Tracking Marketing Effectiveness - Is Your Content Resonating?

Tracking Marketing Effectiveness:Is Your Content Resonating?

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From the Capturing and Acting on Metrics learning series

© 2013 Tracking Marketing Effectiveness: Is Your Content Resonating? 2

TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction

Chapter 1 - Is Your Content Working?

Chapter 2 - Strategy 1: Using Vanity Metrics to Your Advantage

Chapter 3 - Strategy 2: Testing Content with Engagement Data

Chapter 4 - Strategy 3: Content Insights

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Tracking Marketing Effectiveness:Is Your Content Resonating?

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90%of organizations market

with content1


INTRODUCTION

You're in the content marketing game, producing ebooks, whitepapers and presentations hoping they bring in leads, or ultimately lead to sales. Is your strategy working or are you wasting valuable time, and how do you differentiate the two?

We covered the metrics you should understand in our ebook Tracking marketing effectiveness: 3 critical content metrics.

Producing effective, engaging content is paramount to capturing and keeping a prospect’s attention and interest.

This ebook will discuss how to use engagement metrics to test your content and tailor it to what your audience wants.

79%of B2B marketers use

content marketing to achieve brand awareness goals2


Marketers use a number of tactics to determine which topics are most valuable to address with their audience. However, it can be difficult not only to figure out the most effective ways to conduct this research and choose a topic, but also to decide if it was worth it after you’ve produced and launched it. Some common strategies include:

Reading about industry trends - Scouring industry magazines and content marketing trends is a common way that marketers get their material. But think of it this way - if you’re already reading about a topic in other publications, that means it’s already being talked about. Topics in industry magazines can definitely be addressed with the general public (since it’s less likely the article has been seen), but make sure your competitors aren’t writing about the exact same topic. If they are, your product’s content marketing just blends in with the rest of the noise.

Writing about product features - This strategy is heavily dependent on how it’s carried out. If positioned correctly, plugging your products in content marketing can be good. The best content marketers may discuss helpful features without doing a hard sell in their marketing material. But keep in mind that talking about product offerings too much typically turns off prospects. When a prospect believes they’re going to read something insightful and learn from it, they don’t want to feel like they’re really talking to a salesperson.

IS YOUR CONTENTWORKING?1 ?

Analyzing content data - Marketers who use data to shape their content strategies are on the right track, but again, this depends on what kind of data you’re using. Vanity metrics - like quantity of views and downloads - help a little, but even with these numbers, it’s still mostly a guessing game. Marketers need more comprehensive, actionable metrics - like deep engagement data, lead and sale figures - in order to make the very best decisions regarding the content roadmap. We discussed vanity and actionable metrics more in the ebook Tracking marketing effectiveness: 3 critical content metrics.

Tracking Marketing Effectiveness: Is Your Content Resonating?


For many marketers, vanity metrics are all there is to work with. Rather than just looking at a number of downloads to decide which piece of content is most effective, marketers should use vanity metrics creatively to make the most of the available metrics. Here are some ideas to implement and improve your content strategy immediately:

Vanity metric: Landing page visits - The number of prospects who hit your landing page, then may or may not download content from there. Get the most out of this data with these ideas:

Tweak the text on the landing page each week and comparing the number of visits, inserting different keywords to increase those that find your content. Is one landing page bringing in substantially more visits?

Seed the landing page. Seeding means planting links to your landing page on relevant forums, blogs and articles to increase relevant traffic.

Do away with the landing page completely. Is a landing page necessary? There may be a better way to capture prospect information than gating - such as collecting information inside the content, or offering another relevant piece of content at the end of the ebook in exchange for information. Ungated content gets between 20 and 50 times more views than B2B content that is gated3. How many more leads will that mean for your business?

STRATEGY 1:USING VANITY METRICS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE2

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TJohn Smith

Acme Co

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Vanity metric: Forms completed - The number of prospects who fill out and submit a form on your landing page to get access to content. Here are some tips to use this data to your advantage:

Change the data the form requires. Is your audience weary about submitting one piece or the other? There’s only one way to find out. Marketers - make sure you’re using a tool that allows you to change the form as you see fit, but keeps the content link the same (so prospects can come back to it without hitting a wall).

Split test with different forms. Send a certain percentage of prospects to one form or the other and measure the performance of each. This is the most efficient way to find the best form content for your business.

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STRATEGY 1: USING VANITY METRICS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE, CONT.

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Sandy McCormick

Smith Enterprises

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VP of Marketing

Keep the form very simple. When the form is long and difficult, prospects are less likely to fill it out. Many marketers compare this to a first date. Your prospects aren’t that interested yet, so why would they spill all of their private information right off the bat? Forms with only 3 fields have average conversion rates of 25%, while forms with 6+ fields convert at only 15% on average.



Vanity metric: Content downloaded or viewed - The number of prospects who have either accessed the content link you provide or downloaded a document from your site. To dig deeper into this data, follow these tips:

Talk to prospects as they engage. The most progressive way to understand what a prospect thinks about your content is to ask questions within the con-tent. Marketers may either ask questions in the body of the content and include a survey at the end - or ideally, acquire a tool that allows you to ask interactive, optional questions at the end of a given section. That way, you’ll get real time feedback on each section of content.

STRATEGY 1: USING VANITY METRICS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE, CONT.

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Test your title. Change the title of your content and test it repeatedly over time to see if a different title draws in more readers. Sometimes, just a word or two changed will make a big difference.

Conduct personal interviews. Marketers gain a lot of credibility by reaching out to those prospects who download their content only to conduct market research. Be sure to ask both what was helpful and what wasn’t quite as valuable for constructive, honest feedback.



Another actionable metric, engagement data, tells marketers a lot about each prospect they target. We discussed engagement metrics in the ebook Tracking marketing effectiveness: 3 critical content metrics. Here, we’ll discuss how to use them to improve content.

Inside the content:What marketers really want to know is how prospective clients interact with their content after the download or during the reading process. Do they abandon the content after thirty seconds or are they truly engaged? There are only a select few strategies that help marketers track the content after it’s been viewed by a prospect. We’ll discuss how marketers track and use these metrics more in the final chapter.

STRATEGY 2:TESTING CONTENT WITH ENGAGEMENT DATA3

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Engagement over time:Your prospect viewed or downloaded one ebook. Did they come back for more content? If so, how long did it take them? Tracking engagement over time requires setting thresholds - if the prospect returns for more content right away, they were likely very engaged by the content of the first ebook. If the same prospect took over a certain amount of time to return (say, a week), or doesn’t return, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the content in the ebook that was downloaded. These trends should be examined both on a case-by-case basis and over time.



Social sharing:Understanding social sharing is extremely important and marketers should pay attention to their content’s traction in social media. You can examine both the number of shares versus other pieces of content (and against industry benchmarks if available), and the number of clicks on the link from each share. When your content is shared on social media, you have the opportunity to reach second-level prospects.

Marketers should track whether these prospects are interested when they come across your content on social media, (a good indicator is number of clicks), and whether they take it a step further by visiting your site. Ideally, marketers will also have visibility to whether those second-level prospects fill out a form to access more content or abandon the site.

STRATEGY 2: TESTING CONTENT WITH ENGAGEMENT DATA, CONT.

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of users listen to recommendations shared by friends 590%

Clicks from shared content are five times more likely to result in a purchase 55X

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To get the deepest insight into a prospect’s level of interest and engagement, marketers must understand what the prospect does after they have their hands on your content. Vanity metrics can only tell you so much. The most effective marketers need information such as bounce rate, where in the ebook the prospect is spending most of their time, how many pages were read and the time spent on each page.

There are a few ways to find this out, such as post-download interviews and test studies; or, you might considering purchasing a tool that makes examining ebook engagement easier. Here are some scenarios in which you might use content insights to examine your content strategy and gain a greater understanding of your audience:

Pages read and time spent reading:With this metric, marketers can draw conclusions about the popularity of a piece of content. Using download vanity metric as a representation of interest doesn’t mean much if the prospect reads the first page and abandons without returning. Having access to the number of pages read and time spent in the document sheds more light on the prospect’s engagement: did they make it all the way through? Did they download more? Or, did they jump ship halfway? All of these insights are imperative to scoring leads.

STRATEGY 3:CONTENT INSIGHTS4 A



Bounce rates:If you see high bounce rates from within a document, it’s time to examine the content and figure out why. Aiming for a bounce rate at or below 50% is a great place to start.

If prospects are abandoning right away, the document may appear hard to digest. Is it text heavy? Break up the text with call-outs and graphics. Perhaps your introduction needs work - revamp it and see if that changes how far your prospects read into the content. Be sure to make your changes and test before and after to ensure you’ve found a good solution.

Topic popularity:Your content likely covers quite a few different topics in each piece. If you see that most of your readers are spending most of their time in a certain section of the content, that indicates that the topic is of greater interest to your prospects. Such metrics can be used to understand exactly which subjects your prospective customers are interested in and help determine the topic of your next piece of content.

STRATEGY 3: CONTENT INSIGHTS, CONT.

50% 60%80%

bounce rates are average 4

bounce rates are a sign that marketers should be concerned 4

bounce rates means there is a critical problem with your content 4


ABOUT DOCALYTICSDocalytics’ powerful cross-platform technology allows customers to track user interaction with documents and sales collateral such as whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, presentations, sell sheets and other documents.

Docalytics empowers businesses to produce better content, get more sales-ready prospects and prioritize sales outreach.

For the first time your sales and marketing teams will be able to track exactly how prospective customers engage with your content - while more efficiently capturing lead data as a prospective customer engages with the document versus having to capture everything upfront before a visitor can determine the relevancy of the content.

Fore more information visit www.docalytics.com

SOURCES:1 - Content Marketing Institute: 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, Oct 20122 - Content Marketing Institute: 2010 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, Sep 20103 - Statistic attributed to David Meerman Scott, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219649, May 20114 - QuickSprout: How to Optimize Contact Forms for Conversions, Jan 20135 - Statistic from Inc magazine, http://www.inc.com/guides/2011/01/how-to-reduce-your-website-bounce-rate.html, Jan 2011

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Tracking Marketing Effectiveness - Is Your Content Resonating?