Measuring the Effectiveness
of Content
Marketing
Content Marketing was the buzz phrase spilling from the mouths of digital leaders all over the world in 2014. So now we know how crucial content marketing is to engaging users with a brand, we need to develop new tools to effectively measure our content marketing efforts on the end user. The two questions we asked ourselves were; how should we truly assess the impact of content marketing across websites, social media and email? And more importantly, how do we give our insights context so they can be translated into something actionable for content teams?
The result was a Strategic Framework for Content that allows us to deliver measurable and actionable reports to our clients.
Content Strategy & Framework
Content strategy is largely shaped by a brand’s key business objectives, but almost always involves, developing content themes, defining key audiences and researching user’s platform preferences so we’re delivering the right content to the right users at the right times.
A Portable Content Strategy is recommended for clients who struggle to resource the level of content production required to meet their nirvana content strategy. Content for multiple channels is created and then published by the same content author. The idea is to design your content for distribution across a number of channels, while minimising the effort required.
To define a content strategy we need to think about who we’re speaking to, what we’re trying to say and where we’ll reach them.
Who you want to speak to? Who are your brand audiences? This always stretches beyond your current and target customer market.
What you want to talk about? Based on brand values and objectives, what are the content themes that you’d like represented in your content? E.g. For AMEX customers, content themes may include “luxury,” “travel” and “rewards”. Themes should be authentic to your core brand values.
Where do you want to say it? Audiences, content themes and brand values help us define which channels are most appropriate. Only create content for a specific distribution channel if it’s targeting an audience who prefers that channel. Within each channel, determine how it should be used to most effectively reach audiences. This may include factors such as preferred post frequency, time of send, word count and content format.
Will our current workflows support the new strategy? A new content strategy may require new ways of working. Ensure people and processes are in place for gathering information from subject matter experts, absorbing content and repurposing the best stories for the appropriate platforms.
Once the framework has been defined and implemented, we’re ready to begin measuring the results.
Measurement
Brands often do the leg-work to implement a content strategy, but find it difficult to measure the impact content is having on their audiences. This results in difficulty justifying further investment in high-quality content assets, despite their perceived value.
For certain eCommerce brands, content marketing may be more easily measured through the peaks and troughs of sales. If a blog article is posted on ladies shoes and sales of ladies shoes spike on the same day, we can assume the blog article had a positive effect on sales. Other brands that focus more on reputation than conversion may struggle to measure their success because emotional drivers like audience sentiment take priority over sales or leads.
Another difficulty is the ability to measure across platforms. While it’s easy to attribute a sales spike to a blog article on a website — it’s much more difficult to measure the full, holistic impact of a piece of content that has been published across a number of different platforms.
Of all the people who saw an article, on Facebook — how many saw it, then interacted with it? (liked, favourited, clicked on a link or commented). To measure impact across different platforms we need to measure impressions and engagement across audiences, themes and channels.
How to Measure
Every piece of content published across every channel needs to be attributed to key audiences and key content themes defined by the strategy. The performance of the content is then assessed by impressions and engagement.
Impressions: refers to any eyeball on a piece of content
- Page views/ article views on a Website
- Impressions on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
- The number of opens for an Email
Engagement: any interaction with a piece of content
- The number of comments, likes, link clicks, retweets and any other interaction on the social media posts
- For Email this means the number of links clicked
The dashboard: a visually engaging way to view analytics
Once all of the data has been collected we work towards aggregating and presenting it in a way that is the most useful for our clients organisation’s purpose and goals.
Presenting the data in a visually engaging way is critical. As digital marketers we often focus all our efforts on the user experience of the content, but neglect to apply the same methods when presenting the results.
What is the simplest way to present meaningful information that is easy to digest and comprehend? What will be the easiest way to communicate results to other people in the organization that don’t necessarily understand the technicality behind content marketing efforts? A long-winded excel report stuffed with numbers might be interesting to the data analyst producing it, but how useful is it for the organisation?
Utilising the information produced
You should use the information you’re getting as a predictive tool for content production. By tracking the frequency and impact of content on certain themes and audiences, you will more easily be able to identify high engagement opportunities, or to address gaps in your content production.
Future expansions and opportunities
Once a baseline of content production addressing key objectives, audiences and themes has been established, there is an opportunity to begin identifying audiences via behavioural content personalisation and automation, delivering more targeted and personalised content experiences.
Engagement Ladder
Further more, a long-term content strategy can be complemented by something we’ve named the ‘Engagement Ladder’. The idea is to migrate users from social channels to more personalised channels such as email and the website in order to cater to each audience’s unique needs.
Personalisation and Automation
Many organisations will get consumed by manual reporting processes, spending time acquiring numbers instead of dedicating the time to analyse insights that make an impact on performance. Automating the data acquisition from multiple platforms, and having the measurement framework to visually display the results will ensure efforts are focused on analysing the insights and implementing solutions. Personalisation will also aid in automated reporting on your content marketing efforts.
Personalisation strategy and implementation comes into play to both automate audience attribution to content and automate the content displayed to different audiences when they visit the website. You can use your CMS personalisation features or a segmented email database to market directly to your audience segments (e.g. Sitecore DMS allows you to ‘bucket’ users into an audience group).
