuff and spend less time on the not-so-popular stuff.
• Get better: By regularly reviewing your engagement data, you can see what's trending and use those insights to make your content even better in the future.
• Check your investment: Marketers are always under pressure to do more with less. The right set of engagement metrics helps you make informed decisions about where to focus future efforts to get the best return.
• Understand your audience: Engagement metrics give you the inside scoop on what your audience is into, helping you tailor your content to their real interests and needs, instead of guessing (or worse, projecting) what it is that they care about.
• Smarter decisions: With all this data in hand, you can make smarter decisions about how and where to promote your content, ultimately getting more bang for your marketing buck.

In essence, content engagement is like a live guidebook to creating high-performing content. You don’t just get data on which types and formats are having the biggest impact on pipeline, you also get priceless insights to help you create future content your audience will love.

The metrics you choose for measuring content engagement will always depend on your unique audience and marketing goals. Here are some key metrics that might come in handy, depending on your strategy.

From referral traffic to bounce rates, there are a number of important website metrics for B2B marketers to stay on top of. Some of the key website engagement metrics include:

• Traffic sources: Tracking traffic sources helps you understand which channels are driving the most visitors to your site so you can optimize your website content accordingly. Common traffic sources include paid search, organic search, referral sites, and emails.
• Bounce rate: According to Google, “an engaged session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.” Bounce is now defined as the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. A high bounce rate in GA4 may indicate a failure to engage or meet the expectations of visitors.
• Conversion rate: Conversion rate tracks the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as filling out a form or subscribing to a newsletter. On GA4, conversions are now labeled “key events”.
• Average session duration: This measures how long visitors stay on your site on average. According to Databox’s Benchmark data, the median value for average session duration for B2B companies is 77.61 seconds.
• Exit pages: By understanding your site’s top exit pages, you can analyze user behavior, identify opportunities for improvement, and guide visitors towards a desired action.

The right event strategy can unlock a wealth of engagement insights on your audience, which is especially crucial during a lengthy B2B sales cycle.

Event data can be grouped into two categories: active data and passive data.

• Active data: this is data that is directly volunteered by your event attendees through surveys, forms, polls, Q&A, chat, and 1:1s.
• Passive data: is automatically captured by your event platform and includes metrics like sessions attended, links clicked, and time spent in each session and the event overall.

To cut through the noise and identify hand-raisers quickly, B2B marketers are using their virtual event data to identify their most engaged accounts and tailor personalized follow ups to meet their needs.

With the right insights, you can also make data-driven decisions about how to improve your event content. Consider questions like:

• How long do attendees spend in each session on average?
• How did they respond to our live polls?
• Which specific questions did they ask during the Q&A?
• Which session types had the most engagement?

With a digital event platform like Goldcast, you can access critical engagement data through centralized, user-friendly dashboards, including:

• Event Summary: central overview of all the critical metrics related to your webinar’s performance, including number of registrations, average time in event, Call to Actions (CTA) clicked, and more.
• Pre-Event data: filter down to just your pre-event data, such as registration and daily registration count, to gauge the impact of your event promotion efforts.
• Engagement data: comprehensive overview of all webinar/event engagement data, including attendee-level data on clicked CTAs, questions asked, polls answered, and several more attendee activity metrics that get sent directly to the rest of your martech stack, including HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce.

The right engagement tools don’t just show you which content types are working, they also provide critical insights to help you convert your engagement data into potential leads.

LinkedIn is the #1 most effective social media channel for 93% of B2B marketers. And the noise is louder than ever.

“One of the things that you should always ask yourself when you see a post on LinkedIn that gets your attention is, ‘Why did I pay attention to this? What was it that caught my attention? You’ll start to find the principles of what engages with you. A lot of the posts that feel like low production value, or maybe a little bit cringey, those are the ones that aren't going to get as much engagement,” said Mark Yung, founder of Authority during a session at our recent Goldcast Insider webinar.

Experts like Mark believe the bar is getting higher for content on LinkedIn. For him, if it passes the ‘billboard test’, as in, is the content strong enough to put on a high resolution billboard, it has a much better chance of getting people engaged.

Whether you’re active on Meta, X, Instagram, YouTube, or all of the above, you’ve got to invest in quality content that projects a professional image. You’ll also need to know which social media KPIs to stay on top of to ensure that you’re focusing on the right things. According to Sprout Social, the top social media engagement metrics to track include:

• Engagement metrics including likes, shares and comments (79%)
• Follower growth and demographics (52%)
• Click through rate (49%)
• Social media traffic to the website (60%)
• Reach and impressions (58%)
• Conversion rates and leads generated (43%)

A well-planned and executed video marketing strategy can boost your engagement and ROI in a variety of ways. According to research, video ads tend to have cheaper cost per engagement compared to other formats. And by some estimates, social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined.

Adding video to your traditionally text-based forms of content can help improve your engagement and ultimately drive more lead conversions. But you’ve got to know what to measure.

Key metrics for measuring engagement on video content include:

• Total Video Plays: total number of plays on a selected video or clip
• Total Watch Time: overall watch time of all selected videos/clips in minutes
• Average Watch Time: average watch time of selected videos/clips
• Clip Embed Insights: performance details of internally and externally embedded video clips
• Watch Time Distribution: breakdown of video watch time among different types of users

Already a Goldcast user? The Clips Analytics dashboard inside Goldcast Studio helps you track the performance of your video clips on your event’s on-demand page. In one user-friendly dashboard, you’ll see metrics like play count, total watch time, clip embed insights, and more to help drive engagement and views.

According to research, the average B2B email open rate is just over 15%, with an impressive one-third of marketers sending emails on a weekly basis. But how do you make sure your emails stand out amidst an avalanche of other messages? What’s the real goal of your email to begin with?

With the rise of platforms like Substack and the growing impact of zero click content, your goals for your email marketing may extend beyond clickthroughs to encompass less tangible objectives like brand loyalty, customer expansion, and more.

To increase your opens and achieve your email marketing goals, start by giving subscribers a clear reason to read. Whether it’s offering a VIP event invitation, an expert interview, or a video reel of the spiciest hot takes from your latest webinar, focus on delivering something of value in every email.

Here again, having the right source content can put you multiple steps ahead.

“Now we even have monthly repeatable webinars. We’ve scaled substantially and I expect it'll continue at this scale,” says Georgianne Parker, Senior Manager, Events & Field Marketing at FullStory. After each event, she and her team spend just minutes repurposing their recordings into high-quality video content for social and email campaigns.

In the new game of digital marketing, the classic funnel framework isn’t enough. You need to know where the customer likes to spend their time, so you can figure out how to give them more of what they want.

The following strategies will help you use your content engagement data to build and execute a high-impact content strategy.

“People’s attention spans are short and only getting shorter,” said Ghazwan Almoazen, Director of Global Events, Demand Generation and Communications at DocuSign. In a past episode of Event Marketers Live, Ghazwan discussed the challenge of building brand awareness amid rising competition and falling attention spans.

No matter what shape your campaigns take, the push marketing tactics of the early 2010s no longer have a place in your strategy. To make a real connection with your audience, you need to be able to speak their language across each and every piece of content.

Here are some of the key questions to think about:

• Who are they? What kind of pressure do they have in their role? How big are their companies? and where are they located?
• What bugs them? What are the big problems they face at work? What are they trying to accomplish in their roles or industries?
• Where do they hang out online? Are they online, on social media, forums, or somewhere else when they're looking for information?
• What do they like to read or watch? Are they into research reports, videos, case studies, infographics, quizzes, or something else that really grabs their attention?
• How should you talk to them? What kind of messages and language will hit home and get them interested in taking the next step?
• Where should you reach them? Do they prefer LinkedIn, email, industry events, or other places to find and engage with content?
• When should you post? When are they most likely to be scrolling through content and really paying attention?
• What do you want them to do? Do you want them to comment, share, sign up, or do something else after reading or watching your content? What types of interactive content can help them make that decision?

In an age where 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make buying decisions, you need to be 100% sure you’re choosing the formats and channels your buyers actually want. So, don’t be afraid to dive deep into the rabbit hole.

By taking the time up front to tailor your strategy to the real needs of your audience, you can create content that gets them excited to engage with your brand.

Today’s buyers are spoiled for choice. Whether they want to read, watch, or listen—there’s content out there ready to answer their questions, no matter where or how they ask.

That’s why it’s critical to use a multimodal content strategy to elevate engagement across channels. And it doesn’t have to be as time consuming as you might think.

By leveraging high-quality long-form video content, like a podcast or event series, as your source material, you can use AI to help you consistently repurpose video, audio, and text-based content for a variety of channels, including email marketing, social media, search-optimized blogs, and more.

For example, when you run a webinar powered by Smart Event Technology, Goldcast uses the AI-powered video repurposing features inside Content Lab to automatically generate key content assets after every event, including:

• Full-event recording
• Short snackable video clips
• Multimodal social media posts
• Multimodal blog posts
• Emails
• Top takeaways
• Event transcript

And more. But you’ve got to start with quality, entertaining, and authentic event content in order to effectively scale that engagement across channels.

That’s why marketers like Ghazwan and Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian, are putting video at the center of their marketing. After a digital event, Ashley and her team use the event recording to create multimodal content for other channels.

“We created snippets and gave them to speakers so they were able to promote that on their own LinkedIn or Twitter. We were also able to take that video and embed it into an SEO-focused article around story points and estimation and then update that article with additional insights,” said Ashley in a recent episode of Donuts & Demand.

[OPTION TO ADD DONUTS & DEMAND EPISODE OR CLIP ~: The Power of Alignment: Marketing, Sales, and Demand Generation | Donuts and Demand]

One good thing about the rise of AI, is that the barrier to entry for high-quality text and video content has lowered. However, the bar for quality is getting much higher. Whether it’s text, audio or video, your content must look trustworthy and professional in order to drive engagement.

Adjust your content creation process to include a step for repurposing your content according to what works on each platform.

For example, if you’re using Goldcast’s Smart Events, it’s easy to transform your webinar content into bite-sized content for social media:

• After your event, give the platform ~90 minutes to generate your post-event content, including the complete transcript, social media posts, email text, top takeaways, and more..
• Click "Edit Clip" to adjust the generated content in Content Lab (any changes you make will be seamlessly integrated back into your event).
• Publish any of the generated content to your On-Demand page in just a click.

Get real insights from real event pros on all things event content. Download the Event Content Playbook and start making the most of your content before, during and after your events.

When planning a digital event, the marketing team works together for weeks to create exceptional content for your target audience. It’s strategy. It’s operations. It’s real moments of levity between real subject matter experts. In other words, it’s all the things you want in a high-value content machine.

Use Goldcast’s full suite of engagement tools to create authentic moments to be repurposed into content for other channels. With help from Content Lab, you can create:

• AI-generated clips from any video
• Social posts with text and video with customization options for specific social platforms
• Audiograms from podcasts or video
• Multimodal SEO-optimized blog posts
• Emails from video
• Custom text posts from video
• And more

Digital and hybrid events are one of the top B2B marketing avenues that encourage engagement with target audiences. And by repurposing content from your events into strategic multimodal content, you can strike the right chord with your audience every time.

Request a trial of Content Lab to start repurposing your event content. Or, schedule a demo of Goldcast to find out exactly how the powerful event platform works.