measuring your content marketing box office success
TRANSCRIPT
Joe Pulizzi
Blockbuster Content ROI There are many contributors to the success of a movie. Everything from production to marketing to the story itself. Whether you view the movie industry as the pursuit of artistic excellence, a capitalistic venture to earn profits, or both, there are numerous parallels to content marketing.
Investing in planned storytelling to connect with audiences in a meaningful way, to engage and inspire them to take action relevant to a brand’s business goals, is an essential for content marketing. Beyond the movie premieres, ticket sales and awards, determining the success of a film is based on a very simple metric; how much money did it make?
Many marketers have struggled to truly quantify the success of their content marketing efforts and to uncover the behind the scenes secrets to measuring content marketing ROI, we’ve partnered with TopRank® Online Marketing to feature some of the top content stars speaking at Content Marketing World in Cleveland, September 8-11, 2015.
It’s go time for content marketing ROI and our triple feature finale!
Joe Pulizzi Founder, Content Marketing Institute & Content Marketing World
CAST OF CONTENT CHARACTERS
CONTENT MARKETING INSTITUTE XEROX ALTIMETER GROUP KRAFT FOODS KING CONTENT NEWSCRED BRANDSCAPING TYPE A COMMUNICATIONS LINKEDIN TOPRANK ONLINE MARKETING ACTIONABLE MARKETING GUIDE RAZORSOCIAL RELEVANCE
JOE PULIZZI JEANNINE ROSSIGNOL
REBECCA LIEB JULIE FLEISCHER
TODD WHEATLAND MICHAEL BRENNER
ANDREW DAVIS CARLA JOHNSON
JASON MILLER LEE ODDEN
HEIDI COHEN IAN CLEARY
CHAD POLLITT
“If you are trying to measure
the value of your content
marketing, create a
subscription program.”
- Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi @JoePulizzi
Founder Content Marketing Institute
#CMWorld Presentation:
Welcome to the Content Marketing Revolution
Favorite Movie:
The Godfather I & II
Oscar-Worthy Content Marketing Requires a Subscriber Strategy
In the past six months, I've had the pleasure of meeting with dozens of the largest and most innovative companies on the planet. Not one of those companies (not one) was working on an audience-building program focused on subscriber growth. Sure, there were brand awareness goals, perception goals, brand lift goals, lead generation goals, and lead quality goals … but no subscriber goals. The Importance of Subscription Growth According to Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2014 research, fewer than one in three organizations have subscription growth as a content marketing goal. And recent Association of National Advertisers findings on native advertising didn’t even list subscription growth as a possible metric. Why is this important?
Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi @JoePulizzi
Founder Content Marketing Institute
#CMWorld Presentation:
Welcome to the Content Marketing Revolution
Favorite Movie:
The Godfather I & II
Use Subscriptions to Measure Content Marketing Value More and more, we see the ultimate measurement of content marketing programs depend on answering this question: What is the difference between those that subscribe to my content and those that do not? If you are trying to measure the value of your content marketing program, create a subscription program. Something truly unique and valuable that you can consistently send to subscribers. Execute this over time, and promote your subscription offer as much as you can. Then, measure the difference. It does take time (at least 9+ months), but it works!
Oscar-Worthy Content Marketing Requires a Subscriber Strategy
Jeannine Rossignol
Jeannine Rossignol @j9rossignol
Vice President, Marketing for Large Enterprise Operations
Xerox
#CMWorld Presentation: How Senior Marketers & CMOs Are Structuring Around Content
Marketing
Favorite Movie: Charlotte’s Web
Content Marketing Measurement Requires Ongoing Refinement
Marketing went from not being able to measure anything, to being able to measure everything. Determine Your Key Metrics It is overwhelming, but pick a place to start… pick one question you want to answer and go from there. Get it roughly right, and keep refining. Continuously evolve and add questions. You also need to know what metrics are “useful” for you to measure and keep a program on track (opens, click-throughs, page hits, likes/tweets) versus “meaningful” – the metrics that your business leaders care about (closed deals, revenue, etc). Always report to management meaningful metrics and use tactical insights within marketing to improve content performance.
Rebecca Lieb
Rebecca Lieb @lieblink
Industry Analyst Altimeter Group
#CMWorld Presentation: Less-Than-Obvious Content
Metrics You Need to Pay Attention to
Measure Content Marketing Success - Meaningfully
The foundation of content strategy is goals. Without knowing why content will be created and published -- to what end, for whom, where, and how -- content marketing is at best a spurious, ad hoc activity. Yet when my colleague and partner-in-research, Susan Etlinger, and I sat down around a year ago to discuss the state of content measurement, we quickly realized growth in that sector is nowhere near commensurate with the overall growth of content marketing. Content Marketing Performance This lead to research into what KPIs marketers should be working toward and measuring for in content, the subject of our latest research report titled, Content Marketing Performance: A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact.
Rebecca Lieb
Rebecca Lieb @lieblink
Industry Analyst Altimeter Group
#CMWorld Presentation: Less-Than-Obvious Content
Metrics You Need to Pay Attention to
Measure Content Marketing Success - Meaningfully
Content can indeed lift sales, but it can achieve so many more measurable, revenue-linked goals associated not only with marketing, but with other business areas, from product development to customer service. The Foundational Principle of Content Strategy There is no content strategy without measurement strategy. Before embarking on a content initiative, irrespective of medium or platform, it's important to know what you want to achieve. • Is it to drive more awareness? • Build an audience? • Encourage people to convert? • Reduce call center expense by deflecting appropriate
queries to a digital channel? Each requires different metrics -- for content, yes, but also to calculate whether you have achieved your goal.
“Content Marketing success starts by first determining what critical measurements drive spending
decisions.”
- Julie Fleischer
Julie Fleischer
Julie Fleischer @jfly
Sr. Director, Data + Content + Media
Kraft Foods
#CMWorld Presentation: Leveraging First-Party Data
From Content & the Impact on Digital ROI
Favorite Movie: Cinema Paradiso
It’s Time for Content Marketing Measurement Intervention
With all of the articles, surveys and agencies calling for an increase in the amount of strategic content that marketers are producing, it would be easy to believe that we have universally arrived at the Era of Content Marketing. The Content Marketing Measurement Lag But not so fast…content marketing measurement lags far behind the common sense belief that if people don’t pay attention to it, they can’t be persuaded by it. Marketing Mix Models, while painfully flawed, have the solid advantage of having been around for decades; they are built into volumetric forecasts. They represent a gross approximation of reality and cannot read small spends, emergent media, or the diverse, intimate, personal, service- driven nuances of content distribution, but they have been around forever, so what CMO is going to forgo their guidance to approve a plan that is wholly ungrounded?
Julie Fleischer
Julie Fleischer @jfly
Sr. Director, Data + Content + Media
Kraft Foods
#CMWorld Presentation: Leveraging First-Party Data
From Content & the Impact on Digital ROI
Favorite Movie: Cinema Paradiso
It’s Time for Content Marketing Measurement Intervention
How on earth can the esoteric, precious, and unproven metrics we’ve been using in content marketing unseed the dominance of Mix? If trust is built on credibility and credibility is built on consistently delivering what you say you’ll deliver, how can convenience metrics ever win? The Basic Tests of Marketing Metrics We’ve been so focused on measuring what’s easy to measure and what’s unique by platform, that we’ve failed the basic tests of marketing metrics: Do they measure what we really need to know? Are they material? Can they predictably guide our businesses? The most important thing you can do as a content marketer is determine what measurements are critical in driving spending decisions at your company and then build an analytic methodology that answers it for content.
Todd Wheatland
Todd Wheatland @ToddWheatland
Managing Director & Head of Strategy
King Content
#CMWorld Presentation: How Senior Marketers & CMOs Are Structuring Around Content
Marketing
Favorite Movie: The General
Linking Content Marketing Strategy & Results
We’ve all seen the research that says organizations without a documented content marketing strategy are most likely to fail. But even those companies with a strategy often either don’t know exactly what to measure against that strategy - or do know, but don’t have the tools to be able to do it. Show Real-Time & Long-Term Results This is a huge issue. The purpose of developing a strategy is to ensure that the business and marketing objectives drive the execution. But if you can’t show content marketers the real-time and long-term results of what they’re doing relative to the business objectives, the strategy loses any relevance. Find the most simple, repeatable processes you can, and make sure you’re getting the measurements that matter – in real-time - to the people working on the execution. That’s how you’ll link strategy to results.
Michael Brenner
Michael Brenner @brennermichael Head of Strategy
NewsCred
#CMWorld Presentation: How Senior Marketers & CMOs Are Structuring Around Content
Marketing
Favorite Movie: Shawshank Redemption
A Movie’s Success is Measured by Box Office Sales
Measuring the success of your content marketing should simply be based on the same criteria you measure your overall marketing success. For me, that has always included some measure of quantifiable results. Hollywood doesn't care how many people are interested in seeing a movie, watch the trailer, or hit their movie landing page. The real measure of movie success is how many tickets it sells. Create Content Marketing People Want Content Marketing is no different. You need interest. You need to create content people want. You can measure that by traffic. You can measure how good the content is and how much engagement that content receives based on shares, comments, and time spent. But clicks and shares don't pay those movie star salaries, so you have to generate real sales with real people.
Michael Brenner
Michael Brenner @brennermichael Head of Strategy
NewsCred
#CMWorld Presentation: How Senior Marketers & CMOs Are Structuring Around Content
Marketing
Favorite Movie: Shawshank Redemption
A Movie’s Success is Measured by Box Office Sales
The Real Measure of Content Marketing Success 1. How many people opt-in to your content by "paying" (subscribing) with their email address 2. How many people provide even more personal details for your whitepaper and eBook offers 3. How many people register for your events 4. Best of all, how many people click to buy something
Content Marketing success should be measured the same as overall marketing success – through quantifiable results.
“The two simplest ways to measure the value of your
content marketing: revenue by post & subscriber.”
- Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis @tpldrew
Author Brandscraping
#CMWorld Presentation: Moneyball Marketing: The
Simple Science Behind Mega Content Success
Favorite Movie:
Fletch
Measure the Value of Your Content Marketing
Instead of just measuring views, followers, fans, likes, retweets, shares, and clicks, the smartest marketers in the world are measuring the value of their content. There are two simple ways to start thinking this way immediately: 1. Revenue Per Post Take the number of pieces of content you’ve distributed this year and divide it by your company’s total revenue for the same period. Now do this for the year prior. Is your revenue per post higher than last year? 2. Revenue Per Subscriber Take the total number of subscribers and divide it by the total revenue generated by those subscribers who became paying customers. Try this for a similar period and compare the two. Is your revenue per subscriber rising?
Carla Johnson
Carla Johnson @carlajohnson
President Type A Communications
#CMWorld Presentation:
How to Build Content Programs for Internal Audiences That Create Distinguishing Brand
Experiences
Favorite Movie: The Matrix
Attach Meaning to Content Marketing Measurement
Content marketers now have the ability to measure a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean that they’re worth measuring. Monitor content performance across all channels. Look for patterns, but keep common sense in play. Just because something performs well one place, doesn’t mean that it’s moving the needle toward overall goals. Think progress, not perfection. Monitor, learn and adjust what you’re doing as you go. Remember what you’re trying to achieve. Not every metric should be up and to the right. If that’s your goal, then you’re risk averse and missing out on grand opportunities for creativity with your content. The point of measurement is for feedback, not to prove that you always make the right decisions
Jason Miller
Jason Miller @JasonMillerCA
Senior Manager, Global Content Marketing LinkedIn
#CMWorld Presentation:
How to Effectively Outsource Content to Freelancers
Favorite Movie: This is Spinal Tap
Measure Progress with Traffic Engagement & Quality Leads
Referral Traffic. You can measure this super easy, non-complicated metric with Google Analytics. I suggest you focus on non-branded keyword referral traffic, which refers to people who are coming to your site without typing your brand name into the search engine. Engagement. I personally think it’s only a matter of time before engagement plays a role in search engine rankings. The idea with engagement is if your content is encouraging interactions – people sharing it, liking it, plus-one-ing it – that is a sign of relevance. So, the more customer engagement, the more relevant your content is. Higher Quality Leads. How quickly is your content accelerating the funnel or shortening the buying cycle? If your leads are coming in by way of your content and they are much closer to purchasing your product, that’s a clear sign of success.
“For content marketing
success, make all content
accountable & measurable to
attract, engage & convert.”
- Lee Odden
Lee Odden
Lee Odden @leeodden
CEO TopRank Online Marketing
#CMWorld Presentation:
Participation Marketing: How to Co-Create, Optimize & Socialize
Content with Influencers
Favorite Movie: Braveheart
Don’t Let Content Marketing ROI Be Your Horror Movie
Do you know what’s scarier than SAW 7 in 3D? According to Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2014 research, this: • Only 21% of marketers are successful at tracking their
content marketing ROI • 64% of marketers are neutral, or not successful • A full 15% don’t track ROI at all
Can I Open My Eyes Now? I’ll admit, I’m not much of a horror movie fan, but there are few things scarier than managing content marketing investments as a mystery. If you’d like to avoid your CMO's leatherface and chainsaw, make sure all of your content is accountable and measurable to these three things:
Lee Odden
Lee Odden @leeodden
CEO TopRank Online Marketing
#CMWorld Presentation:
Participation Marketing: How to Co-Create, Optimize & Socialize
Content with Influencers
Favorite Movie: Braveheart
Don’t Let Content Marketing ROI Be Your Horror Movie
1. Attract - How does your content attract readers? How do search, social, publications, subscriptions, advertising, influencers, or events pull them in? 2. Engage - When customers consume your content, what topics do they prefer? What formats and media types (text, video, audio)? How do they interact and react? 3. Convert - What offers do you provide to collect inquiries, subscriptions, downloads, registrations, trials, demos? How effective are you at inspiring readers to take the next step? If you want a real thrill in your content marketing, make sure all of your content is accountable for attracting a target audience, engaging them in a meaningful way and inspiring them to take action. Do that and you’ll find yourself in a safe happy place vs. a leatherface the next time you meet with your CEO.
Heidi Cohen
Heidi Cohen @heidicohen
Chief Content Officer Actionable Marketing Guide
#CMWorld Presentation:
Moderator: Social Media Track
Favorite Movie: When Harry Met Sally
Create Actionable Content Marketing Measurement
To get your content marketing efforts up in lights within your firm, track your success back to your business objectives by target marketing personas. Roughly one out of five B2B marketers can successfully measure their content’s success according to Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2015 research. Organizations tracking ROI perform 17X better than those that didn’t according to Hubspot’s The State of Inbound 2014. Create Content to Meet Business Goals Start by stating your business goals and creating content to achieve those objectives. Make your goals as tangible and measurable as possible to increase your likelihood of success. This translates to adding quantities and time periods. To ensure that your goals are reasonable, create them relative to your past year’s performance.
Heidi Cohen
Heidi Cohen @heidicohen
Chief Content Officer Actionable Marketing Guide
#CMWorld Presentation:
Moderator: Social Media Track
Favorite Movie: When Harry Met Sally
Create Actionable Content Marketing Measurement
Among the top 5 content marketing goals are: • Build brand awareness. • Generate leads. • Drive sales, cross-sells and upsells. • Retain customers. • Grow thought leadership. To improve content measurement, follow these 3 actionable content marketing tips: 1. Include a call-to-action (aka CTA). Ask prospects to do
something you can measure.
2. Use related landing pages rather than a one-size fits all approach. The more tailored the landing page is to your content, the better it should perform.
3. Continually test your results. Take what works and find ways to improve your performance.
Ian Cleary
Ian Cleary @IanCleary
Founder RazorSocial
#CMWorld Presentation:
15 Essential Tools to Optimize Your Content Marketing
Favorite Movie:
Gladiator
Scene-Stealing Content Marketing Measurement Tools
There are a variety of tools and tips available that enable more effective content marketing measurement. Here are 5: 1. You can build promotion campaigns around content and
use unique tracking links to measure success.
2. Use Google UTM builder or tools such as trks.it to track important content you share.
3. Find your most linked to and shared content and produce more of it.
4. Use BuzzSumo to find the most shared content and Ahrefs to find the most linked content.
5. Pixel your website visitors according to the category of content they consume and remarket to them. Track conversions through Facebook of your pixeled audiences.
Chad Pollitt
Chad Pollitt @chadpollitt
VP of Audience, Co-Founder Relevance
#CMWorld Presentation:
Advanced Content Promotion Techniques (Paid & Unpaid)
Favorite Movie:
Glengarry Glen Ross
It’s All About the Baselines for Better Content Performance
There’s lots of different ways to measure content marketing performance. Marketers can measure topline goals, strategies and tactics. Identify Solid Baselines Measuring all are important, but having solid baselines defined by appropriate research are just as important. This can be accomplished by collecting and interpreting audience, media, competitor and trend data. Where these categories intersect can provide content marketers with an end-to-end roadmap that defines goals, strategies, promotion, execution and measurement. By learning how to collect baseline data from others, marketers can master how to measure themselves.
CONTENT MARKETING WORLD EBOOK CREDITS
MEASURING YOUR
CONTENT MARKETING
BOX OFFICE SUCCESS
DESIGNED BY JOSEPH “JK” KALINOWSKI
CREATED BY TOPRANK ONLINE MARKETING
VISIT CONTENTMARKETINGWORLD.COM
••• TOPRANKMARKETING.COM
HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!
CLICK BELOW TO SHARE THIS EBOOK ON YOUR FAVORITE SOCIAL NETWORKS!