According to Content Marketing Institute, only 45% of marketers know what a successful content marketing program looks like. If you haven’t mastered measuring your content marketing effectiveness, or you’re not sure how effective your efforts are, you’re not alone. Measuring the success of content marketing begins with setting goals and KPIs that are directly linked to the overall corporate goals of your organization.
In a recent episode of Found Friday, I spoke with Steve Farnsworth, CMO Steveology Group, and Erin Robbins O’Brien, President GinzaMetrics about what it takes create a data-driven content marketing program. We discussed the importance of getting the right data and knowing how to analyze it to determine what’s working and what’s not.
What makes content marketing successful
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Effectively measuring content marketing efforts is still one of the top five challenges for marketers. While it’s surprising that so many people are doing something without really knowing its effectiveness, it’s not surprising that marketers are still confused over how to define success. To date, there are no standard, universally accepted metrics to define content marketing success or even any agreement about what to measure.
“It feels like we’re still very disjointed in terms of marketing channels, marketing methodology, tactical decisions versus strategic decisions and where we place emphasis on budget and resources,” states Erin.
When we ask if our content marketing efforts are successful, we’re really asking about the success of a variety of efforts, organizational groups, and outside consultants and agencies. Lumping all those things into one group and measuring them as a whole is a challenge for many organizations. There’s a lot to tackle when it comes to deciding if a marketing program is successful, or not.
Steve Farnsworth agrees that the questions we’re asking are often too broad to answer accurately or with a single measurement. “All the pieces that make up a content marketing program are a collection, ideally, of the dozens of programs you’re doing. Each of the programs has to stand on its own with individual KPIs. What I think probably speaks more loudly or broadly [to why people don’t know what a successful content marketing program looks like] is that people aren’t necessarily truly tracking the improvements from campaign to campaign,” Steve says.
Not all goals and KPIs are created equal
The challenge of measuring content marketing effectiveness begins with the challenge of setting goals and KPIs that accurately reflect overall corporate goals. In the end, the goal of any marketing program is to drive sales, increase conversions, and contribute to the bottom line. If marketing’s goals are aligned to corporate goals, measuring the effectiveness of content marketing efforts with metrics like increased website traffic, time on page, and social share of voice fall short of proving the real value of content marketing programs.
“Measuring followers on LinkedIn purely by shares or purely by the eyeballs that read your content are interesting KPIs, but they are secondary to a proxy KPI where we ask if someone reads a piece of content, do they subscribe or do they ask for the next stage content? Most of the goals should be around lead generation, if they’re not, you need to have a pretty good conversation about why they’re not,” suggests Steve.
According to Steve, measuring
efforts and setting goals fails at two levels. First, management is still learning how to use content marketing technology to make sense of the data and second, a lack of communication exists between management and the rank and file about KPIs and goals.
Getting data and measuring content marketing results cannot be an end unto itself. Somewhere along the way, we need to know what to do with the data we’re gathering. We need to know how our KPIs and goals are helping to shape overall strategies and our day-to-day efforts. We need to know how the data from one department or team compares to data from another department and how the analysis of all this data helps everyone make overall smarter decisions across the organization.
According to Erin, “One of the big topics around here is data normalization. If everyone in an organization is measuring things but they’re measuring them in a lot of different ways, you’re not comparing apples to apples anymore. You’re not even comparing apples to any other fruit. At that point, you’re just off somewhere in the vegetable patch because you can’t re-aggregate the data to deliver on a core goal. At some point, the goal is money and conversions.”
The trouble with KPIs
Vanity metrics and KPIs that target likes on social media or pageviews on blog posts tell you how individual content assets are received and most popular, but those KPIs won’t tell you how successful your efforts are at moving things along the chain and improving sales and conversions. Marketers may be playing it safe to keep from losing their job
Who do you have in mind when you create content? We all like to imagine we’re creating content for our audiences, but do we really know who our audiences are? Even if we think we know our audiences, are we actually creating content that matches their intent? Creating personas and delivering the right content to engage the right people with your brand is a combination of art, science, and the right data.
You are not your audience
Even if you have a lot in common with the people you’re communicating with, the very fact that you’re offering a solution means that you’re no longer a part of the cohort group. By definition, you’ve stopped asking the same questions and you have different pain points.
Now that you aren’t a typical consumer of your own product, you’ve introduced a level of bias and the possibility that the judgment calls you make on your audience’s behalf are flawed.
“The Golden Rule is treating others how you want to be treated and the Platinum Rule is to treat people how they want to be treated. To do that, you need to know how they want to be treated. To know how they want to be treated, you need data that tells you about their habits, preferences, and interactions,” suggests Erin Robbins O’Brien, President at GinzaMetrics.
Getting to know your audience means understanding their positive interactions as well as their negative ones. Creating negative personas helps form a picture search for telephone numbers of those people who are in the realm of your audience, but aren’t engaging with your brand. Knowing their unique traits and the reasons why your content has not interested them to date will help you craft specific messages designed to attract them to your brand.
Use search data to get to know your audience
When marketers embark on the journey to create audience personas, search data is often overlooked, or at least not the first place we look for audience insights. Search data should be a key component to our persona development because search. Data allows us to understand how audiences are actually talking about products and services natively. Search data gives us the ability to track the actual words and phrases audiences are using when they’re looking for. Solutions to their problems without the prompts of paid advertising and other marketing efforts.
Search data allows you to take a deeper dive into:
The language audiences are using.
Specific words and phrases
Changing words and phrases
Where the search originates.
Geography
Type of device
Which social channels your audiences prefer.
What’s working for your competitors.
Mediums
Messages
Methods
Search data provides a certain granularity of audience preferences not available through other types of data. For instance, you can see how each of your persona usa b2b list groups uses keywords and descriptions differently for the same features or services.
Vocabulary and terminology differences may vary across persona group attributes including:
Geographical regions
Ages
Income level
Roles
Industry
According to Erin, “When you know the different ways. People are describing your product and services and what content they’re consuming, you can design better. Outreach on paid efforts, optimize better social messages, and create better content for search.”
creating relevant content seo solution
Understanding the search preferences of your. Persona groups can help you to not only. Create better content, but also distribute it in a way that’s more likely to engage your target audiences. Search preferences will help you determine persona behavioral traits, including:
Device type
Mobile
Desktop
Marketing channel
Email
Social media
Content type
Video
Podcast
Blog post
EBook
Infographic
Your personas are more than current customer profiles
Historically, audience persona profiles have relied heavily on the traits of current customers. The practice is understandable, given the amount of. Data available when marketers first starting thinking about their audiences as groups of individuals. With different needs and desires. Now, relying only on personality traits of those who have already bought your. Product or signed up to use your service is dangerously close to being completely ineffective. And unnecessary, given the amount of data now available to inform persona development.
If you’re creating persona profiles based on the. People who are already taking the actions you want them to take, you’re missing out on identifying and targeting. Audiences who should be engaging with your brand, but aren’t. To understand why certain audiences aren’t completing the buyer journey, create negative personas for those people who came close to. Becoming customers, but didn’t buy your product or service.
In addition, relying on the habits and preferences of. Current customers to inform your persona development may mean that you’re only looking at the. Person who made the final buying decision and ignoring the people who influenced that decision. Before the purchase was made by the C-suite executive who now populates your cust