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Tag: content marketing

  • Return of Investment on content marketing – another useless exercise?

    Content Marketing, a ‘buzz phrase’ that umpteen blogs and articles are all talking about. Just when you think you have a handle on it, ‘they’ (the experts, unseen and anonymous) tell us we should be measuring the return of investment of content.

    Yawn.

    But, is there some mileage in it?

    Always conscious of exploring new avenues and thinking outside of The Box within which we all function, we thought we take a closer look at this whole return of investment thing. Is it worth the hassle? And when/if we complete the exercise, what does it actually tell us? Is this information of any use?

    Who invented Content Marketing?

    You can and will be forgiven for thinking that content marketing is a relatively new and modern thing; in relation to the web, it is but it is a concept that has been around for far longer than this.

    Those of you who live or work in agriculture will be familiar with John Deere. Deere, a manufacturing of all kinds of farming implements and machinery, including tractors is a name synonymous with farming and quality products.

    And, it is also a company knowing within brand publishing circles. If we are to attribute content marketing as an invention of one person or company then many people have plumped for John Deere.

    For over a century, John Deere has been producing The Furrow, a magazine stuffed full of jolly interesting stuff for the farmer, from 1895 to today. And, the return of investment on The Furrow is immense, especially when measures over the 100 years plus that it has been circulating.

    There are all kinds of metrics and data against which your content marketing can be measured but, we are sure we have spouted this before – content is about a marathon, not a sprint. If you are expecting an immediate, 30 day return on your investment you may be disappointed. However, when your content does bear fruit, the results can be nothing short of incredible. And very, very welcome to local, online businesses.

    The lesson remains the same…

    …For now, at least with content marketing experts, including those at The Furrow, still saying that the value of content lies in its value to the consumer. This value, matched with effective distribution is perfection but, it may not be the language that executives speak.

    Budgets are tight and business executives want to know what they are getting for their money; is all this money they seem to be sending on creating content, matched by the portion of marketing budget spent on Hootsuite, Buffer and subscription-type services for distribution of this content actually returning – how much money does each blog, post, tweet or pin bring in?

    Is it all about money?

    First things first, if you get stuck in the eternal spiral of making money, then you will not see all of the value in content marketing. It is not there simply as an avenue of cash. Being online with your business is not just about selling, it is about engaging with people.

    Thus, your content needs to do 4 things:

    1. Be attractive – people are the lynch pin of any business; without people, there are no customers and your content marketing should be people-centric. However, on the flip side of the coin are the all-powerful, all-seeing and all-seeking search engines. If they don’t like your website and your content, then you are, to use a technical term within content marketing, ‘a bit stuffed’.
    2. Present ‘your’ personality – not your own personal one but your company/business/brand. Content is a two-way conversation, rather than a one-sided advert. Think about what you expect when you approach a company for help or advice; what do you think your customer expectations are when they talk to you?
    3. Build loyalty & trust – where would be without those returning customers? For some businesses too, working with customers is not a one-off transaction; it is a relationships that grows and builds over time and thus, if you in this kind of industry your content must reflect this.
    4. Authority – not the sergeant-major type of ‘listen to me, and to me only’, but rather a reflection of your knowledge. Content marketing should reflect high value information to your customers or clients.

    “We do all those! Job done…”

    Not quite. Whilst you can certainly bask in the golden light and ripples of applause for having all these factors in your content marketing, they are not measurable in the format above.

    You need a bit more hard data than that.

    Time – the enemy of so many, but with content marketing and its return of investment you simply must bear in mind that it can take search engines and people anything from a week to months to discover a piece of content.

    The metrics that could be useful

    Thus, we suggest 4 metrics that can be used as measuring sticks as to whether your content marketing is hitting the mark, or any mark at all. And, for those shy about digits and numbers, they are not too onerous…

    • Consumption metrics

    Google Analytics, for example, show consumption metrics that include exciting things such as total visits to your website/pages, unique visits, downloads, time spent on site, cost per visitor and bounce rate.

    What you are looking for – how is your data or content being consumed by visitors and, even better, it how they find it. For example, they may have read your blog, navigated to the ‘about page’, had a look at the ‘products pages’ and then sent you an enquiry is your contact form.

    So what?

    Well, actually, these statistics can show where people are landing on your website and what happens next. If they find your blog interesting, but then go to another page then navigate away, the content marketing is only performing part of its job. Don’t forget you website is a live, living and breathing ‘thing’, maybe it needs a tweak or two?

    • Lead-generation metrics

    Now we are talking carrots, but no sticks approach to hooking leads – leads, in this sense, being potential customers.

    If you have a contact form and this is central to your business, you need and want people to complete it and return to you. If you metrics show you have plenty of website visitors but not many leads, something is adrift.

    If this is your kind of online business, how much do you annually spend on content marketing (a)? How much does it cost to promote and distribute it (b)? Add these two figures together. On average, on each lead how much does the customer spend (c)? Follow the math and you have the number of leads you need to break even…

    (a + b) ÷ average value of c = number of break even ‘leads’ needed

    So what?

    You may find this breakeven figure a startling one, and one which unless monitored could mean that our business is falling short…

    • Sharing metrics

    Social media likes, shares, pins etc. are far more difficult to quantify in terms of pound sterling BUT, they are useful vehicles for generating traffic to your website. We have talked in the past about social signals and these share metrics are about engagement, rather than the money they make you.

    So what?

    Sometimes, too much weight is attributed to share metrics so take care not to throw everything at your social media but, they can be a useful indicator of how people are finding and engaging with you.

    • Sales metrics

    This is possibly the simplest statistic – is your content marketing turning people in to paying customers? If you set out with this as your primary aim of the content, then this is your primary metric to measure.

    If, however, you use your content to increase referrals and engagement, then this becomes secondary.

    So what?

    If sales is what you are wanting from your content marketing then this metric will tell you, over time, what type of content is bringing paying customers to you… or not, as the case may be.

    The bottom line

    You do need some idea of what it, and what is not working when it comes to content marketing; after all, you wouldn’t knowingly keep throwing money after bad, would you?

    How hard is your content marketing working for your business? Are you creating the ‘right’ stuff that attracts people and search engines? Is it worth it or do you need to change course…?

  • Top trends in Content Marketing 2015

    You know all those blogs you write and stuff you create that is content?

    People are reading it but, do you know how many? Do you know why? Who are you aiming for…?

    There are many challenges in creating content but, it is an activity that many businesses are now spending a little more time, effort, money and thought on creating. With social media channels now even more prevalent in our lives – and the lives of our consumers – local, online businesses have even more outlets through which they can distribute their content.

    Content is everywhere…

    And it seems that more and more people are creating content and so, how is it faring? A recent survey, conducted annually by marketing and IT company Spiceworks, found that there were some significant changes in the ‘why?’ of content creation.

    And, as always, we have trudged through the data and statistics and pulled out the ones that show how we are really using content in the larger field or marketing…

    WHY content is created

    Back in the day, content was created because… well… everyone else was doing it. Sort of. And we all followed suit. If you were not creating and publishing content, you were not making an attempt to bag your fair share of consumers.

    However, it seems that times are changing; ‘customer acquisition’ through content marketing is no longer hogging top spot.

    We have long talked about content being the door to your business and company, through which consumers and fans will step. And so, of those surveyed 59% were using content as lead generation, whilst keeping a keen eye on becoming leaders in their field (43%) and 40% of those questioned using it as part of their raising brand awareness. Customer acquisition had dropped to 28%…

    Content strategy

    A content strategy is where you have pre-planned blogs and other content: who is writing, where it is being posted and how it is being distributed. This survey found that those companies who did have a documented content strategy on average had content that performed better than those businesses without one.

    Having said that, only 30% of the companies surveyed actually had a content strategy documented – in other words, written down – but overall, three quarters of those surveyed said they did have some kind of plan (verbal, written on a napkin, that kind of thing…)

    The lesson – thinking about your content strategy and writing it down produces results and thus, spending some time getting it down of paper, sticking with it and reviewing it can reap rewards.

    What kind of content?

    Content is a BIG word, that covers all kind of information, produced in a variety of formats and thus this survey produced a series of results that show what companies are producing and sharing…

    • Blogs – 65%
    • Social media posts and statuses – 64%
    • Case studies – 64%
    • White papers – 55% (unlikely to be used by consumers, but important to other businesses…)

    There were all kinds of other content formats named but some of the fastest growing content marketing formats – video, podcasts and the like – were fairly low down on the list. When you remember that this survey also questioned companies about how they content market to other businesses, it seems that there is a divide growing between business-to-consumer marketing and business-to-business.

    Content Marketing Challenges

    But, as with many aspects of business, there were many challenges that businesses said they faced in terms of content marketing, with the biggest hurdle being lack of time.

    And it seems that this time hurdle is now a serious enough challenge for content creation to, at last, be figuring in the marketing budgets of companies; creating and sharing content is something we have always known is important but, this fact alone has not always been enough to act on it. The time has come that businesses can no longer be failing to act!

    The lesson – businesses need to be paying considerable attention to the possibility of portioning part of their budget to outsourcing content creation if they do not have the skills and/or time to do so ‘in-house’.

    Development

    And we all know that, in business, nothing really stands still for long… and content creation and sharing is one aspect that is not static. Ever evolving, it is now time for the micro business to the huge global corporations to take a fresh look at not only what it is producing, but who is doing it and why…

    Of those businesses surveyed, 54% put content marketing in with the marketing division of their business or company. Of these marketing people, half of them created all the information, blog, analytical reports etc. themselves; a staggering 92% of information and content creation was developed in-house.

    In terms of budgets however, the survey raised an interesting conflict; if a business relied on content marketing as its favoured form of marketing, the production of material in-house raised concerns about how the value of the content (the return of investment, or the ROI – what you get back from the effort you put in) was being measured… and in most cases, it wasn’t. In other words, some very well paid were producing content that maybe wasn’t quit hitting the spot. Are you spending hours poring over blogs and articles? Is it paying off?

    The future

    The survey asked companies how and what they intended on producing in the future in terms of content creation and marketing…

    77% of those surveyed said that content creation within their company was going to increase, with a third of these companies saying they expected this increase to be ‘significant’. NO ONE said they were going decrease their content marketing efforts.

    What is this survey REALLY telling us?

    • Content marketing to customers is essential.
    • Content marketing from business to business is essential.

    The format only varies slightly and many businesses put a lot of time and effort into creating content, but not many are able to pinpoint its value in terms of return of investment.

    Despite the online world becoming an even more crowded place, content marketing is far from old-hat or close to dying out, simply because it is still effective.

    It builds authority and trust, as well as promoting brand awareness and recognition. Top quality content will be distributed more and more through a variety of social media channels.

    How do you create content and, more importantly, how do you market and share it? What are you plans for content marketing in 2015?