How do you benchmark content?
An attempt to estimate the value of soft data.
Web analytics is a world of misleading certainty. Numerical values are tossed around and—don’t get me wrong—those numbers mean a lot, but how much to they mean when we try to compare one undertaking to another?
In a world where we have been told that our value will eventually be measured by the degree of personal brand engagement we are able to generate on various social media channels, it can be tempting to measure too directly. Ten views is clearly not as good as a hundred. A hundred isn’t as good as a thousand. And so on.
That seems obvious, and it informs the way we think about other things on the internet. View counts are news items in and of themselves.
So if you create content, how do you know that you’re doing a good job? Is it just the size of your audience? What about the “soft stuff?”
A foothold in the search for an answer
I was pleased to find a list of the “top 50" brands engaged in content marketing, and further pleased to find that Kapost, which constructed the list, made both the underlying data and the method for the list’s construction public.
Since they use a mixture of qualitative (their perception) and quantitative (twitter followers, youtube plays, inbound links, monthly active users, and facebook likes) criteria, we should be able to compare the two factors.
So I built an index that was purely quantitative and compared it to the final list. My method’s in the caption below.
The result was really surprising: the quantitative factors (or at least the way I combined them) explain almost no part of the list. The Kapost “Top 50" would seem to be determined almost purely by the “soft stuff”.
Why is that?
Look at some of the evidence that they give when justifying the choice of DocuSign as their #1:
Whitepapers, webinars, events, case studies and videos aimed at specific personas, buyer concerns, industries and departments beckon online visitors to the website. Then, as buyers enter the database through a demo, free trial or gated content asset, 36 automated email nurturing programs deliver timely and relevant content based on buying stage and persona.
In the quantitative ranking, Docusign wouldn’t have made the top half. Here’s how they do on each of the criteria:
- Twitter followers: 39th
- Youtube views: 29th
- Inbound links: 33rd
- LinkedIn Followers: 41st
- Monthly Unique Views: 19th
And they still came in number one.
Can you conclude anything from this?
Obviously you’d never reconstruct your understanding of the world on the basis of one quick experiment, but I was surprised at the weight Kapost gave to the softer factors.
It may be that their list is just flawed, but it’s intuitive to place a lot of weight on soft data when evaluating this sort of thing. Think about it: it matters just as much what you get people to look at as it does that they saw it.
The lesson to me is that the key to being “good” at content creation—which may never be empirically assessable—is likely to ensure you derive value from it apart from an audience. That can take a lot of forms. I love doing podcasts because I get to talk to amazing people about wildly interesting things.
Others find that writing out their ideas clarifies their thought process and helps them learn from mistakes in their reasoning. There are business reasons too: DocuSign clearly has found a way to have more productive conversations with their costumers through content.
This takes you to a simple place. The value of the activity is the value it provides you. Relating the quantitative data in this report back to “value” is a fraught process: remember when people used to try and value companies on a “per eyeball” basis?
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