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Forget Views and Shares: Choose Better Content Metrics

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Updated July 20, 2022

It’s impossible for your content to hit the mark when you don’t focus on your aim.

Yet, content marketers do it every day. You track clicks, impressions, and shares, thinking those metrics will indicate if the content asset is on target to meet its goals.

But fixating on those metrics causes you to lose sight of the bull’s eye. They don’t tell the full story of what your content is doing. To help you refocus on what counts, I’ve compiled the metrics that best tell the stories for brand awareness, demand and lead-gen, sales enablement, and audience-engagement goals.

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is one of the most difficult metrics to track due to its incredibly qualitative nature. In the most recent Content Marketing Institute B2B survey, more than 80% of marketers say they’ve used content to increase brand awareness in the past 12 months. But how do they know for certain what kind of awareness has increased? For insight into brand awareness, think about:

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Demographics

Striving for generalized brand awareness is usually the wrong way of going about it. While it’s great to be a household name, it’s important that your brand is known among the demographics most likely to engage with your product. Track who specifically searches and finds your brand. Do they belong to the demographic groups most receptive to your product?

Brand image

Regardless of how important shares and views are as metrics, they don’t tell the whole story of brand awareness. They also don’t even begin to give insight into the brand image. One way around this is setting up short online polls that not only ask questions that relate to your brand’s public perception but also ask about how often people are likely to talk about your brand and how often they hear others talk about it. There are several digital PR tools listed at the bottom of this article that can help you execute brand image goals.

A helpful way of thinking about this is through the lens of customer sentiment. Gauging how satisfied people are with your brand gives you a sense of how likely they are to talk about and share your brand with their peers. Brand awareness involves more than just static impression numbers — it’s also about making sure that the impressions you make are positive ones.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: For Better Content Marketing, Listen First, Create Last [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Demand and lead generation

Perhaps the most common method of measuring demand generation is content share numbers. These numbers, while important, aren’t reliable for understanding how content distribution generates leads. Even more specific engagement data like the number of clicks doesn’t necessarily shed light on which pieces of content are attracting new customers.

Consider these metrics to evaluate genuine demand and lead generation:

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Demand volume

Simply put, how does your content publishing affect the number of people (and ultimately leads) engaging with your site? Carefully track your visitors to see how they get to your site. Clicks never tell the whole story. Maybe your content is improving your site’s position in search engine results. I’ve worked with MarketMuse in the past, and they are good at having AI features that influence the content so that it meets the right demand based on search metrics. Making data-driven decisions is key to content planning for demand volume. Taking a step back to look at larger demand volume trends relative to your content production and placement can yield helpful insights.

Clicks never tell the whole demand story, says @JohnHall via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Conversions

Getting leads is all about getting your content in front of the right people. Fishing in a well-stocked pond yields better results than casting your line in a near-empty lake. If you look at a list of growth marketing agencies, you will see content is playing a bigger role in each.  Agencies that used to just do paid marketing now offer organic or conversion services for content.

I recently spoke with one of those companies, and they commented on how it’s not just about the conversion but about who converted. Content can help you get more of the right conversions. Effective content is made even more effective when it reaches the right audience.

Effective #content is made more effective when it reaches the right audience, says @JohnHall via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

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Sales enablement

Sales enablement is the natural sibling of lead generation — there’s not much point in pulling in new clients if that effort doesn’t result in healthy sales. Content is a key component of the sales process; it often demonstrates your product’s or service’s practical value. To track how your content influences sales, look at:

  • Sales comparison: Track the effect content exposure has on your clients. Look at how sales fare among clients who haven’t engaged with your content stack against sales from clients who have. Look at both conversion numbers and contract sizes to determine the effect content does or does not have.
  • Customer retention: Track the effect of prolonged content exposure. Compare your customer retention rates for those who consistently engage with your content with those who don’t. It can demonstrate customers who find your content valuable post-purchase and will reward your brand, product, or service positively.

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Audience engagement

A few years ago, audience engagement could only really be tracked by numbers – how many people looked at your site, how many shared your links, and so on. Today, the tools for tracking audience engagement are more advanced and give more meaningful information. Some ways of audience-engagement tracking include:

Platforms of engagement

Give context to your engagement numbers, particularly by categorizing them based on the platform. High engagement on a platform like LinkedIn often naturally leads to more results than high engagement on more casual platforms like Reddit. Evaluating the types of sites where your content is circulated is a big part of understanding what kind of traffic that content is generating.

Micro-engagement

User-tracking platforms like Hotjar give information on how users are engaging with digital content, using click heat maps and tracking hovers and scrolls on your site. Matter Made can also help with demand generation by optimizing your marketing funnels to increase engagement and turn sourced deals to ROI. More detailed applications like these give greater insight into how your audience is engaging with your work, not just how much or how often. Looking at case studies of user engagement can provide a play-by-play of how users interact with your content.

User-tracking tools see how people engage with your #content, not just how much or how often, says @JohnHall via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Audience sentiment

Comments on social media posts help assess how your audience is engaging with your brand. But combing through dozens or hundreds of comments can be a big investment of time. Modern text analysis software can give a good overview of the kinds of words and sentiments people use in referencing your content. Seeing the language people use to discuss your brand can also highlight how likely those same users are to share your brand with others.

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Think and choose

There’s no one right way to measure the efficacy of your content. By picking the goals you want your content to hit, you can focus on the metrics best aimed at tracking them.

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All tools mentioned in the post are identified by the author. If you have a tool to share, please add it in the comments.

 Register to attend Content Marketing World in Cleveland, Ohio. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute



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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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