In all of our talk about data and analytics, it can be easy to lose sight of the importance of content. We’ve talked before about the importance of creating quality content, especially as the amount of content generated through social media, blogging and other platforms increases. In today’s world, 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared each day: make sure yours rises to the top and helps to increase your marketing ROI. Here’s how to ensure that marketing content positively impacts your ROI:
Marketers have to fight against two main obstacles: the quantity of competing content and a lack of control over what information goes to potential customers. Brands no longer have as much control over their message. Nowadays, potential customers look towards online content, including reviews and tweets, to judge a brand. Moreover, the sheer amount of this content makes it difficult for a brand to craft a compelling message that sticks.
To ensure your marketing has meaningful reach and impact, it’s now necessary to personalize content and increase quality. 70% of customers surveyed say they get frustrated when content isn’t relevant to them, so use data and analytics to ensure that you’re delivering the right information to the right people.
The impact of content can’t just be measured with one metric, since no one data point can tell you whether or not your content is effective. Instead, focus your content metrics in four main buckets: consumption, sharing, lead generation and sales. When determining how valuable your content is in proving your ROI, try answering the following questions:
Once you have put a system in place to measure content, you can start to understand how to better personalize and target that content to improve these numbers. Use the data that you get from measuring these metrics to understand who is responding to your marketing and whether they’re your target audience. Once you have that initial data, start to further refine and personalize content to reach your target demographics.
Creating consistently better content gives you more marketing predictability and a higher rate of return, driving more sales and allowing you to more easily show content’s contribution to your company’s bottom line. By basing your operations off of data, you create a trackable line of progress in your marketing that allows you to demonstrate your ROI to your C-Suite.
Let us know: how do you use content to help prove your ROI?
Photo Credit: Fabrice Florin via Flickr Creative Commons
(Click here to expand)
