Welcome to the wonderful world of content marketing analytics.
I hear you say, “I said there would be no math in marketing.” The good news is that all sorts of tools will help you do all that math.
The bad news is that none of these tools will help you understand what the numbers mean for your business.
In marketing, there are no standard rules that define success. Measurements – or metrics – that mean success at your company may indicate failure at mine.
In Volume 10 of Marketing Makers , CMI's series for marketers, I explore the evolution of marketing analytics (which isn't new) and how you can create a shared framework to use it in a meaningful way. effective. Watch the full show here or read on for highlights and watch the respective segments of the show.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI8sXYfjrqo[/embed]
@Robert_Rose explains how to set goals shared in the new #MarketingMakers episode via @CMIContent @semrush. Click to Tweet
Get everyone on the same page
Shared goals are not available analysis is vision without a map. And deciding to analyze without a goal is like having a map but getting nowhere.
If you start with a common goal and a common understanding of how you'll know if you'll reach it, you can define that goal by numbers. That's when the numbers have a purpose and more importantly make sense.
Start with a common goal and understand how you'll know if you've achieved it, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent @semrush. #MarketingMakers Click to Tweet Think of your company as a team with the same goal of winning the game. Everyone on the team knows you need to score more points than your opponent to win. But without a common understanding of how many points result from a goal on the field or a touchdown, you won't know if you've scored enough until someone declares the winner. . If you lose, it's too late to fix anything. If you win somehow, no one understands why.
For more context on why it's so difficult to get a general understanding of what numbers mean in marketing (and why it's not new), check out this segment of Episode 10 .
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noDt-8LwdOw[/embed]
So, what is the answer?
It's to define and architect your shared goals by defining success metrics clear, clear .
You can then design analytics and reports to provide the insights needed to determine what's working (and what's not) to get you on the path to a shared goal. there.
Often, marketing leaders pose targets and goals for their team while sales leaders set goals for the team. Meanwhile, executives set their own goals for the company. But none of the groups communicated these goals to each other.
As one VP of marketing recently told me, “Sales teams are measured against the value of opportunities that turn into customers. Marketing is measured by the number of leads generated. It sounds like a match - but it's not.
“We generate a large number of leads looking for referrals – but the sales team is only interested in the leads we generate for our business products. We're both achieving our goals, but we're losing business. ”
If you don't have a well-defined (and shared) vision of what success looks like, you can't measure anything meaningful in content marketing or any other department.
Without a clearly defined and shared vision of what success means, you @Robert_rose @CMIContent @semrush can't measure anything meaningful. #MarketingMakers Click To Tweet
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How do you create shared success measures?
One useful measurement architecture that has emerged over the past decade is a concept known as goals and key results (OKRs). OKRs are a great way to approach key metrics. They help ensure progress towards a shared destination.
I've written down the process here, but you can also watch it (and enjoy more of my sports metaphors) in this Episode 10 segment.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7SP_dNHbfI[/embed]
Let's go through three steps.
Step 1: Set a goal
Make sure you create a realistic and sharable goal.
Clearly laid out strategic objectives capture how the combination of content will bring value to the business. They also imply or explicitly say about the time horizon – when success will happen.
Now, your plan could be quarterly, a year, or years to see if a goal is realized (or not). You can have long-term and short-term goals. You can figure out the hierarchy of those.
Setting strategic goals doesn't mean they don't change as markets change or assumptions evolve. It just means you can start timing them to understand how quickly you need to change.
Now that you have a shareable strategic goal, move on to the next step.
Step 2: Determine success
Decide what will clearly define success. This is where you get an indicator of key results that you will use to measure your goals.
Let's go through an OKR example. The strategic goal is to drive a 25 % increase in net new sales in the coming year. Now, a shareable goal for the content marketing team is to deliver 10% of all new sales opportunities next year.
That's shareable, but what that success looks like is undefined. Take a look at these three main results:
- Increase new leads with content by 15%.
- Increase the conversion rate of the free trial by 25%.
- Reduce the cost-per-thousand ad ratio by 20%.
You now have a shared goal and determine how it will directly affect return on cost. That's the key.
Step 3: Design your analytics
In Volume 4 of Marketing Makers , I was talking about the measuring pyramid. As you decide on your analytical reporting needs, a measurement pyramid can help you understand what metrics help you determine whether you've met key results in your OKRs.
There is no single tool that clearly and elegantly indicates if you have achieved your important results. Instead, your analytics tools must evaluate some activity.
Let's see an example of how to design a measuring pyramid.
The top level represents the main outcome of your strategic objective. Two levels of support describe the analytics you need to track to see if you're making progress toward those goals.
The middle floor includes key performance indicators (KPI). To track your progress towards your KPIs, you can use a dashboard that combines different metrics into a single score.
Lower tier is more data and metrics that can help you improve your process to achieve those KPIs.
Let's go back to our OKR example of increasing leads and conversions and reducing advertising costs. Content Collaboration Analytics can help gauge internal content consumption from peer groups. The procurement team's budget will indicate the asset's implementation costs. The Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution shows the number of campaigns created with the content. A marketing automation tool shows the number of conversions for free trials, while an SEO analysis tool helps understand new leads from organic and paid traffic .
All of these tools help to bring the amount of content produced during the quarter, the cost of paid and organic traffic, the cost of conversions, etc., into context. Everything is shared and everyone agrees that these metrics improve the process of meeting KPIs. KPIs show whether you have achieved three key results that indicate the goal has been met.
What does it look like when it's all designed? It looks a bit like an org chart – you see the overall business mission broken down into strategic goals. Each shard connects to the OKR pyramid and the source engine for each metric that goes into it.
Click to enlarge
Everything is understood by all the groups involved. The game won, and You know why.
More than number
Now you are measuring what is meaningful and important, not just anything or everything you can.
There's a great quote about planning your life that says, "Create a life so good you don't need a vacation to get away with it."
The same is true for data, measurement, and analysis. If you take your time and be careful, you can create a measurement and analysis strategy so good that you don't even need to do the math.
Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute
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