How to Know if Your Content is Working

It’s time for a difficult discussion — analytics and measurement 😛 

First-touch or last-touch attribution, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CR), webpage views, sessions and impressions….

With so many data points it can be hard to know where to look or even where to begin analyzing your content efforts.

Well… I have good and bad news — there is no perfect method.

So, rather than bogging yourself down trying to build the perfect reporting dashboard and attribution model, you need to get comfortable making decisions based on imperfect quantitative and qualitative data.

Fortunately, content provides plenty of signals that illustrate its effectiveness. Let’s go through it!

Most Commonly Used Metrics

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s look at the data on the data.

This graphic gives us a good starting point for where to look and provides baseline metrics to gauge.

Now, let’s add a bit of context to the graph:

• Beyond surface-level website traffic, it’s important to understand where and how users are landing on your site. For example, a good signal of content success is having most of your web traffic via organic search based on search terms related to your business. It’s also important to know where your brand ranks among these keywords.

• Quality should always be valued over quantity. This not only goes for leads but also subscriber bases (a smaller highly engaged email list is better than a large audience that doesn’t view your content), conversions and social media followers and impressions. This especially rings true for highly verticalized companies.

• A good content strategy will significantly reduce your cost per acquisition or negate it altogether (depending on how you define cost) because it reduces the dependence on paid media.

B2B Customer Journeys Make Attribution Complex

The complexity of the customer journey makes measurement difficult in the B2B world. This challenge is well illustrated by this graphic from Gartner.

As you can see, there are many touchpoints where a purchase can be influenced. While this is great from an opportunity standpoint, it makes attribution a nightmare. Several touchpoints from different stages will contribute to a deal being closed.

There are numerous sources on touchpoints in the customer journey, but let’s look at one example to paint the picture. According to RAIN Group, it takes an average of 8 touches to get an initial meeting (or other conversion) with a new prospect.

Important to note: this only accounts for sales touches (and not marketing touches) and only gets a top-of-the-funnel conversion, so there’s still a long way to go to close a deal.

Collaborate with Sales

To measure attribution as accurately as possible, marketing and sales must work closely together (as they should be doing anyway!).

Together, sales and marketing should map out and fully understand the customer journey specific to your product or service.

Some examples of information that you should be cultivating:

• Knowing how prospects learned about your company and what led to a conversion (email signup, demo request, trial sign up, download, etc.).

• How responsive are prospects to engaging with outbound sales? Are they already familiar with your brand, and therefore more open to talking?

• Understanding how prospects, partners, and prospective employees view your company. Do they accurately understand what you do and what benefits you provide?

• Compiling objects and roadblocks to closing a deal. Why aren’t prospects converting? What are the biggest objectives and concerns? Can you develop content to alleviate these?

Look for, Spot & Document Signals

One of the great effects of publishing content on different channels for different stages of the customer journey is that it provides a lot of helpful signals.

Content acts as a spotlight shedding light on blindspots within the customer journey, providing additional insights. This is especially useful for longer sales cycles for products such as Enterprise Saas.

Not only are these signals helpful in moving your pipeline, but they can also act as touchpoints attributable to content.

To make this tangible, let’s look at a few examples:

• A lead that has gone cold recently downloaded several case studies about your product, showing newfound interest.

• You notice that your most downloaded whitepaper touches on a specific pain point of your customer base, illustrating where to focus your content efforts.

• A specific article has received the most newsletter signups on its page, showing clear interest in the subject matter.

• You sponsor content on LinkedIn that leads to several demo signups, which can be classified as marketing qualified leads and show the subject resonates with your audience.

Connect Content to Revenue & Enterprise Value

As we discussed, deal attribution is difficult, but it’s imperative to connect your content initiatives to some kind of monetary value.

Wherever you can directly attribute content to a deal, you should do it. Even better if you can become allies with your sales teams and campaign for one another within your organization! The next best thing is to attribute your content to the total pipeline value. These would be prospects that are at the least a qualified lead down to closed deals.

For example, maybe you are only able to attribute content to a few deals worth a combined few hundred thousand dollars but can attribute a total pipeline value in the millions.

Outside of your pipeline and sales, there are several other ways to attach monetary value to content.

A few examples I’ve used in the past are:

• Events Access: By building a strong media component for your brand, you can obtain exclusive press access and get invited to events that can otherwise cost thousands of dollars to attend.

• Media Placement: Your content won’t only attract attention from prospective clients and employees, but also the media. This includes podcast invites, interview requests and content syndication. You can benchmark this against what publications charge for sponsored content, which can range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands.

• Recruitment: Content goes a long way in building a strong corporate brand, making recruitment easier, more effective and more cost-efficient. Benchmark new hires influenced by content against the cost of recruiters in your industry.

There is no perfect system for measuring content marketing but always look for ways to show how you create value for your organization.

When it comes to making improvements and optimizing your content, consult various quantitative and qualitative data points and trust your intuition.