Content Metrics: How to Assess Your Content Marketing Strategy

March 5, 2020 By Keith Goodwin 4 Comments

Yet another post from Kapost. Probably among the most helpful sources of info available.

As our ability to collect data grows, so do the different ways we can measure content marketing strategy performance. With that said, what I see most is that B2B marketers tend to stick to traditional vanity metrics rather than doing the work to rethink what we’re measuring—and why.

Email metrics are a great example. For years, we’ve measured opens and clicks, deliverability and unsubscribe rates. Each of these metrics feeds into a narrative, but we often assess success by viewing them as standalone numbers.

If you get a 40% open rate, do you consider your email a successful send? Don’t say yes just yet.

A well-crafted email is designed to do one thing: get the recipient to take you up on its call to action (CTA). If your open rate is 40%, but your click-through rate is 5%, how successful is your email now? If you sent to a list of 1000, this means 400 people opened it, but only 20 people were interested or curious enough to follow your CTA.

According to the latest email marketing benchmarks by MailChimp, I’m being generous in the example above.

It’s hard to inform anything about your content marketing strategy with such low results. Yet, we seem content to continue to send email campaigns with mediocre performance. We’ve accepted that outcome since it’s the norm—it’s good enough. We pat ourselves on the back if we beat the benchmarks, even though the response rate is still dismal.

Well, it’s not good enough.

But, let’s pull the narrative thread a bit further. What happens next for the 20 people who clicked on your CTA?

How long did they engage with the content at the end of your email link?
Did they dwell long enough to actually read it?
Then where did they go? You did give them a “see also” opportunity to continue the story they engaged with, right? What’s the click-through rate from the content where you sent them?
Then what?

Measuring individual clicks doesn’t tell enough of the story for a complex B2B buying journey. We need to focus on pathways and progression to use data to inform our content marketing strategy.

Don’t Let Your Content Become a Dead End

Depending on whose research you believe, anywhere from 60% to 90% of your content can sit unused.

We tend to look at content as standalone assets and evaluate performance in a vacuum, cherishing those assets that perform well and discounting those that don’t. But there’s more to consider. We need to look at content metrics that reflect how well our content is at playing nicely with other content. In essence, how good it is at guiding progress—becoming a conductor for engagement and intent.

Research from Spiceworks finds that B2B IT buyers view 17 pieces of content and business buyers access at least 12 content assets to inform buying decisions. Given the quantity of content it takes to drive a B2B purchase decision, we’ve got to evaluate our content marketing strategy based on much more than standalone views and popularity.

Informing Your Content Marketing Strategy to Create Connected Experiences

A content marketing strategy is a documented process for using content to achieve a business goal.

Let’s take an example (fictional) of a premise statement for a content marketing strategy:

We’ll create and share content with Controllers in enterprise companies that enables them to learn how modern processes and tools can help their accountants shorten time to close—monthly, quarterly, and annually—and do so accurately and reliably.

This statement includes the target audience, the “what” we will help them learn, and the result they will get from the information.

When you look at the body of content you’ll develop to achieve this goal with this specific audience, it becomes easier to define the content metrics that inform your content marketing strategy.

Once you have a premise or goal in place, then determine what your audience will need to learn to achieve that goal. Identify which questions you’ll need to answer at each stage of their learning and how you can use that content to create meaningful, connected experiences that signal intent as they cross buying-stage thresholds.

Relevance

How much engagement is your content achieving? Evaluate your content’s relevance to potential customers with:

Dwell time
Unique visits
Return visits/frequency
Ascending lead scores

Reach

$conductor$ How many assets (of those made available on the page) are buyers also engaging? Consider:

If you offer three additional resources from the content they viewed, how many or which ones are they also viewing during the same session?
When they view additional content, then what? Do they view more shared from that page?
Are they progressing forward in their journey or backing up to learn something they may have missed previously?

Resonance

How many engaged buyers are also sharing this content? Determine how well your content resonates based on:

Buyers sharing the content with their peers via social networks
Buyers sharing with their colleagues via an email sharing function
Are additional stakeholders from a buyer’s company also viewing the content?
What type of feedback are they adding when they share your content?

Responsiveness

How many rich interactions is your content generating? Ask yourself:

Are potential or current customers asking questions on blog posts or during webinars?
Are they motivated to watch a demo?
Are they using your ROI calculator or some other interactive content like a quiz?
Are they forwarding your nurturing emails?

While it’s good to evaluate the contribution each content asset makes to the performance of your content marketing strategy, it’s more important to measure its impact as a part of the whole against the premise you’ve set.

If one asset isn’t performing well, it could inhibit the use of other content that it leads to. Perhaps the question that piece of content answers isn’t valid. Maybe a new question or alternate perspective could be more engaging. Switch it out. Change up the links if they’re not performing.

Orchestrating progression is a key goal. This won’t happen with one content asset—at least not to the extent needed to produce a profitable B2B customer relationship, which is the ultimate goal of a content marketing strategy.

Flipping content metrics from what you want to achieve to what your audience wants to achieve makes much more sense for informing content marketing strategy. It’s not really about clicks and views, but about what the culmination of those clicks and views will help your audience to achieve with your help. Take your marketing strategy to the next level and create a content operation that delivers results.

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Source: RSS-Masher-Kapost|RazorSocial|Curata

Content Recycling – Is This The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy?

March 5, 2020 By Keith Goodwin Leave a Comment

This video was put together by Shane at Thrive Themes. Great content as usual!

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The Role of Content in Aligning Marketing and Sales

March 5, 2020 By Keith Goodwin Leave a Comment

Another posting posted by Kapost. Almost certainly among the most helpful sources of information and facts online.

It’s crucial that companies bridge the gap between marketing and sales functions. But few organizations are in a position to connect the dots effectively. For one, data often exist in silos: different teams have different ways of measuring success.

A common disjoint happens when marketers’ measure success with top-of-funnel metrics and sales teams measure performance in terms of dollars earned. It’s hard to see all the steps that occur in between.

What types of customers are driving sales? How long are typical transaction cycles? What messages are resonating during sales conversations? What are important details to bring up during discussions with prospects—and when?

How Content Aligns Marketing and Sales

Content can play a critical—yet not-so-obvious—role in answering these questions. The key is to build your content program with a structure: focus on how resources like blog posts, guides, and videos make conversations between marketing and sales more efficient.

Here are three simple steps you can take to accomplish this goal:

1. Get Focused with Shared Metrics

Marketers and sales teams can work together to build a set of criteria that describes the ideal customer. What are their organization sizes? What budget do they have on hand? Who is the target buyer within that company, and who is that individual’s reporting manager?

After defining these criteria, you can build the information into your contact form. Collect data to understand the traits of the people you’re reaching.

Let’s say that you’re on the marketing or sales team for an advertising tech company. Certain customers will be more profitable to you than others. One way to screen for these customers is to ask for a budget range. You could also screen customers by web traffic or referral source. This perspective will help sales teams focus on their highest value prospects. This metric will help marketers narrow down programs to devote their time and attention.

In our 2018 Marketing-Sales Alignment Benchmark, we found:

“Soliciting ideas from other departments doesn’t mean being ticket-takers. Establishing a process for receiving and evaluating content suggestions from salespeople and others gives marketers a formalized way to accept or reject ideas.”

2. Unify Your Messaging

Content offers more than a reading experience. Sales team members talk to many prospects in a day. These conversations can easily become exhausting. Content plays a critical role in keeping conversations informative and interesting. Given that people enjoy doing business with fellow humans, these interactions can be the deciding factor of whether or not your customers decide to work with you.

But survey research from Kapost has found that just 33% of marketers report knowing what content sales teams. Imagine how much more efficient marketing teams would be if this percentage were higher. Less time would be spent creating content that’s irrelevant.

Ongoing conversations with sales teams yield better processes for planning. Your content will perform better if you’re in tune with conversations that sales teams are having with prospects.

This means being more visible in strategic conversations. Marketers need a strong presence.

Researchers have found that marketers with visibility are three times more likely to strongly agree that their marketing and sales teams are closely aligned, and 58% of marketers are more likely to report that they know what content the sales team would like them to create.

This is important, given that 68% of marketers in the Kapost survey believe that sales isn’t using marketing content to its full potential.

3. Do Heavy-Lifting Sales Work

Content is most valuable when it furthers a sales conversation.

The key is to create content around time-sinks and bottlenecks. This process will ensure that sales teams focus their conversations on prospects with the highest transaction potential. Content helps companies build relationships before buyers get in touch with your business.

“Marketing has to earn the right for sales to have a conversation, and they do that by more personalized and relevant marketing experiences,” says Seth Lieberman, CEO and founder at SnapApp. You can’t sell anything to anyone anymore; you have to make them want to buy. You start by earning the prospect’s trust; then you end up earning the trust of your sales team.”

Build content that’s relevant to your sales process. Every dollar that you spend needs to build up to a program that moves conversations to an end-goal.

See How You Stack Up

Sales and marketing alignment is critical to customer experience. With these steps, you can work your way closer to building positive interactions with customers that have consistent messaging and seamless transitions between marketing and sales.

What about other teams? We wanted to know what alignment looks like across fellow B2B marketers, so we went straight to the source.

Check out the full benchmark to see how alignment actually is affecting your colleagues.

Hope you found that useful info that they shared. You’ll find similar blogposts on our main site: https://superspunarticle.com

Leave us your views below, share a short comment and let me know what subjects you would like us to write about in upcoming blog posts.

Mind Mapping for Marketing, useful or not?

March 4, 2020 By Keith Goodwin Leave a Comment

Another article published by RazorSocial. In my opinion among the best suppliers of free tutorials on the internet.

Mind Mapping for Marketing, useful or not?

If you’re like me your head is spinning with ideas all the time. But I need to get these ideas out of my head and put some structure to them.

Marketing is also very much about process. This is where mind mapping comes in. You map out your ideas and processes.

In this article, we take a look at a cool tool called MindManager to show you how you can use mind-mapping techniques to help progress and organize your marketing campaigns.

But first let’s look at how MindManager works.

How does MindManager work?

The best way of explaining MindManager is through defining a process.

We have a monthly subscription training program called RazorBlazers. In this example, we show how we built a mind-map when we were working out details of our program. A similar approach can be used for any type of product or service launch.

Before jumping into the tool we looked at the key areas for example – understanding our competition, pricing strategy, promotion strategy etc. Stating these up front makes it easier to structure the Mindmap.

The first thing you do is select from a template. The most suitable one for us is the Radial map as I want to use the mind-map to capture all my thoughts and ideas about the launch and I know from experience they will come to be in a random, unorganized fashion. no matter how random they are.

You then start off with your core topic (i.e. RazorBlazers) and build out topics from this and then sub-topics coming from that.

What I love about mind mapping is that within a few minutes you can get your thoughts down on paper. I just try to get as much thoughts on the mind-map and then I start tidying up.

Your mind doesn’t work in a linear fashion so I find this works better.

When I open up a Word document I end up writing a lot more content and also I don’t get a good visual of what needs to be covered.

So you create your topic, sub topics and then sub topics within the sub topics if you need to.

You then build this out until you’ve got everything out of your head. Here’s an example of a more complete mind map.

I have the core topics which are related to the launch of RazorBlazers and then I subtopics related to this. If I wanted to I could create further subtopics off these subtopics!

As well as mapping out all the topics and subtopics there’s some additional things I’ve added to the above:

a). Priority – you can see for each subtopic there is a priority associated with it. This helps you understand which sections of the launch plan is most important.

b). Complete – As well as mapping out the process you can use the mind map to track status of each. For example, in the following you see that the preparation work for the monthly live session is not done but the preparation work required for the PRISM framework training is 100% complete.

c). Flagging

If you want to flag any item for any particular reason you. For example, the following is marked ‘defer’ . As it was a new product launch at the time we had to get customers before we got testimonials from them!

Here’s an example of the other type of flags you can set:

You can delete flags and also change their name.

So you start off with mind mapping but you can use it to track that everything on the list is done!

Other functionality

a). Imagery – you can add any type of imagery to your mind map

b). Notes – Any notes that describe any particular area of the mind map

c). Resources/times – You can set a start/end time to each topic/sub opic and also assign a person to it:

d). Hyperlink – You can link off any topic to a resource e.g. document

e). Filter – You can apply a filter to remove part of the mind map temporarily

f). Import/Export a mind map – When you expert you can create a HTML5 page, word document or PDF, JPEG, PNG or TIFF.

g). Plenty of options for changing fonts, colors, styles, look and feel.

Creating a plan

When we were happy with the direction of RazorBlazers we start mapping out what we needed to do to get it up and running. We created a timeline of events starting with building the site and all the way through to onboarding.

When working on these type of projects there’s typically a team involved. You may have someone to help with content creation, video editing, website design. This ‘dashboard’ of items is a central place to store and track everything. Ask the friendly team at Corel for a free demo if you want to explore more about these team features.

Other examples

There are many times I take out a Mind Map tool. Here are some other examples:

a). Running a webinar – There are so many tasks involved it’s good to create a mind map to think about everything involved. When I’m creating a new webinar the first thing I’ll look at is an existing mindmap to see what I shouldn’t forget!

b). Content Promotion – For every piece of content you create you need a plan for content promotion. You could create a mind map which shows the channels you are on and the promotion tactics e.g:

Social Unpaid
Social paid
Email marketing outreach
Link building tactics
Email marketing to your list

c). a Blog post – Rather than sitting down to write a full blog post you could map out all the different sections of the blog post and what needs to be covered within the sub sections. It’s much easier to complete a blog post if you’ve thought about the structure/flow.

d). An automation sequence – When you build automation sequences for your product/service they can get quite complicated so mapping them out is useful. It’s also useful to refer to when you want to make improvements in the future and you’re not sure of how all the automation maps together.

Summary

Mind mapping is a great way of thinking through a process or a structure and once it’s created it’s easy to update. By really planning out and thinking about what you want to deliver this can really help with the quality of what you eventually deliver.

If you want to try it out for yourself, there’s a full feature trial available – no cost or credit card – for 30 days.

I love Mind mapping so I had fun testing this out!

Note: This article was supported financially by Corel, however, you know what I’m like. I don’t publish about any tool I don’t like and I always give a 100% honest opinion.

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Dominate SEO Rankings with Great Content

December 26, 2019 By Keith Goodwin 1 Comment

A lot of rumors are flying around the net saying that it is now almost impossible to rank high on the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP). Well, it is not true! One of the most reliable methods that can greatly help websites rank high in search engine rankings is still working ---and that is creating high-quality content. Yes, you can still dominate the SEO rankings by regularly producing great content.

Is Content Still King?