Measure Content Performance with Less-than-Common Metrics

Editor's Notes

• #3: In just a few years, content marketing has become a priority for most companies, to the point that content tactics are already claiming an average of 39% of their total ad/marketing budget. https://www.marketingtechblog.com/content-marketing-adoption-tactics-results-2014/
• #5: as participation in content initiatives increases and permeates the outward-facing and non-marketing divisions such as human resources, customer service and support, product groups, research and development, etc., which we call the Culture of Content metrics and KPIs that are applied to content correspondingly shift.
• #10: Each point in the compass represents an opportunity for business-centric measurement; that is, measurement that directly ties to business objectives and strategies.
• #11: These are by no means exhaustive, but should provide a starting point for organizations eager to derive deeper insights from the performance of their content. In many cases, the same “raw” metrics can be used as ingredients to answer many types of questions. In other cases, there are business or strategy-specific metrics that require data from other tools or sources, such as web analytics, business intelligence, market research, email marketing or CRM systems.
• #13: It can be expressed in sentiment, topic drivers, sharing behavior, likes, retweets and other measures of interest and attitude. While listening is a useful tactic to understand drivers of brand health, content can be useful to address issues, raise awareness and, overall, communicate at scale. From there, responses to content—viewing behavior, sharing behavior, sentiment expressed about the content, even audience growth— show how the content is performing and whether it is augmenting or detracting from the health of the brand.
• #14: The Problem The Seattle Seahawks’ social media team wanted to leverage the tremendous real-life conversations about the Seattle Seahawks authentically, but in a digital context. Its goal was to use the digital medium to build more engagement between the Seahawks and fans, rather than as an extension of broadcast.
• #15: The Approach To increase engagement and better understand fan sentiment, the Seahawks’ social media team used Simply Measured to assess content performance to determine which content resonated with fans, both as a community and as individuals.
• #16: The Result The results of the Seahawks’ social media efforts were clear: a 40% increase in overall audience, measured by followers per platform, and a 173% increase in engagement across social networks, measured as an aggregate of major channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+) and compared to an average during the playoffs. The Seahawks’ social media team used this data to inform its communications strategies and measure and optimize its tactics going forward.
• #19: Rokenbok manufactures high-end toys that combine construction sets with robotics. Five years ago, 80% of the company’s customers discovered the products in brick-and-mortar specialty toy stores, 20% via word-of-mouth. There was no digital component to either sales or marketing. When economic shifts led to the decline of the specialty toy retailers Rokenbok relied on to showcase and demonstrate its complex products, the company found itself threated. “It’s not obvious to folks from static images what our toy system is, or how you play with it,” says Rokenbok CEO Paul Eichen.
• #20: After experimenting with demos at malls and tradeshows, the company began to create mini- videos created with Rokenbok’s toys. These serve not only to entertain, but also to demonstrate products that require a $50-$100 investment from buyers. The company doesn’t expect a conversion at first touch, so relationship building is key. The company also showcases user-made videos on its YouTube channel, many made by teens who have been using the products since early childhood, creating retention, loyalty and word-of-mouth. Videos are also targeted to prospects with YouTube’s TrueView in-search and display ads, helping the company to discover target audiences and keywords relevant to their core kid and family segments.
• #21: Half of Rokenbok’s customers now come from YouTube, the #1 source of traffic to the site. The company has transformed into an e-commerce only business, from a very recent legacy of selling exclusively in bricks and mortar specialty stores. In short, Rokenbok's business model transformed via a goal-oriented content strategy.
• #23: Zenni Optical, a provider of prescription glasses and accessories, wanted to build brand awareness and drive sales, while increasing the efficiency of their marketing campaigns.
• #24: The Approach Working with Wpromote, Zenni added a content layer to the customer journey and buying process, with the aim of making the experience of buying eyeglasses in the digital realm as fun and engaging as it can be offline. And, because the glasses are inexpensive, consumers have the option to treat their eyeglasses like accessories, and change them according to outfit or mood.ixThe company used search and off-site content to drive new customer acquisition, incorporating leveraged email marketing and social media such as Instagram hashtag campaigns (#zennifashion), blog posts and other tactics to support customers throughout the digital buying cycle. The idea was to use content to show how fun the glasses and experience could be, and encourage customers to approach the buying experience playfully and socially.
• #28: The Approach Unilever partnered with content marketing platform Percolate in a pilot program to attempt to create global content marketing efficiencies across three brands: Knorr, Hellman’s and Surf. Teams were trained on the platform, and both global and local KPIs were established. All content, design, local specifications and publishing are centralized in one governed environment. Global images are hosted centrally, easily accessible by all teams. Key features of this campaign included brand prompts prior to publishing; a centralized dashboard tool for calendar and creation, as well as communication and feedback; shared, customizable assets; and customized metrics linked to KPIs with visual data displays. The Result Unilever experienced reduced time to create and publish content, and increased output (significantly, in some markets). Investing in collaborative tools to scale content globally over more than 30 brands, 40 agencies and 20 different markets has coordinated activities while reducing costs per post. (This translates to an estimated $10 million in annual savings if applied across the entire organization). Based on these efficiencies, Unilever increased implementation by 300% more licenses and now operates in about 80 countries across approximately 40 brands.
• #29: For Unilever, digital marketing efforts are particularly resource-intensive given its global scale, the large number of brands in its portfolio, multiple agency partners, and regional variances in support and expertise. On Facebook alone, the €14 billion conglomerate has hundreds of millions of fans, over a thousand people involved in the content process, and over 360 new posts daily. Creating efficiencies, brand consistency and effectiveness on a truly global scale while simultaneously managing operational costs are obvious, as well as formidable, challenges.xi
• #32: Nico Henderijckx, Sony’s European forum and community manager, points to an example. A recent how- to troubleshooting post, written by a volunteer super-user (i.e., at no cost) on Sony’s community site, was viewed by 42,000 visitors within two weeks. Leveraging data around who was interacting with this specific piece of content not only helped Sony identify the need for similar creative content but also helped affix value to it. A call to the call center costs the brand €7. The potential value of this one post, then, in just a fortnight was €294,000 (€7 x 42,000). The Problem Sony Europe’s call center staff found themselves repeatedly helping customers to troubleshoot a specific issue with a specific model TV set. Each call cost the brand €7.xii The Approach According to Nico Henderijckx, Sony Europe's forum and community manager, one of the company’s volunteer customer forum super-users wrote a how-to troubleshooting post addressing the issue and outlining a solution. The post cost Sony nothing (as it was written by a volunteer), but was visited by 42,000 visitors in the first two weeks it was live. Leveraging data around who was interacting with this specific piece of content not only helped Sony identify the need for similar creative content but also helped affix value to it. The Result A call to the call center costs the brand €7. So the monetary value of this one post in just a fortnight was €294,000 (€7 x 42,000). Roughly translated, that’s $350,000. In this case, internal, cross-departmental communication about content needs was as essential to ROI as was identifying the specific type of content to address a customer problem.
• #35: The Problem Domino’s Australia wanted to find a way to engage consumers to create their own pizza ideas, even to the point of compensating them for sales of pizzas they designed.xiii The Approach To that end, they began a campaign in 2014 Called “Pizza Mogul,” with the tagline: “Create. Share. Earn.” The concept was simple: customers could log in to the Pizza Mogul site, create a pizza, share it, and earn money on its sales.xiv According to the Wall Street Journal, one pizza designer earned roughly 32,000 Australian dollars ($27,800) from his contribution. The concept was successful in Australia, but FTC rules governing sponsored content may prohibit U.S. companies from launching similar programs. The Result Domino’s Australia quantified its results simply: which were the most popular pizzas, and who earned the most from their recipes? The clever twist to this strategy was that the KPIs in themselves made for interesting content, which may also have spurred continued interest.
• #36: Domino’s Australia quantified its results simply: which were the most popular pizzas, and who earned the most from their recipes? The clever twist to this strategy was that the KPIs in themselves made for interesting content, which may also have spurred continued interest.
• #39: Measurement must be the foundational principle of content strategy. In fact, 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 toachieve. 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. Set and prioritize goals and desired outcomes, developKPIs to track these, and measure and iterate constantly.
• #40: Every measurement strategy must focus on business outcome. Content metrics can be notoriously volume or vanity based, rather than outcome-based. This means that counting likes, shares or organic reach in and of itself likely doesn’t demonstrate business value. To do that, you need to show a business outcome, using the compass in Figure 1. For example: a. An increase in reach can show audience growth. b. An increase in shares (preferably combined with other measures of engagement) can show engagement. c. To understand whether a content strategy has affected brand reputation, you must have a benchmark, and measure sentiment, and look at the before and after. It’s critical to have an analyst who can perform this correlation with an eye to other confounding factors. For example, a “viral” video may be immensely popular, but if there is a product recall, pricing change or other factors, it may be difficult or even impossible to assess the impact on the business overall.
• #41: Know your metrics and your data. Some signals, like click-through rate, are clear and relatively easy to assess. Measuring sharing behavior requires that an analyst assess multiple platforms--Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, others—to define what “sharing” actually means. Compounding this issue is the fact that some of the most valuable data, for example, private Facebook data, Snapchat data, are not available for privacy reasons. So analysts must take that into account as they assess impact, and create defensible benchmarks as part of their process.
• #42: Be realistic about organizational capabilities and tools. Because content performance data comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, from various platforms, it often requires a great deal of manual intervention to analyze properly. This is simply a reality of the market today; content vendors often supply their own analytics dashboards, while social media tools also serve to measure content reach, resonance and other (content-specific) outcomes. It is not uncommon to require a mixture of web analytics, content measurement, marketing technology and social media tools to assess the impact of content. As a result, content strategists should work with their analysts to develop a realistic (near term) and aspirational (longer term) measurement strategy. Otherwise, content strategists and business leaders will inevitably become frustrated, while analysts will burn out from all the manual work needed to deliver reports.