New School ROI: The five pillars of measuring content marketing success

How much does it cost to build an empire? Well, as far as building a content marketing empire is concerned, assembling your army and giving them the right arsenal can be pricey.  In fact, the estimated spend on new digital collateral in 2014 was a staggering $135 billion.[1] However, as any of the great emperors would surely testify, no matter how exquisite the materials used, they amount to nothing without the right foundations in place. For digital marketers, operating in the multiscreen world, the foundations for all content come from measurement and the ability to define success. In this article, Duncan Clark explores the five pillars of content marketing measurement and why digital marketers need to purvey their empire through a different set of metrics if they are to be truly successful.

The roots of the five pillars for determining content marketing success were formulated in the desktop world, but in today’s landscape, where mobile, social and digital media have transformed how we think about consumption, need some refinement in order to cope with the complexities of multiple screens and seemingly endless user contexts. Below, we have demonstrated how marketers should be thinking about each pillar, followed by a detailed description.

The five pillars:

Audience: The artist formerly known as Traffic

First of all, just as an empire needs to know where it has influence, so the marketer needs to know: where is my content marketing having an impact? If it is effective, content marketing should be slowly growing the audience. This has traditionally been measured in terms of page views, which, all being well, are trending upwards. That’s useful to know, but where are the visitors coming from? Could the growth be even faster? Here’s where the split by different platforms (feature phone, smartphone, tablet, desktop, smart TV and so on) comes into play.

Don’t forget, especially for mobile, many people simply expect a more relevant experience as they are location sensitive and, often, on using different devices at different times. It means that content which can reference a person’s location or their preferences will be key to improving performance on mobile devices. Remember, keywords and content that people will be looking for do differ by platform[2] – so you need to measure whether you hitting the right message for all your different audiences? People look for content with different search terms (so, what’s easier to type out on mobile). We know that mobile traffic is growing and it does vary by vertical. But one thing is for sure: if your mobile audience is not growing, then the content is not resonating on certain platforms and your sphere of influence will be diminishing.

Sessions become Engagement

Growing an audience relies on being contextually relevant. The level of relevancy can be determined when looking at sessions. People’s intentions are different, depending on the device being used. If the content is in the wrong format, or not right for the person’s current situation, then that visitor will not stay long or visit many pages. The session time and the average number of sessions by device will reveal how much of an issue this is for your site.

For instance, research from the Netbiscuits Analytics tool shows that average sessions on tablets are 75% longer than they are on smartphones. And there are 55% more page views per session on tablets compared to smartphones. Here the context is critical: if the time on site should be shorter because your mobile users are looking to complete tasks quickly, this may not be a problem. But if your key KPI is keeping people on your site longer, and your smartphone traffic is growing as it should, you will find that market trends are eroding your ability to hit that KPI. Consider whether the audience is looking for different things? Would videos make them stay longer than a written article? How can you drive engagement? If engagement on different platforms is not in line with expectations, we need to look for more information about the user experience.

Understanding the User Experience through Visitor Flow on your website

Designing content for the multiscreen world is not just about the content itself. The visitor’s journey to that content is equally as important and it impacts how a visitor perceives a brand overall. If visitors only visit an average of three pages on smartphones, your content could be great, but far too deeply buried. You need to get people to the great content that you are producing in a way that matches their expectations. It might be fine under a sub heading of a navigation bar for a desktop visitor, but this could be too much for the average smartphone user.

So, do you need a dedicated landing page instead when you produce a certain content marketing campaign? Also, the length of time that visitors spend on individual pages will tell you how much they like or interact with your content. Or indeed if they leave at that point, it suggests that the content does not match the expectations. You could check the origin of the traffic, to see whether your organic search, Facebook or Twitter users are more engaged and this will provide an indication of what different audience are expecting. It enables you to see the points of weakness throughout your site. Once the weaknesses are identified, it’s time to fortify.

Not just Conversion, but visitor Satisfaction

Fortunately, conversion does not have to be limited to ecommerce goals such as click to buy. They can be set up against other events to get a better insight into how content is performing. For instance, they can be used to determine how much of an article is read? Or if the audience never reads to the end, is a longer article proving to be a waste of time, and therefore money? How about videos? Does your audience watch 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of a video, and does it differ depending on the platform, the time of day or the bandwidth speeds a customer has? And if your CTA is always at the end of a video, how many people actually see it? Should the videos be shorter? And do visitors go on to share your content? Can everyone in all circumstances access video? According to the wise words of Gartner, ‘availability is part of relevancy’. If a user can’t access what they are looking for on the device they are using, then your website becomes redundant and irrelevant to them.

Thinking of Bounce in terms of Optimization

Don’t just measure where things work well, but think about where things are going wrong as well. If a microsite has a high bounce rate, contextual indicators can be used to see what could have been done to improve it? Did it serve the customer with what they wanted at their moment of need? Bounce rate by device will show you if this was the problem, or not. Or again, looking at interaction by the time of day and device type will demonstrate whether the content matched expectations across different mediums. For example, do smartphone users engage more than tablet users on a morning rather than an evening? Identifying reasons for bounce is an absolutely essential part of the continual optimization process, and it is very easy to get insights on this from web analytics tools.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and there are seemingly boundless ways of measuring how your content is performing. We’ve chosen a few, but see for yourself. You can be up and running with your FREE 30-day trial of Netbiscuits Analytics in just minutes, putting the foundations in place for your very own content marketing empire, ensuring you’re optimised for mobile and getingt the best return on investment from all your assets.

[1] Digital asset management firm WebDAM, quoted from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/20-statistics-will-drive-2014-marketing-strategies-infographic

[2] http://www.quora.com/In-terms-of-SEO-how-would-keywords-phrases-for-a-mobile-site-differ-from-a-non-mobile-site

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