Shelley Middlebrook, President of Fifth Story, a Toronto-based content marketing firm, recently participated in a panel on content marketing ROI at Marketing Magazine’s Content Marketing conference. We asked Shelley how her clients are measuring and evaluating the ROI of their content marketing strategies. She shares her insights below.
Q. What are brands trying to achieve with content marketing?
A. Content marketing objectives vary from client to client, and from campaign to campaign. Some of the most common objectives are awareness, engagement and lead generation. Successful content marketing isn’t just informative, educational and/or entertaining; it generates business results. Therefore objectives should be specific to the organization, and aligned with its key performance indicators (KPIs). They should also be measurable.
Q. How are brands measuring content marketing?
A. It depends on a number of factors: 1) what stage of the purchase journey their consumers are at – awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase or loyalty, 2) what platform(s) they are using – television, radio, print, online, social, and 3) what media channel(s) they are using – paid, earned, owned, shared. Brands should identify the metrics necessary to measure performance. It is essential to use multiple metrics to measure the full picture of a content marketing campaign.
Q. What are some of the key metrics at the various stages of the purchase journey?
A. According to a 2014 Nielsen study, earned content has the most impact at all stages of the purchase journey. With earned media, you generally don’t get the in-depth analytics you get with paid, owned or shared media. You can however identify quantitative metrics, such as overall reach or potential impressions, as well as qualitative metrics, such as tier of media or presence of key messages. To measure and evaluate earned media, Canadian public relations and communications professionals often rely on Media Relations Rating Points (MRP), the industry standard developed by the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS). Brands should take advantage of standard measurement tools.
Q. What about paid, owned and shared media channels?
A. There are many ways and tools to measure and evaluate content marketing across the various media channels. For paid initiatives, click through rates and view through rates of videos are key metrics. If you are trying to measure conversations, look at content sharing and referral traffic. If you are trying to measure conversions, look at your visitors to leads conversion rates.
Q. Who controls (or should control) the content marketing strategy, as well as the evaluation of its performance?
A. To ensure all content marketing efforts work seamlessly and offer a consistent customer experience, brands have had to rethink their marketing structures and shift towards a more integrated approach. Leveraging budgets and sharing metrics without the restraints of disciplines, departments or agencies are key to success. Measuring content marketing ROI is easier when advertising, public relations, digital and social teams work together. Ultimately, brands must bring all the elements together, and work with their partners and stakeholders to ensure the “big picture” strategy is executed.
Q. Do you think brands have content marketing strategies in place, and buy in on the metrics to measure success and ultimately ROI?
A. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 39% of B2C marketers have a documented content strategy. I believe more and more brands are trying to put content marketing strategies in place, and have a means to measure and report back on ROI. Content marketing is an always-on strategy that requires ongoing, quality content production and marketing, and the results are often long-term. It takes a long-term commitment of resources and budget to stand apart from your competitors.
For more information on how to maximize your content marketing ROI by leveraging video content across multiple platforms and media channels, click here.
