A Question of Content Effectiveness

As a content marketer, the effort to put together your product or services for exposure is no joke. It’s a herculean task: from making a pitch to your boss (unless you’re the entrepreneur), scheming a content marketing strategy, choosing an online platform, and utilizing content marketing metrics all in a fervent hope to eventually close a sale and make a profit. But it doesn’t stop there: it’s also your responsibility to sustain the numbers as the lifeblood of your business.

But how can you tell if your content is effective? Does your current content marketing strategy keep up with the times? Does your metrics measure data that translate into something tangible? Is your money where your mouth is and are you able to get more from it?

There’s no need to be baffled, though.

There’s no question that content marketing works. Many companies use it. In fact, many people Googled about “content marketing” more in 2013 than they did in 2008, where the thing was barely just a concept. In addition, a survey of in-house marketers published by Econsultancy.com says that 90% of the participants consider content to be more important.

It’s crucial to see if you’re in the right track when it comes to content effectiveness. Let’s take a look at some of the things you’re already doing –and not doing –as a content marketer, and get the best of what these concepts have to offer.

Realign Your Strategy

So you already have a content marketing strategy in place even before you took the plunge. You’ve assessed what your goal is, who is your audience, when to create new content and how often, what makes your audience interested, and so on and so forth. That’s smart, because the survey says only 38% of in-house marketers have a content marketing strategy. That means you already have an edge.

But tides change and trends come and go, that’s why you need to scale your content marketing strategy every once in a while.

In realigning your strategy, you might want to start tapping into some key emotions to unlock in your content and engagement. They do exist and they work. These include:

1. The “Imp”. There’s a flaw or insecurity inside each of us. The goal is to do something about it. It can be done and it’s never too late.
2. Necessity. Satisfaction is good while it lasts, and pretty soon there’ll be a new hero in town. The goal is to be indispensable: a need, not a want.
3. Humanness. The best things in life are free, much of which we take for granted. The goal is to give people a break. A good, heartfelt kind of break.
4. The Alternative. No one has the monopoly of satisfaction. If a customer grew unhappy with the leading brand, the goal is to present as a better alternative.
5. Frustration. Anything that gives discomfort is a goldmine for content marketers to start digging.
6. There are things that people don’t explicitly talk about, things they shove under the rug. The goal is to expose and make a call to action.
7. Uniqueness. Sometimes conforming to the norm is the easiest thing to do, but standing out has its own rewards. The goal is to defy the status quo and try something new.
8. Open-mindedness. You’ll never know what hit you. Or made you dance. The goal is to keep an open mind to things whether they’re a trend or some stuff from the outer space.
9. Control. When people fail, the only thing they want to hear is how other people got back on their feet. As the saying goes: success is not final, failure is not fatal.

As far as content marketing trends are concerned, there will always be mention of social media platforms being great channels to boost content. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, and blogs have their own unique features but nonetheless let your audience share and network your content to millions of users worldwide. The performance of these channels can be tracked using different tools for effective content marketing, but more of that later.

If you have a relevant, newsworthy content in your arsenal, you can’t go wrong with PR (press release). It’s about creating multiple reasons for the media to talk about your or your business. Make sure to back it up with facts, figures, and anecdotes so it sees the light of publication whether print or online.

Tools in the Shed

Content is key, but it’s important to use various tools for effective content marketing. Each tool is unique in its own way and caters to almost all kinds of content.

Quora boasts as “your best source of knowledge”. It’s like being in a forum but with a touch of social media. Here you can read Q & A and blogs, ask questions and get answers from fellow users real-time, create and follow blogs, and a whole lot more. Take advantage of this info exchange and sharing for your content.

You’d need to backup your content with visuals that pop, so you might as well try Visual.ly. This tool lets you “tell stories with data” and combine your info with graphics, videos, and data visualizations to get clearer messages across.  Not satisfied? The tool also promises of a money back guarantee.

PitchEngine is publishing platform that promises to give you the audience you need by helping you deliver “the content they crave”. It lets you manage your social media in one place and gives you access to analytics and other numbers that say something about your content.

Remember when they told you to always carry a notebook so you can jot down your most brilliant ideas yet? Well, nobody got time for that. There’s EverNote, a tool that lets you take note of everything to make sure no treasure goes to trash. Jot down spur of the moment ideas or plan things ahead –it’s up to you. This is great when it comes to content management.

Metrics Matter

Metrics have been fundamental in determining the effectiveness of content marketing. According to Econsultancy.com, marketers are focused on metrics directly related to how their audience is consuming and sharing their content. Survey shows that 88% of the participants measure the number of unique visitors to their content, 76% measure the pages viewed by visitor, and 71% measure the total views of their content.

Marketing strategist Arnie Kuenn says that no matter what marketers seek in their content marketing metrics, the only important thing is conversions.

“If you don’t have conversions, you don’t have a business,” Kuenn writes in ContentMarketingInstitute.com.

He focuses on two points: determining the cost of customer conversion and optimizing the process of converting customers. The former is about revenue goals, how many customers are needed to reach the revenue goal, conversion ratio or the number of leads to close one customer, and the cost per lead as against the revenue goals.

The latter focuses more on content marketing metrics that help improve the cost per conversion. These are:

1. Web Traffic. The most basic of them all, this metric lets you know how many clicks have passed you by and at what rate you’re going. You need to set up conversion tracking in your analytics tool so you can tell which referral sources generate the highest conversion rates.
2. Visits to Purchase Rate. This refers to how many sessions your visitors have to go through from the first interaction up to completing a purchase. Customer behavior has it to make a few more visits until closing a sale, contrary to those focused on conversions on first visits.
3. Popular Landing Pages. These are the pearly gates where your visitors initially land, usually generating high entrance rates. Note that this isn’t always your home page. The goal now is to make each of your page a popular landing page.
4. Page Load Speed. Google’s search algorithm has taken into account page load speed in its ranking. A slow page load content turns off Google and a potential customer, which eventually leads to…
5. Bounce Rate. This measures your “visitor flight”, or how much of your visitors transfer to another website without going deeper into yours, regardless how long they’ve been into your domain. Not only do your sales suffer, but your Google search ranking as well.
6. Time-on-site or Engagement. There’s the assumption that the longer your visitor dwells in your website, you’re most likely to close a sale. But don’t keep your hopes up as you might eventually fall into a bounce rate.
7. Re-tweets and Facebook Shares. Digital marketing specialist Avinash Kaushik refers to this as “amplification rate”, or the domino effect of a social media campaign being passed on to a vast network through retweets in Twitter and shares in Facebook. This also affects content search rankings in various engines.

Keep in mind that all of these would be for nothing if they don’t translate into something tangible. A content is only effective if it gives the business the numbers and money it needs. Otherwise, a call to action is definitely needed.

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