Devote a part of your budget to distribution
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“We see an awful lot of brands creating really amazing content and a lot of the budgets are used just for creation. When it comes to distribution there’s nothing left. It’s important if you’re looking to drive effective content marketing, that you have enough budget and a strategy in place to ensure that your content gets in front of the right people.”
Ensure your search, social, amplification and CRM distribution channels are linked up
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“What we tend to see is that these groups [search, social, amplification and CRM] are siloed within an organisation. They can have similar objectives and we recommend having these teams talking to each other.
Combining them will give you the first elements of a framework to understand: ‘Okay, these are the channels I’m using to amplify my content and now let’s start to measure their success versus each other.’
“Then you can start to understand what’s delivering the right business objectives and you can start to move the leavers up or down on the channel that gives you the best results. Think about the different impact you can get from these different channels when they start working together.”
Context is everything
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“It’s important when you look at these metrics to look at them in context. If you have a click through rate of 5% is that a good or a bad thing? Well it really depends on how much you’ve spent, but more importantly if you have a click through rate of 5% but people are leaving your content after two seconds, that’s a bad thing.”
Measuring awareness
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“Awareness is all about reach. It’s all about getting in front of enough people so that when their ready to start looking at options you’re on that list. Some of the metrics you may want to look at are traffic, impressions, unique visitors but also what is very interesting is overlaying that with demographic data.
“What you’ll find is you have a variety of different audiences that are very interested in what you’re doing but they may want different types of content. It can help really tailor your content strategy.”
Measuring consideration
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“Within this phase you’re on someone’s radar. They’re considering what to purchase. You’re looking at helping them to solve a problem. So you probably want to start to consider providing slightly different types of content, perhaps something more informative.
“Some of the metrics you can use to measure success are time spent on site, pageviews per session, if someone scrolls all the way down to the end of the content. Are they bouncing and is that a good or a bad thing? You may want to run a brand lift study. Showing someone a piece of your content and then speaking to a non-exposed group and understanding: is there a change in brand preference, favourability, intent to purchase?”
Measuring conversion
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“Outside of purely purchasing something, there’s a lot of positive ROI factors to demonstrate and measure success: metrica like signups, downloads, social sharing. Understanding the customer journey, what type of content to show them through the awareness of phase, how to shift them through to consideration and ultimately down to conversion.”
Tag up your content
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“Once you’ve tagged your content up and once you can measure all these different formats you can then understand which of the channels you should use to activate [...your] consumers within each of the different stages and what’s the correct journey to get the business objectives that I want.”
Consider these three types of content
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
Owned media
“Owned content should be at the heart of your content strategy purely because this is where you will own all of the data. “
“When you’re looking at consideration, you may want to start combining click-through rate with traffic versus pageviews, start to give yourself a content engagement metric to understand: well, how did the piece of content compare with another piece of content and then mapping this through to drive the business objectives, whether that’s a newsletter signup, a business signup or a coupon download.”
Paid media
“Where does paid media play a role in my customer lifecycle? Should it be within the awareness, consideration or does it drive the conversion rates. Figuring this out, mapping the success of each piece of content, using metrics, to build benchmarks is the way you can understand if paid media is driving incredible consideration for me. Let’s invest more in this section.”
Earned media
“Earned media is great because it’s trusted: it’s somebody else saying you’re great.”
Use these data to feed the loop
Alex Cheeseman, Head of Brands and Agencies, Outbrain UK:
“Use these analytics to go back to your content team to say: “Guys, this is the stuff that’s working really well for us. We need to create more awareness. Here’s the data. That will feed into your insights and strategy and your creation and curation. This is an endless loop that goes on and on.”
Compare your content marketing ROI to your larger marketing effort
Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy, NewsCred:
“The first question that I retort when someone asks what’s the ROI of content marketing is what’s the ROI of marketing? Every organisation that asks this question needs to first commit to measuring their marketing ROI. In almost every case [where content marketing and marketing are compared], we’re seeing magnitude increases [in favour of content marketing].
Building a business case for content marketing
Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy, NewsCred:
- The Content Audit: how much does your content cost, how much is used, how effective is it?
- Cost per lead: from inbound vs. outbound
- Early-stage prospects: How much early-stage search traffic do you get? How large is that audience?
- What is the ROI of content marketing relative to the rest of your marketing spend (such as advertising)? [see above]
- How much improvement can you achieve by shifting from paid - earned - owned?
To see Michael’s full explanation of the business case, click through to 25:00 mins on the DigiTalk published above.
This DigiTalk was brought to you by Outbrain, sponsors of the Guardian Media Network’s digital content hub
