Further metrics of content marketing success

In one of my recent posts (here) I provided three important metrics for understanding the value of your content marketing efforts: bounce rate, pages per visit and returning visitors. Furthermore I said I believed that although these three figures are each individually important, when combined they are potentially even more useful.

However, there was a couple of metrics I did not include:

1. Sharing:
   It is possible to measure the use of social sharing functionality in several ways, including: the metrics provided by applications such as addthis / sharethis / etc. that usually come with their own built-in analytics or by tagging actions that integrate with your website analytics.
2. Conversions from links
   Within your website analytics package you should be able to track users from links within your content pages all the way through to them completing their required goals. This gives you another indication of the value of the content you are producing and how it is directly affecting your bottom line (note: it is even possible to tag each link with it's own specific identifier).

Have I missed any others?

Note:
You may also want to read my previous post on Content: Found, read, shared and measured, a useful way to categorise your content marketing activity.

Digital Shopper Marketing - the new influence

The world of retail is now multi-channel and customers now shop across a number of different devices, at times of day to suit them and in different ways to how they used to (convenience vs. cost, etc.).

 

The area of Shopper Marketing, which originally looked mainly at things such as the in-store path to purchase has now started to merge with the eCommerce / multi-channel retail and even online marketing. This has formed the relatively new discipline of Digital Shopper Marketing.

Here's my take on this:

1. Brands, by placing themselves between the channels of influence and the point of retail (e.g. the store), can affect the buying decisions of the customer
2. A lot of customers now use the Internet to inform their buying decisions (e.g.recommendation and comparison sites, social media, brand micro-sites, etc.)
3. The digital influence doesn't just happen at home and in-front of a static PC these days. Users search sites at work, they have laptops when on the move, they use tablets in bed and over half of the UK population now has a smartphone.

So how can brands disrupt a consumer and get the maximum affect? Well this depends a lot on what consumers you are targetting, their shopping preferences and the mix of marketing that is required.
For example, a particular segment (let's call them "shopper savvy mums") are more interested in ways to:

• Saving: Using vouchers to make the family budget stretch that little bit further
• Sharing: Commenting and gaining opion via Social Media
• Sampling: Trying new or improved products to optimise spend and overall family well-being

The secret for digital shopper marketing suppliers is to find out what works for their client's target audience. And I''ll leave you to find out how to do this for yoursleves.

7 reasons your content marketing is crap

There, I've said it and it's time to admit it. Basically a lot of the current hype around content marketing is crap and so are a load of blog posts about the subject.

Here's my thoughts on why a lot of efforts into the latest online marketing trend are going to be poor, very poor:

1. You have no content plan
Are you publishing content with no editorial calendar and therefore no schedule for seasonal changes? Good content begins with a good plan of what you're going to write and when you're going to publish it,

2. You have based everything around search engine optimisation
On-page optimisation of your content is one of the key focuses of SEO, however just writing content for the search engines (and not really for your readers) isn't the right way to get engaged readers

3. You're not encouraging sharing
So you're making it harder for your readers to post the URL to different social networks or to share content with their peers. Why exactly?

4. You're not linking off to other parts of your site
Part of your reason for writing content should be that it actually drives people around your site and triggers your other site KPI's. Have you got an eCommerce site and yet you're not linking off to products you feature in your blog?

5. You're not reading what you're writing.
The way to create a sustainable audience of any long term value is with the deployment of quality, original and engaging content. Like a chef who doesn't eat what they make, you need to write stuff that you believe in. which ultimately means you have to be the first consumer of your content.

6. You're not properly measuring what you're doing
How are you going to optimise your content if you don't actually collect data about what is working for you and what isn't? Ensure you have the right goals measured and that you get regular feedback on these.

7. You're not learning
Content marketing optimisation is a slow process of test and learn, where you not only have to spend effort producing content... you have to also gain insight into what is actually working. And then you have to actually tell yourself some home truths about what isn't!.

7 steps for creating a content marketing strategy

In my previous post, I mentioned that content marketing is easy. Well here's my thoughts on how to create and run a successful content marketing strategy:

1. Have a strategy

Yes, I know this I'd obvious. But if you set-off without knowing what you're doing, you stand a chance of going nowhere quickly (See my posts on agile digital strategy for my approach on doing this)

2. Have a strategy that can be measured

Yes... I've purposely made this a separate point and I think you need to be clear exactly what your KPI's are and what success looks like. These figures should also be stated within your business justification (e.g. for further resource to assist you or to explain why additional effort must be put in).

3. Create an editorial calender

Your content plan should not be a hand-to-mouth process of a weekly meeting to just plan the next few days of content production. Products are seasonal, demand is seasonal, budgets are seasonal and therefore content needs to be seasonal... or at least adapt to the changes needed over time.

4. Build an editorial team

Ok, not every organisation can have a full-time team of one, two or more people doing their content marketing. However this doesn't mean you don;t need to have the input of (offline) Marketing, Comms/PR, Product/Proposition and your own digital marketers (and/or agencies).

5. Don't just create content, share content!

It's simple enough to forget, but you're not just encouraging visitors to enter and read your content, you're hoping they share it via more traditional (email) as well as social channels. Therefore do what you can to encourage this via the use of social sharing functionality (usually via the typical array of social buttons) on your site.

6. Make it usable and beautiful

Ok, maybe not beautiful, but at least consider that your content isn't just for the search engines..... it has to be read by a human too!

You however notice that I've really not focused on Search Engine Optimisation in a post about content marketing. "Surely that was a slip?" you're thinking "SEO is key here, why not cover it?".... Well to tell you the absolute truth, we all should know that content marketing IS about SEO anyway and a lot of the points mentioned above should consider this all the time. I'm also keen not to promote a specific formula for search engine spamming within a content strategy.... or maybe I'm saving that for a later post?

Share and enjoy

OK, perhaps I was a bit critical in my recent post about oversharing on Twitter and obviously not everyone who positions himself as an online curator is as bad as I pointed out. In fact, isn't everyone who retweets interesting stuff and posts links carrying out some form of curation?
(In that case, that makes nearly everyone on Twitter an online curator of content in some way).

The altruism of online sharing is a concept I'm looking to further explore as I try to understand more about its impact and viral nature. To me it is still a mystery why are certain things far more "sharable" than others and the idea that there is a magical viral formula that brands can tap into this to try to reach their influencers and customers is not something that rests easily with me.

I sometimes find sharing hard work. It is not all the time that I remember to pass-on what I find... perhaps because I'm too busy trying to absorb what I have learnt.

However, when I do share things and this gets passed around the Internet... there is a certain amount of pleasure I get from knowing that I have also helped someone on their knowledge journey.

Perhaps its this joy we need to preserve and increase (and perhaps its why the top online curators seem to enjoy what they do so much).

Can you over-share on Twitter?

Being a content curator on Twitter is a great gig….. You get to Tweet about everything you like and hopefully build a reputation as a content sharer the process.

The less-than-generous may say that these self-indulgent personal brand builders merely pump out regurgitated opinions and provide shortcut links inks to a multitude of sites that their followers mindlessly click on and consume.

Whilst this opinion might be a little harsh on most Twitter users, there are a few points that some online content curators don’t want you to know.

They over-share….

In other words:

1. They don’t actually read all those links they add into their Twitter posts



2. They copy tweets (and pass them off as their original finds) rather than retweeting



3. They work out how often to tweet the same thing to get maximum exposure

Now some of us have been guilty of doing at least some of these either in the early days of twitter or when evolving our usage & knowledge of the social media platform (in fact, I sometimes duplicate the tweets that link to my blog as I have an international readership). But some online curators still do these things (and more) just in an effort to build a bigger following and increase their curated influence.

So do you know an over-sharer and isn’t it about time to call the serial offenders out?