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According to the recently released "Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends" report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 28 percent of B2B marketers don't measure the ROI of their content marketing. Failing to do so is a mistake, because tracking metrics — the right ones — enables you to concentrate on the content marketing activities that most benefit your bottom line. To prove your content marketing effectiveness and see which content initiatives are worth your time and money, focus on these metrics....
With the increased use of content curation (the best marketers use a mix of 65% created, 25% curated, and less than 10% syndicated content), some unique challenges need to be addressed in a content marketing measurement strategy, including: - Marketers who are curating content are selecting, organizing, and contextualizing third-party assets.
- Target audiences are not necessarily consuming content within branded experiences.
- Content curators also are redirecting traffic to external sites and distributing content across multiple channels – including email, social media, and feeds in addition to branded sites and blogs....
If you’re like most marketers, you’re waiting for some sign that says your content is “working.” Unfortunately, though, most marketers suffer from two major roadblocks when it comes to understanding whether or not their content efforts are paying off.
1. They don’t have the infrastructure in place to measure the right data.
2. They don’t know what the “right data” might be.
Like any aspect of marketing, your content must have defined objectives that align with the goals of the organization....
Nine out of ten in-house marketers say that content marketing will become more important, but just 38 percent has a content strategy.
There’s a gap to bridge. The infographic by Pardot.com shows interesting data points, among others the four content marketing metrics categories.
The four types of content marketing metrics can be divided in: - consumption
- Sharing
- lead generation
- sales.
As shown in another point made in the infographic (most popular metrics), the research behind it shows that marketers are focusing on Consumption and Sharing metrics but by also taking into account Lead generation and Sales it keeps the content aligned with business objectives....
“Content audit” sounds a bit intimidating like something that involves ghastly amounts of time, endless spreadsheets, and dozens of unpaid interns. The word “audit” is so tied up with other unpleasant life experiences that I totally understand if it doesn’t inspire you. But hang on for a second because a “content audit” might be what your site needs to get to the next level.
So, what is a content audit? A content audit is a careful look at your website’s existing content in order to make sure that it’s doing what you want it to do — driving the right kind of traffic, containing the right kind of keywords, and improving conversions.
The reason this is important is because the content of your website is the most important factor in your website’s existence. To be blunt, your content is your website....
Last year, IBM poured some cold water on social advertising when it said social sites like Twitter and Facebook had almost no impact on online Black Friday sales.
This year, things aren’t much better.In tracking traffic and sales at about 800 e-commerce sites, IBM says it found that only about one percent of visits to e-commerce sites this week come from social networks, according to Jay Henderson, strategy director for IBM. And, once again, just a fraction of one percent of overall orders are made by people coming to the e-commerce site directly from a social network, he said.
“I don’t think the implication is that social isn’t important,” Henderson said earlier this week. “But so far it hasn’t proven effective to driving traffic to the site or directly causing people to convert.”...
Measurement matters now more than ever.Marketing technology advances have made it easier and more affordable to connect activities to outcomes, but marketers are largely dropping the ball when it comes to monitoring, reporting, and improving performance.Adobe’s Digital Distress study, which surveyed more than 1,000 marketers, found 76 percent of marketers believe measurement is important, though only 29 percent believe they are doing it well. ...
How to Measure the PR Value of a Blog or a blogger. 7 steps and 7 metrics to examine.
We were asked an interesting question recently about placements on blogs and their impact:
“How do you measure the PR value of a blog?”
Most of the time, PR firms and practitioners measure an outlet’s capabilities on behalf of a client in terms of audience, in terms of the number of eyeballs that you’re in front of. That’s not irrelevant: a blog that has 0 readers will deliver 0 new audience members to you, and thus having some audience members is a good place to start. Let’s look more carefully at how you might measure a blog’s potential impact on your PR program through the lens of how SHIFT measures PR.Recall that we measure PR in 7 broad categories or buckets......
Marketers have a new tool available to them with the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses. Late last year, Pinterest began rolling out new business tools for companies using the social media platform, and Pinterest Analytics is the next logical step to help marketers use the medium successfully. Many brands and companies have taken to Pinterest to promote products and share content. Rather than tell customers about your product, Pinterest makes it possible to show what you have to offer. And the online scrapbooking site allows your customers to share your content that they find interesting as well. This is where the new Analytics feature comes in. Now you can track, in any given period, what content your customers are engaging with the most. What content resonates with your audience? What is driving traffic to your website? The new tool offers several useful pieces of information for business users to track. Here’s an overview of the new tool and its unique features...
Web analytics and general knowledge of digital marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) have come a long way since the days when people were measuring “hits” on a site. Tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, and proprietary systems within companies have made digital marketing reporting more simple and accessible for the average marketing professional. These days, you’re nowhere in marketing if you don’t understand your basic web KPIs, including customer engagement and conversion rates.
However, as content marketing takes the forefront in digital marketing tactics — especially for B2B and SEO marketing — marketers are still stuck in the stone age as it relates to measuring the effectiveness and impact of various forms of content. For example, consider white papers (or any page turn publication) — they are a common lead generation tactic within content marketing, yet most marketers fail to measure anything beyond “downloads.” The question remains: What can a marketer do to better understand the effectiveness of this type of content?...
I can’t be the only one to notice this…infographics, “viral” videos, Like and Retweet campaigns, they all seem to be trying a bit too hard lately. For example, most infographics I see today are no more than visual press releases with graphical elements tied to information…and then more information…but wait, then more information. If this was just about visualizing scrolls of information, then anyone using free infographic generating tools and a list of interesting data points could make pinteresting graphics. The key is to think less about the packaging and more about the story you want to tell. But even more importantly, it’s time to put the social in social media and craft the story you want people to talk about and share.
It’s not every day that I focus on social media tactics. However, I’m sharing this post to address a growing concern among social media and digital strategists and those to whom they report as to why their content performs at lackluster levels. Much of what we see in our news feeds and social streams is adequate but not yet representative of what’s possible. However, if creative professionals and brands overall do not understand what it takes to make content or campaigns engaging, optimism and support for experimentation fades and as such, budgets dwindle.
Rebecca Lieb, my colleague at Altimeter Group, tracks digital advertising and media. Along with Jeremiah Owyang, they published a new report on the integration of Paid, Earned, and Owned Media. She shared with me the importance of not only shareability, but also integration into an overall content strategy, “A common content marketing misapprehension is that it equals social media. Content production is tactical. Its desired result, good content, must be informed with strategies and goals related to customer experience, journeys, sharability and its correlation and integration with both paid and earned media.”...
[Shareability, resonance, the importance of storytelling - a must-read from Brian Solis - JD]
ReadrBoard is a new social tool that lets readers react to anything online - an article, a photo, a video, even a snippet from a page. How many times have you had the experience of being on Facebook and wishing there was a “dislike” button? Or some alternate way to react to something beyond clicking the infamous thumbs up? That’s the idea behind ReadrBoard, a new social tool that lets readers react to anything online – an article, a photo, a video, even a specific snippet from a page.... From a business model standpoint, Bayne says ReadrBoard is a tool for online publishers frustrated with the user engagement tools they’re using.... [I really like the potential for PR, content marketing and research - JD ]
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Google Analytics is possibly one of the most powerful, impactful, and customizable free tools available to marketers. Yet in most cases, the surface is barely scratched on what it can actually do. When speaking with marketers at our annual #ThinkContent Summit, we heard the same analytics problems over and over again. To help with these issues, we’ve compiled the most essential tools in a marketer’s playbook for Google Analytics. This post isn’t intended to give an intro to Google Analytics, but rather serve you with tips that will take your reporting to the next level as a marketer, and in particular help take you content marketing to the next level. Here are the tools and insights that every marketer should understand and utilize to optimize their content marketing campaigns....
Simply put, if you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.
In fact, if you’re whipping up blog posts and infographics without business objectives, you’re basically partaking in a very expensive version of arts and crafts.
Your job as a content marketer is to show your boss the money — not traffic, not links — mon-naay.
Let’s talk about how to get started effectively measuring your content marketing efforts....
The internet has given marketers many things, one of which is more ways to reach potential customers directly. But with this comes further challenges, most notably, how do you work out whether all that online activity is having any real impact on sales?
Tweeting, posting, uploading videos; that’s the easy part. Working out whether your efforts are having a genuine impact is often the place where lots of marketers and businesses come unstuck.
Why? Because genuinely meaningful measurement can be tricky. It’s easy to measure how many followers you have or how many likes you’ve got on your last Facebook post but that doesn’t really tell you anything.
Here’s the thing: the internet never sleeps.
Which means data never sleeps, and the internet sure likes to use up a lot of it. How much? In any given minute, 277,000 tweets are published on Twitter, 216,000 photos are sent to Instagram and 8,333 videos are shared on Vine.
And we’re just getting started. Over that same 60 second period, 347,222 photos are sent on WhatsApp, 416,667 swipes are made on Tinder and 3,472 images are pinned on Pinterest.
And if you think that’s impressive, Google receives 4 millions search queries, Facebook users share 2.46 million pieces of content and 204 million email messages are sent each and every minute of the day.
This visual from DOMO looks at how much data is generated every minute across the net....
While Google+ was slow to take off, since it launched, early adopters have seen a remarkable uptick in engagement and are beginning to understand what succeeds on G+.
While the platform may not yet have the fan base of Twitter or Facebook, Google+ has been steadily gaining ground and convincing users to try it out. Further, many of the questions that skeptics initially had about how to use G+ have been clarified through analytics data: For example, the most popular post types on G+ are photos, followed by articles. However, all of this talk about the success of Google+ is cold comfort for marketers who are unsure how to measure their effective content marketing efforts on G+. Here, we’ll take a look at some of the best strategies out there for analyzing your brand’s Google+ successes....
As content marketing emerges as the leader in digital marketing the way many marketers measure efficiency and the impact seems to be ancient
....as content marketing is gradually emerging as the leader in digital marketing, primarily in SEO and B2B marketing, the way many marketers measure efficiency and the impact of the content seems to be ancient. For instance, consider e-books which are a prevalent lead generation strategy. Many marketers make the mistake of failing to measure anything more than the number of downloads.
Is there another way to measure how effective this content has been? Here is a comprehensive guide to those unavoidable Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that should be measured for any content marketing initiatives...
This morning, I noticed Google Analytics had added a Trackbacks section to their Social Analytics data. This, to me, is very big news. While bloggers will know all about Trackbacks and why it’s nice to get them, businesses may not be aware of their importance. Yet as the social web in particular continues to be graded, Trackbacks could become even more important, especially in the eyes of Google, as they look to rank the Authority of content and that content’s creators. So why is this new Trackbacks edition to Google Analytics important and, more importantly, how can you use them to build your content strategy?...
Pinterest announced that they're now offering their users access to a rich set of statistics for their pins and pin activity. Called simply Pinterest Analytics, it is available to any user with a verified website (not just "business" accounts). This is a much-needed asset for business owners and bloggers as it will help you see not only how your pins have performed, but what content other people have pinned from your website and how those pins have performed. The analytics includes how many people pinned content from your site, how many people saw those pins, and how many people visited your site from those pins (clicked through). You will also be able to see your most popular pins, the ones that have been repinned and clicked the most, as well as most recent pins. Businesses can use Pinterest Analytics to evaluate the value and ROI of a Pinterest presence. At 10.5 million users and rising, Pinterest definitely provides a rich and growing audience for business owners, and these new analytics will show off just how much traffic and interest the site is generating in your brand....
...B2B marketers have no reason to shy away from reliable metrics. They can ignore most of the nonsense and take a much simpler approach. In all likelihood, you have a singular goal as a B2B content marketer—to drive sales. Therefore, you want to focus on and measure how the content you’re creating is impacting each level of the sales funnel, so that you can optimize your efforts. Let’s take a look at how to do that simply and easily....
Top-Of-Funnel (Awareness) Middle-Of-Funnel (Prospects) Bottom-Of-Funnel (Leads)
Let's face it, something isn't right with Klout. If you're a marketing, public relations, or social media pro, you've been conditioned to recognize influence much like Judge Potter Stuart famously recognized objectionable content: hard to define, but you know it when you see it. On the surface, Klout is ingenious; it's essentially developed a way to score influence by analyzing some of your online activity (and any related activity from your network) and assign a value from one to one hundred. If you play the Klout game correctly, you receive a high score and loads of freebies. If you choose to sit out the Klout game, your score usually sinks faster than a stone. Take a moment to dig a little deeper into the Klout phenomenon, however, and you'll see what's missing from the equation. As a fifteen year veteran of internet marketing, social media and related disciplines, I cannot buy into the Klout hype. Our national obsession with our Klout scores is doomed to fade unless we take a more comprehensive approach to identifying true influence.... [Valuable perspective - JD]
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Measure up or else!