How do I get people to read what I write?
Content marketing demystified — part one of a simple guide to getting your words in front of millions of eyes!
We write a lot here at Humanlytics. Part of that is because our content person is a former liberal arts major, and plays to his strengths, but even more of that is because content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is proven to drive high-quality engagement and brand awareness.
In a time period where every brand has an active Twitter account (and sometimes more!) content marketing is a great way to get your information heard above everyone else’s. After all, while Facebook advertising is pay-to-play, content marketing is a space where writing quality can really make a difference in readership.
Like any form of marketing, however, there’s a specific set of metrics and strategies that you should be tracking and using to ensure that you’re getting great returns on your effort. This guide is meant to take you from zero to hero on content marketing and get your words read by thousands of people!
What’s the point of all this anyways?
To understand what metrics to look at in content marketing, it’s pretty crucial to understand the point of content marketing in the first place. The nice thing about content marketing is that it’s anything you want it to be. Want to moonlight as a reporter for your business’s field? Go for it! Want to write a highly technical guide for a process or system? Excellent!
This variability lends itself to several potential outcomes for a content marketing article. Examples include:
- A sign-up for a newsletter or mailing list
- A sign-up for a beta test of a platform
- A link to join a Facebook group or community related to the topic area (that’s our major focus these days!)
- A link to your website or other marketing assets
The only thing that is non-negotiable is including some kind of a call-to-action in your work. Writing all sorts of wonderful content does absolutely no good for your business if it does not direct them somewhere in the end. This concept is part of something called the content funnel, which really drives everything you do with content marketing.
Let’s start right at the top of the funnel. Once you’ve pressed publish on your content, you’re now faced with the difficult task of getting people to read it. If you’re a large organization like the New York Times, you obviously don’t have to worry too much about it. But for smaller businesses and startups, getting your content in front of people is CRUCIAL. Nothing hurts worse than wordsmithing a 3,000 word screed on a topic to only have the other people on your content team and your family members give it a pity read.
So if you’re a marketing person with a fresh article, you should be concerned with a three things:
- Pushing your content in front of as many eyes as possible
- Building your brand in a way where you can rely on a steady stream of readership regardless of how much you push your content
- Ensuring that your content will continue to be read in the days/weeks/months after you press publish.
For the purpose of Part One, we’re going to stick to the top part of the content funnel:
Pushing Content
When you push your content, you’re trying to take something and shove it in front of as many eyes as possible — usually those who wouldn’t normally see what you’ve written otherwise. How do you do this? The easiest way is to rely on paid reach — that is, paying for an ad or an influencer to put your content in front of as many eyes as possible.
Of course, that’s not the only way to get your content to people. Hopefully, you know to share content that you’ve created across your various marketing channels, be they social media, email newsletters, or a push notification. You should automatically have some amount of organic reach that you can rely on to get your posts read. This means that you’ve built (more on this below) a solid following or readership that guarantees some amount of views.
There’s a catch though! Notice I’m saying “reach” rather than “impressions”. Reach is a measure of the number of people who have seen your content, whereas impressions is a measure of the number of times it was displayed to a reader, regardless of if they clicked on it or not. Example — if I see a Wall Street Journal article on my newsfeed 10 times, then that article would have had a reach of 1, and 10 impressions.
It’s important to understand the difference in what both of those words mean. You of course want to maximize both, but sometimes one or the other may be more important. If you’re trying to push your content in front of as many eyes as possible (say you’ve published a new product announcement or a status update), then you should primarily be concerned with reach. If you’re writing something that you want people to come back to over-and-over again (like this guide!), then you should focus more on impressions.
Neither succeeds without the other, so it’s important not to ignore either metric, rather to focus on which is most important for each unique piece.
Building your brand
Here’s the thing with all this. Over time, you want to be able to rely on a solid amount of reads and impressions, regardless of how hard you’ve pushed your content through paid channels. Above, we mentioned the difference between paid and organic reach. Let’s examine the latter a little more.
Presumably, you’ve got a couple of people following you or your business on Facebook or Twitter. When you write something, sharing your content on those platforms should generate a number of organic reaches by default. It’s worth noting that organic reach is very hard to build. On Facebook, many ad agencies are reporting organic reach of ~2%, which is abysmal by almost any metric.
To improve that, you’ve got a couple of options. The first is the title of this section — build your brand! Of course, that’s what you’re trying to do by publishing more, so understand that it’s a synergistic relationship. Posting more quality original content on your feeds will attract more impressions from your followers, which in turns should generate more followers and so on and so on.
That touches on another critical element of brand building — which is the viral reach. At the end of the day, there is only so much you can do to put your content in front of peoples’ eyes. To truly expand beyond a basic level of organic reach, it is crucial to build viral reach, or reach that comes from people sharing or commenting on your article.
When someone comments on your article, or shares it in their own feed, suddenly it becomes that much more credible to their friends and followers. Their name next to your article lends it that air of authority that brands are rarely able to build completely on their own. The power of viral reach is obvious from its name — think about all of those funny videos or great new songs that you never would have seen if your friend hadn’t shared it on Facebook or Twitter!
Ensuring your content is long-lasting
So you publish a post and get hundreds of reaches and thousands of impressions. Congrats! That’s huge! But you can’t rest on your laurels, right? There’s more to write and publish!
So what happens to your old piece? Does it just get consigned to the scrap heap of the “Archives” tag?
Ideally, you should build your content so that it continues to be relevant and read in the days and weeks to come after publishing. The obvious way to keep increasing your reach is to keep posting it on your own marketing feeds.
But that gets obnoxious very quickly. Your followers will only usually tolerate a repost once or twice before they start wondering about your stale content — or worse, if you’ve stopped posting. It’s important to keep reintroducing content to your followers, sure, but you must avoid overloading them with it.
A smarter move is to ensure that your content is loaded with social media friendly words that helps new readers constantly discover your content. By using basic search engine optimization, you can ensure that people will organically arrive at your content for months after you publish.
To be totally clear, that’s what we’re doing here. We hope our current followers get a lot of use out of this guide right now. But we’re also building our content in a way that ensure that people trying to figure out how to do content marketing way in the future can stumble upon this article and hopefully find it useful.
Anecdotally, if you look at our most popular pieces, they all constantly get reads MONTHS after they were published. A good piece of content should never stop getting read.
Views vs. Reads
Brief pause here. We’re being deliberate in using the word read instead of view here. Why? A view is someone simply opening your article. They may not even read the headline! They may have just clicked on it by accident! They may take one look at your first paragraph and say “nah I’m going to look at cat pictures instead”. Regardless of what happens next — that counts as a view.
A read, by contrast, is someone making it all the way to the bottom of your post and, well, reading the entire thing. If someone gets through 95% of your post but doesn’t scroll to the last line — tough, that’s 1 view and 0 reads. This is all measured with your read ratio — the ratio of reads to views. Typically, anything around 40–50% is pretty good.
There’s a lot to unpack in the difference between the two terms, but the main takeaway should be that reads are a much more important metric to evaluate your content’s effectiveness. Sure, if you’re getting a huge number of views from your organic reach, that may seem great, but if nobody is actually reading what you’re putting out, either your piece is boring or worse — not getting people to your desired outcome.
Getting your read ratio higher is a difficult balance. There are a number of approaches you can take to improve it — from reducing the length of your article to burying the lede and hiding the content that people clicked on an article for as close to the end as possible. Either works, but both are dangerous. Too short of an article, and you lose space to make it valuable to the people reading it, and your reaches are likely to decline over time, for example.
The great thing about read ratios is that they can tell you so much about the quality of your content and what people are responding to. Do you have tons of views, but few reads? That means people just aren’t finding your content interesting enough to scroll all the way through. That could be anything from writing style, to a sea of text without breaks or images. Face it, we’re a visual society now — nobody wants to read all of War and Peace on a Medium site.
By contrast, an incredibly high read ratio with few views means that your content is likely great, but you’re not doing a great job of getting it in front of people’s eyes. If that’s the case, look a little bit into how you’re getting your reach. It may be worth investing in some paid reach, or reformatting your asks so that you can get some viral reach from the people who are actually reading your content.
Let’s recap.
- Paid reach means giving a media site (Facebook, Twitter, etc) money to put your content in front of more eyes
- Organic reach comes from people naturally happening across your content in their newsfeeds
- Viral reach happens when people are sharing or commenting on your content, and getting it in front of their audience’s eyes
- SEO isn’t just for your website anymore — it’s crucial to making sure your content is always driving outcomes
- All reads are views, but not all views are reads.
- You read ratio is perhaps the most valuable tool you have to evaluate how your content is being received by your audience.
This article was produced by Humanlytics. Looking for more content just like this? Check us out on Twitter and Medium, and join our Analytics for Humans Facebook community to discuss more ideas and topics like this!
