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If you believe the data, in 2015, businesses will spend in excess of $50 billion on content marketing-related projects. Caught up in the hysteria, and not wanting to be left behind, companies of all shapes and sizes are exploring content marketing as a way of improving customer engagement over traditional tactics, such as online advertising.
And while most marketers want to keep up with the latest trends to avoid becoming digital dinosaurs, you have to take a step back, look at the quality of some of the content out there and ask just how effective it really is. Are you being swept along for the content marketing ride, without really understanding what it is you want to achieve or how to do it well?
If so, you’re not alone. Many brands out there are creating huge volumes of blog articles which no one is reading, or producing video content that people don’t bother to view. The harsh reality is that you’re in the battle of your life to get eyeballs on your content, such is the competition out there. Content marketing can be a cost effective method of engagement, but if it’s not reaching your audience or achieving some form of return on investment, then you might as well be throwing your budget up in the air and burying your head in the sand while praying for success to just happen.
There are two main issues and they occur at brands of all sizes:
- Those starting out with content marketing often don’t research who their web visitors are or the type of content that will best engage that audience.
- Many active content marketers deploy a ‘heads-down’ approach, failing to measure or even really understand what success looks like.
Let’s look at both challenges from a day-to-day digital marketing perspective and offer some suggestions on how these can be overcome.
First of all, it’s not easy getting started with content marketing. A lot of people are completely transforming the way they talk to their customers and that can be a painful process. Many brands are not sure how much content is enough or what type of content they should be building. Yet, many marketers are seemingly embarrassed to ask the question and just plod on by throwing money at the problem.
In the same way, you wouldn’t pay thousands of pounds for an online advertisement on a website whose readership you knew nothing about, don’t just embark on a content creation spree without understanding who your visitors are. Web analytics tools (disclaimer: Netbiscuits provides such tools) can quickly and easily give you some basic information on the user and their device, which should be any content marketers starting point.
Page views: Most webmasters/marketers will know how many people hit their website, but you’d be amazed how many still don’t track this data. Understand how many people are currently visiting your website before you start creating content. This will also allow you to measure the success of your future campaigns.
Device impact: In a desktop world, consumers had little choice but to behave in a very similar way online. Today, they don’t. Smartphones, tablets, wearables, phablets and everything in between, mean your web visitors may behave differently depending on the device they use. If you create content marketing videos, then how your visitors engage may vary greatly depending on the device they use.
Referral sources: Where are your users coming from and how does this vary based on the device they are using? For example, are Twitter users on smartphones clicking through to your videos, while desktop users come through Google search. You can get this powerful information in seconds, It can also be a great way of understanding how you focus your spend on content against other forms of communication.
You should look at analytics data and understand which devices are the most popular on your website and how users behave. You can also see how elements such as device type, time of day and other contextual factors influence things such as bounce rate on certain pages. Knowing this can help you build the right content, for the right device and serving it up at the right time of day, as well as providing insight into the kind of content your audience prefers.
Once you’ve taken your learner plates off and are actively creating and releasing content, you’ll want to know how well it’s doing. For this, you’ll need to be very clear about what you are trying to achieve (increased traffic, signups, shared content, likes/follows). It’s worth saying that measurement in the content marketing world has changed. Historically, it has been sufficient to measure how many clicks your web pages had, but today we require a more sophisticated benchmark.
Many marketers are still not setting clear goals for their content marketing campaigns and are just continuing to churn out content. Here, we look at five areas digital marketers should be thinking about when measuring the ROI of their content marketing.
- How long did the visitor spend watching a video?
It is not enough to see that a visitor landed on your video page. We need to know how much of the video they saw, and if they reached the end, including our call to action. Video can be costly, and if visitors are not engaging, then this needs to be flagged so we can consider if the video is too long? Is the tone right?
- How much time did they spend on the page?
Again, moving beyond the notion that getting someone to your page is a win, content marketers should understand how much time their visitors spend looking at their content. This is incredibly easy to do. Digital marketers should also look at elements, such as scroll depth, to show if visitors are reading an entire article, rather than just headline scanning. It’s about understanding the level of engagement.
- Did they share my content with their social networks?
One of the best benchmarks for successful content is how many visitors shared it with their own social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. If one of your goals is to drive traffic to your website, then measuring click through rates from social referrals is an absolute must, and also provides insight into how highly your visitors rate your content.
- How did the user’s device/context impact the user journey across your website?
You may know where your visitors came from, but what did they do while they were on your website? Being able to track the user journey across different pages and see how different devices take users on particular journeys can be extremely insightful. For example, do smartphone users exit your site at a particular page, while desktop visitors do not? This can help you identify potential issues with your website and content on certain devices. Similarly, the visitor’s connection speed and bandwidth at the time they visited your website can also provide insight into why they behave the way they do, and why content performs or does not.
- What did they do when they had finished viewing the content?
The next part of understanding the visitor journey is to know where the visitor went when they had viewed our content. Did they bounce from the website or look at other pages? Remember, in today’s multi screen world, the fact they bounced is not always a bad thing. Regardless of how good the experience is, some visitors prefer to return on a different device later (desktop over smartphone) to complete a transaction or do further research. We’ll be talking more about how you can track users across multiple devices in a forthcoming blog series.
These are just a few suggestions of how digital marketers can grab measurement by the horns and really start to understand if their content is making an impact or simply falling through the gaps. Take a look at our in depth article on the five pillars of content marketing success for more information on some of the things content marketers should consider when measuring ROI.
Whether you’re a guru or a complete beginner, the sooner you get a better understanding of your visitors, the quicker you will learn which content to create and how best to deliver it. From there, it’s all about measuring the right things and understanding how your assets impact conversion, which is the key benchmark for ROI. Anyone can create content, but if you truly want to stand out from the crowd and ensure your content has a real impact then getting the planning and measurement right is absolutely key.
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