So your website has all this great content. But do you know if it is reaching anyone? The best way to approach any creative, analytical or research task is to ask a series of questions that are organized into key categories. The process will help you pinpoint the areas of your content strategy that are working well, and those that are not. To help out, author and marketing coach Roger C. Parker offers seven ways to measure your content marketing success. For more on this topic, visit the Content Marketing Institute.

#1. CONSISTENCY — Because your content marketing projects a professional image, and builds comfort, familiarity and trust, it requires consistency and predictability. Rate how consistently you share your content to attract new prospects, and retain existing clients and customers. *Remember: Consistency boils down to the existence of a detailed schedule (think editorial calendar) and your ability to keep it current.

#2. RELEVANCE — Rate your content’s ability to help your market solve its most pressing problems and achieve its most important goals. To answer this question, review your reader website visitors’ personas and compare them to benchmark metrics like comments, re-tweets, “likes,” referrals, landing page visits and conversions.

#3. STYLE — This is a measure of your tone or ability to provide helpful, relevant information in an authoritative, yet conversational way. One of the best ways to engage your markets’ interest is to use stories to which your audience can relate to. This provides a context for the information you’re sharing.

#4. EFFICIENCY — Being efficient eliminates the needless frustration, stress and burnout caused by constantly struggling to meet deadlines. Efficiency measures your organization’s ability to choose topics, delegate responsibilities, produce and edit/obtain approval for each topic in a timely manner. Signs of trouble include an undue emphasis on meeting deadlines, frequent last-minute meetings, multiple phase of rewriting and ruffled feathers all around. The goal is to create a process that resembles a well-oiled machine.

#5: INFLUENCE — This is a measure of the cumulative impact of your individual content marketing projects. Although the metrics associated with individual projects (articles, blog posts, events, ext.) may change, influence refers to the long-range view of your firm, relative to its competitors. As with efficiency, your firm’s influence should reflect continuing improvement each month.

#6. GOALS — Your content marketing should support both short-term and long-term goals. An overemphasis on deadlines and specific projects can get in the way of completing major projects, such as premium books, major reports, research projects or white papers. Ideally, individual content marketing projects should be viewed as building blocks that can be repackaged and used as elements in future major projects or new business initiatives.

#7. CHALLENGE — Avoid complacency. Content Marketing never should become so routined that your staff fails to challenge themselves by addressing new topics and ideas. If your staff is bored because your content constantly readdresses the same topics, just think how your audience feels.