SO WHAT IS GOOD CONTENT MARKETING?
The Content Marketing Institute recently updated its definition of content marketing as ‘a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately to drive profitable customer action'.
In short if your content is not contributing to your bottom line it’s not good content it’s just filler, noise even. Good or great content is content (blog post, infographic, video, image etc.) that clearly explains your brand proposition, why chose your brand over the competition. It must also speak to your audience, not evey audience, in the right tone and engage them personally. Its the content which is most frequently viewed prior to a desired goal on your website or has a long term positive brand benefit that indirectly leads to a goal. Its what makes your digital presence more efficent and ultamately gives you a better return on your media dollar.
OVERALL APPROACH
An overall content strategy sets out how you will use content to meet our audience needs and deliver your digital business objectives over time. You can divide the overall strategy into two distinct parts.
1. On one half we look at the Content components. This further divided two distinct areas.
The substance of the required content: How do we align the content with the overall strategy? What message should our content convey? What kinds of content do we need?
The structure of the content: How should it be organised and displayed onsite, How is content prioritised? What taxonomies and architectures are required?
2. The other half, often overlooked, is the people components. This is also made up of two distinct areas.
Workflow: Which process and people are required for creating and maintaining content? How is content prioritised?
Governance: Who makes decisions about content and content strategy? Who is responsible for quality control?
START WITH A CONTENT AUDIT
With the strategic approach outlined, a first step is creating a framework for assessing the existing content to determine what can be repurposed, reused or retired as well as identifying potential gaps requiring new content creation.
This provides direction to the teams responsible for the creation and or migration of content onto the new site, as well as providing key information for the User Experience, Creative and tech teams to use when concepting and detailing a solution.
One key stage in this audit process is understanding the engagement cycle. This is where you define the journey your audience members go through as they familiarise themselves with you. It’s how you map out their needs and how you address these needs and help them become increasingly engage with your brand. You use it to map content to both sales and a consumer engagement process to help deliver the right conversation at the right time. Just as in real life when you meet someone, determining what you want to say to a person is a combination of two things:
Content: What do you want to say?
Context: What is the best time and place to start the conversation?
Once you have your funnel mapped out, you then build out your content segmentation, which is a matrix of your personas and your sales funnel. Once you have your grid, start filling in the cells with your existing or new content items. A primary benefit of this exercise is that it highlights where you’re content marketing is either light or heavy.
Once you have agreement on what needs to be migrated or originated you create a plan of action. That would likely involve a combination of the following approaches:
Reuse existing content. If you have to move to a new site this can be done in two ways.
Programmatic – Developers write custom scripts that move content directly to the new site, content is reviewed by a Content Editor and then QA checked for language and formatting.
Manual - Move of content is led by a Content Editor. Junior resource may be used for some of this and or a mix of client side staff if desired in order to keep costs down.
Created or repurposed – New content can be created or older content repurposed by a combination of Content Editors, Designers and Copywriters. In addition style and tone of voice guides can be created, enabling client side staff to create quality content on an on-going basis
Retire or archived – Old content can be removed permanently or archived if by some chance its required in future.
DETERMINING RESOURCES NEEDED
The resources required to undertake the creation/migration of content are variable depending on the strategic ambition and the audit and the split of manual / programmatic work required. You sould seek to scope this in more detail and provide a range of options and costs during the Discovery and Explore phases of any project.
When the initial scope has been agreed consideration can also be paid to the governance and workflow required to manage and produce content, ensuring that future fresh content created has an owner and delivers against the strategic aims. This is an optional undertaking that can be useful depending on the existing internal resource, expertise on client side and any legal or compliance requirements.
DETERMINING KPI'S
1. Brand impact
Any content KPI must fit into the overall Brand’s higher purpose and start with a solid understanding of why the business exists. So there is a top-level KPI that you need to define and align to, based on your business purpose and your marketing goals overall. The main difficulty there is to distinguish the contribution of good content to this overall KPI. This is not an easy task, and therefore we also recommend that you look at the more immediate tangible impact of good content. That understood there are three main areas to set KPI’s.
1. Share of Conversation
Traditionally marketers measured Share of Voice (SOV) but this was when marketing and media was seen in a broadcasting light. Share of conversation (SOC) starts with a fundamental belief that marketing is now a conversation. Not starting one, mainly it is about joining one and ultimately about leading one.
SOC is also an extremely customer-centric goal. It forces you to think bigger than your business and to focus on providing value to your target audience with content around your topic.
You can measure this through social tool that can defined the percentage of brand mentions you get around the topic you want your brand associated with. You can then seek to grow that SOC.
2. Reach. Engage, Share
The next layer down gets a little more traditional and should always involve a balanced view across these 2 goals: Reach, Engagement and Sharability.
Reach - Reach is measured to see if you are broadly attracting your target audience. It should be a combination of paid, owned and earned reach of the right audience and for the topic you want the brand to be associated with. You can look at the classic metrics such as growth in overall visitors, unique visitors and visits from specific search terms (related to your brand topic), visitors from mobile and social, etc.
Engagement - Engagement is all about how the content is capturing the visitor’s attention once they make it to your site. This can be measured with metrics such as pages / visit, dwell time, new versus repeat visits, social shares and if you have the facilities any comments made.
Sharability – Social sharability of your content is built on the belief that marketing is now a conversation. If your audience decided that whatever you say is worth sharing you are doing something right. So one other hard metric will be the increase in social shares of new content, how have people have tweeted it, liked on Facebook or on whatever audience relevant social channel. Set a benchmark and measure the impact of new content on that benchmark.
3. Conversions
Every site has or should have an event conversion goal or goals that could include anything from an application, a subscription to a newsletter or even as simple as click through to a contact us page. As long as these are tractable they can be measures and improved through good use of content.
For some brands, the ultimate conversion is sales. If this is the case the more immediate results at this level allows you to effectively set up AB testing with different content to determine which one is more effective at driving immediate conversions. But beware, few buyers will move from not knowing who you are, to buying directly from you as a result of an amazing piece of content, the journey tends to be more non-linear.
Word of caution - The Need for Balance
It is important to keep in mind that it is easy to “game” these metrics if you only focus on one. As mentioned, you can always buy reach or become obsessed onimmediate conversion at the expense of longer term goals. You can also drive up pageviews through techniques by adding page breaks to your content or creating slideshows with multiple pages and forcing your visitors to click through. These approaches almost always come at the expense of the user experience and in the end dilute your brand value. So when you conduct tests of your content marketing designs, content types or topics, look across all four areas to ensure you aren’t sacrificing too much of the overall picture.
SUMMARY
Content marketing is fundamentally about earning familiarity, trust and hopefully building a relationship. It’s all about how each piece of content creates a link with your brand so that when the consumer is in the market for whatever you are selling they think of you, or they pass on your details to someone they know in the market for your product or service. It’s very hard to link this sort of activity together never mind connecting it back to specific content.
So measuring the immediate short term gains is useful but only to an extent. For content marketing, it’s a long, long season. It should be viewed against an average lifetime customer value. There should be, many chances to fail and as long as you fail quickly, learn fast, and adapt you’re on your way to maximise the efficiencies of your content program.
In summary make sure your content is…
In the most engaging format
In the most appropriate tone
Has a strong inspirational or informational value
Is designed/written for a clear audience
Understand the context in which they are speaking to that audience
Is labelled intuitively
Is actionable - Have a clear next step