Content marketing is all the rage. Which means that sooner or later, someone’s going to charge into your office and ask you “How you know if it’s worth it?” Here’s how to answer that question, in 4 steps:
Step 1: Get agreement on what “worth it” really means.
Organizations adopt content marketing as a strategy for numerous reasons: to generate leads, build influence in a market, or simply because they can’t afford to buy sufficient advertising to achieve their communications goals. You can’t even begin to measure anything until you know what leadership expects content marketing to accomplish. (And if they don’t know, you get to tell them what it does.) Here’s a chart of possible objectives and how to measure them.
[table “7” not found /]- If the goal is increase leads or build your email list, then you will need to tightly integrate your metrics with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or whatever system manages your leads.
- If the goal is to position or reposition your organization as a thought leader in a particular marketplace, and/or increase your search rankings on a specific subject, then you’ll need to integrate closely with social listening and PR monitoring and your SEO group.
- If the goal is to reach a whole new customer base or market, then you’ll need awareness and perception studies to make sure you’ve accomplished that goal.
The key is to get your management team to agree on how content marketing contributes to your organization’s business goals. Once you’ve established and gotten consensus on the goals of your program, you’ll be more than halfway home in terms of measurement.
Step 2: Agree on a benchmark.
All good measurement compares your results to something else. That’s why you need to agree with leadership on a realistic benchmark for your program. For content marketing, the definition of your benchmark will be driven by your goals. For instance, if you are doing content marketing because you have a tight budget and can’t afford anything else, then you’ll want to do a cost comparison between your content marketing efforts and another program to see which efforts generate the most number of leads for the least cost. If you’re getting your butt kicked by the competition and want to use content marketing as a way to grow your influence and market presence, then you’ll need to continuously benchmark against the competition.
Step 3: Focus only on the agreed-upon goals and the metrics that reflect them.
There are literally dozens of possible metrics you can chart, from time on website, to downloads, leads, and recently added email addresses. But the only ones that matter are the ones that reflect movement toward your objectives. There’s no point in just measuring unique visits, when the true intent of your content marketing is qualified leads. And, similarly, there’s no value in measuring downloads if what you’re really trying to do is get your own CEO’s thoughts and writings in front of an entirely new market audience.
One key rule: Limit your metrics to no more than 7. The maximum number of things any human can keep top of mind is 7. The key metrics that define your success should be (and will become) what you focus on every day. Every time you sit down to write, edit, or produce a piece of content, you should ask yourself:
- “Is this going to appeal to that new audience?”
- “Is this going to be interesting enough so people will give up private information in order to get it?”
- “Is this the most efficient way to get this message out?”
Step 4: Report results in terms of what works and what doesn’t.
Too often I talk to PR people who are terrified of presenting bad news. The reality is that you learn a lot more from what isn’t working than by pointing out what is. The data is the data, and some content works and some doesn’t. Get over your fears. When you report results, show the bad news, but then tell your leadership how you’re going to make it work better the next time.
Here is a suggested chart to use to tell your content marketing story:
The point in every measurement report should be to determine what is working and what isn’t. What’s the most cost-effective tactic you’ve used and what is the least? So to create this chart, you force rank every piece of content you’ve produced in the last month or quarter (based on what you defined in Step 1 as your measures of success). Whatever the agreed upon goal — whether it’s leads, engagement, downloads, or exposure — list everything you’ve produced and put the number of leads/engagement, etc. next to it. Then estimate the time/cost/resources it took to produce. Again, force rank all the campaigns/tactics based on resources required, and that becomes your resource number. Now you can add in a volume number, for instance, the total amount of exposure as measured by number of shares/retweets/impressions each piece of content received. If you have a fancy dashboard program, that’s fantastic. If not, use Excel’s bubble chart function so your data and chart can look like this:
You’re probably saying by now, “But this sounds like every other measurement column I’ve ever read!” And that’s true. Measuring content marketing is no different than measuring any other communications tactics. If you start with clearly defined goals, then the metrics are easy. ∞
