by Robert Rose
Ultimately, the application of a measurement methodology is what’s important. The measurement pyramid is one idea. But, the true goal should be to de-silo the measurement so that different groups don’t ostensibly compete with one another.
In one example of this, we worked with a consumer-facing insurance company. Like many B2C companies, they had different silos of marketing teams working on different parts of the marketing strategy. When they decided to launch a blog as a content-driven experience initiative, things got complicated. That’s when they began to understand the challenges with siloed measurement.
Once the project was ready to launch, the content team went to the web marketing team and asked for a prominent button on the front page of the website. The web marketing team said “no,” because they were measured on traffic. Therefore, anything that took away from their traffic numbers would hurt their success. The then disheartened content team went to the social team to ask if they would distribute their blog posts to the social channels (especially Facebook where they had more than a million likes). The social team said “no,” because they were measured on “engagement.” When they posted cute pictures of cats, they got 1,000 or more likes. When they posted anything having to do with insurance, they got fewer than 10 likes.
This is a classic example of Goldratt’s theory. These teams had altered their behavior to meet illogical measurement. They were actually competing for the attention of their own consumers.
THE MANAGERS OF MEANING
The measurement pyramid won’t solve all of the marketing measurement challenges—but it does come with a number of benefits:
• It places the primary focus on measuring what’s important, and more importantly, what’s meaningful: progress toward a business goal.
• If we can avoid reporting secondary indicators, it frees teams from an “always up and to the right” mentality. Innovative new experiences that may actually reduce traffic to a particular channel (or migrate it away from some other platform) can survive because the team isn’t afraid to lose the incremental success to that channel.
• It can prevent departmental competition. Measuring the content, NOT the team producing it, can provide a tremendous amount of benefit. When we are free to use the user indicators to help us improve our job, and the secondary indicators to help the cross-functional teams reach the goals, then we have every incentive to experiment without fear of failure.
For big data to have any value beyond existing information, marketers must move beyond using analytics as a method to prove success or ROI. Instead, they must use data and measurement as a method to improve the continuing process from which we derive more meaningful insight and develop more delightful customer experiences.
Like innovation itself, companies have been talking about this changed process for many years. But, now, as we move into a new era of marketing, we really need to do it.
We will most likely need to add new roles to our teams (ones that typically don’t exist yet in most corporations). Only then will we be equipped to peel back the layers of big data and make them smaller and more integrated with our business. These new players aren’t necessarily the data scientists or mathematicians that have been all the buzz of late (although those roles are important for different reasons). Rather, these people will have a talent for asking questions about the data, our customers, and influencers. They will be skilled at listening, conversing, synthesizing, and transforming facts and results into meaningful insights.
We call these people the “managers of meaning.”
CONTENT EXPERIENCE MEASUREMENT
Although this is not a chapter on measurement, there is a way that secondary indicators can be integrated into the CCM process. As we stated in Chapter 6, one of the core responsibilities of the CCM team is to measure both the individual experiences the company creates, as well as the portfolio of all the experiences together.
To this end, we have created a framework for content marketing measurement across three specific categories. When layered into the secondary indicators of the measurement pyramid, this framework provides a nicely integrated way to specifically measure content marketing efforts.
The three categories are:
• Attention Metrics
Attention metrics measure audience development. Part of the reason we create content-driven experiences is to aggregate an audience (independent of their stage of engagement with our company) and measure whether we are creating value to that audience. Here we measure how content consumption and content brand awareness is building that audience. In other words, how are we broadening the awareness of our solution and our approach to solving customers’ problems and wants with content? Examples of what to measure include:
Blog subscribers (especially those subscribed via email)
White paper downloads
Regular webinar attendees
Content marketing database growth across multiple platforms
Attendees at physical events
Customers subscribed to our content-driven loyalty program.
• Social Metrics
Social metrics identify audience and conversation influence. In other words, as part of creating value that is separate from our product and service, we want to measure how our content is being shared, and how much of that is turning into conversation. We need to ask how our content is influencing the larger discussion about the approach or sentiment we’re trying to create. One of our biggest challenges with turning our businesses into media companies is getting our approach, our way of telling our story, widely shared.
Remember, as we said at the beginning of this book, we won’t have the capacity to be on every single social channel that exists now and in the future. Every time our content resonates to the point that people want to share it willingly across social channels, reduces the time we must spend to BE on that channel. We should be measuring this to determine whether our content-driven experience is creating value. Examples include:
Social listening mentions and shares—not of our brand per se, but of the experiences we’re creating through our strategy.
Growth of our social networks as it applies to our content-driven experiences (e.g., comments, interactions, and, yes, engagement).
Sentiment analysis—again, not necessarily of our brand or products, but of the new conversations and key concepts we’re driving into the zeitgeist. (Look at what HubSpot has been able to achieve by focusing the conversation on the term “inbound marketing.” They’ve ostensibly created an entire marketing category simply by creating amazing content that fueled that conversation.)
• Effectiveness Metrics
Effectiveness metrics identify how well the content is living up to its purpose. The goal when we develop content-driven experiences is to change or enhance some type of customer behavior. This is a measurement of how the experience is measuring up to that goal. This is where we assess the platform’s contribution to the business. Examples include:
Number of qualified leads from the blog
Increase in loyalty of customers signed up to the magazine
Shopping cart value of those engaged with content experiences
Net Promoter Score increase from loyalty magazine subscribers.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER WITH THE PYRAMID
Again, with the above, we are not identifying ALL marketing metrics, but rather those that are associated with developing experiences and content marketing as a process. Ultimately this is a layer, an approach that gets infused into the overall marketing strategy.
As you begin to measure experiences, you look at your user indicators, and then at your team-oriented secondary indicators. As shown in the example chart below, you can map different metrics into both (and, if appropriate, even your primary goals), across the categories of attention, social, and effectiveness. This will give you a picture of how you are working and how an experience is helping the marketing program.
Attention Metrics (audience development) Social Metrics (conversation i
nfluence) Effectiveness Metrics (effectiveness)
USER INDICATORS • Impressions
• Page views
• Downloads
• Retweets, likes, +1’s
• Forwards
• Inbound links
• Blog visitors
• Time on site
• Referral traffic
SECONDARY INDICATORS • Share of voice
• Audience/marketing database growth
• White paper downloads
• Social shares
• Sentiment analysis
• Influencer mentions
• Cost per visitor or lead
• Blog subscribers
• New leads
Perhaps individuals or teams within the CCM take a “box” (rather than a channel), thus making their group responsible for a category of measurement rather than a siloed channel. For example, let’s say the company’s new content-driven experience is a thought leadership blog. So, if a team is now responsible for attention metrics that are secondary indicators, they might be responsible for:
• Blog subscriber growth
• Email response rates from subscribers
• SEO metrics
• Conversions from PR efforts to promote the blog
• Social traffic to blog posts.
In short, the team is now responsible for “audience development” instead of a channel.
ADJUST, MONITOR, AND ITERATE THE PROCESS
This is the evolution. Because instead of being “data driven,” we can now be “data inspired”—eager to explore new ways to make our content experiences successful.
We’re no longer wrapped around the axles of the number of visitors, email subscribers, and followers. We’re actually focusing on what’s important to meet our goals—and everybody is collaborating on those goals. This helps us define what ROI really means.
Content-driven experiences are not managed separately, but rather as an integrated piece of your marketing strategy. For example, you don’t manage things like “how many leads did the telephone produce?” Or, is the “telephone” a viable channel for us? You just don’t do that. It’s part of a whole program.
In the same way, content is part of an entire program. But, you can and should examine its contribution and how you might improve it. The investment should be easy enough to calculate. The contribution can flow from a number of things. For example, it can come through the KPIs you review, or it can show how you successfully contribute overall to the marketing goal.
A completely viable primary indicator for a blog may only be to provide more traffic into the main website because that’s top of the funnel for the sales process. That may be its only goal. If it accomplishes that, and its cost is requisite with that accomplishment, that’s a perfectly laudable business goal.
Everything does not have to deliver sales directly. We can start to ask better questions, such as, “Does the content really create a more valuable customer? Are we getting more engaged traffic? Are we getting more inbound links? Are we able to better cross-sell to our existing customers? Are our customers more loyal?”
Those are all valuable. In fact, we should be asking our “managers of meaning” those very questions if we’re ever going to expand beyond content as just a lead generator. Instead, we should expect it to create value for the business.
WHAT’S NEXT: THE 90-DAY VISION
The First Month
• Can you change the culture of measurement in your organization? Can you realign your measurement strategy in marketing more broadly? Or should you take a more incremental step?
• Assuming the latter, spend time creating the measurement map for a content experience across the different layers of attention, social, and effectiveness metrics. Map these into a pyramid.
• Experiment with creating teams that will manage elements of that measurement map, as opposed to channels. Does this process work cross-functionally? Is it better?
The Second Month
• Are there more meaningful ways you can measure your content-driven experiences other than “more visitors” or “more sales”? Consider looking at things like “deeper insight into personas,” “cost-savings in third-party research,” or “ways to develop better programmatic advertising” as important business goals rather than the obvious.
• Look to integrate these more meaningful ways to measure into existing content experiences. What would that look like? How would it change the direction of specific content-driven experiences?
The Third Month and Onward
• Identify your “manager of meaning.” Can you find someone within the organization who can start to use data and measurement as a competitive advantage and feed that insight into the creation of content-driven experiences? Should you hire outside for this?
ENDNOTES
86 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer
87 http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=XB&infotype=PM&appname=GBSE_GB_TI_ USEN&htmlfid=GBE03433USEN&attachment=GBE03433USEN.PDF
“Success is not owned; it’s leased, and rent is due every day!” | J.J. Watt
We started this book with a simple question: What do you really do?
We hope that by now, if the answer isn’t clear, there is at least a path forward for you to answer it.
If we’re perfectly honest, we care much less about the companies you work for—and much more about you. Now, we certainly hope that you’re able to take some, or all, of the better practices we’ve outlined in this book and put them to work in your business. We want you to be the rock star in your organization and the change agent who moves it forward. We hope that you’re able to evolve your company’s marketing strategy into the differentiating, strategic function that it deserves to be. We do hope your business can change and evolve into the new era of marketing by developing new processes to get there. But more importantly:
We hope you can change.
As you might have noticed, we’re big fans of Peter Drucker. And we can’t resist adding one more quote of his in here:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
After you read a business book or attend a conference, you usually go back and reflect on the positive things you got out of it; maybe you take note of some of the things you disagreed with. However, more often than not, you’ll set aside all of the changes it suggests.
It’s one thing to actually answer the question, “What do you really do?” It’s another thing to actually go do it.
It’s you who will be successful in transforming your business. It’s you who will pass this book on to your peers, your boss, or your team to help them understand how to make these changes. It’s you who will lean in, step up, and transform some of these “better practices” into BEST practices.
We’ve covered a lot of marketing and content ground in this book. We realize that much of the process of the creation of CCM, story mapping, and a new paradigm of measurement—all set in the context of making marketing more strategic—can be overwhelming.
We hope this book becomes tattered if you bought the print version. Or, if it’s digital, we hope it’s one of those eBooks that has tons of highlighted passages, saved notes, and remains in the upper left corner of the first screen on your tablet reader. We hope that some, or all, of the processes add value to your unique approach to creating content-driven experiences. Most of all, we hope this book can be a periodic check-in to help you sustain success.
The road ahead will be full of challenging adventure and will require YOU to be fluid and adaptive to meet those challenges. Here are a few things we hope you take with you.
CONTEXTUALIZE THE APPROACH OF CCM
The double-edged sword of a great marketing strategy is that it is, on one side, new and uncrowded; on the other, there is no template. When we get asked about templates for content-driven experiences, we ask back: “Would you really want one if it existed?” Is that what you want for your career? To col
or in the lines that someone else has drawn?
That said, take some of what we talked about in Chapters 2 and 3 and contextualize it within your business. If you’re a senior executive, you need to foster a culture of innovation and strategy within marketing.
If you’re a junior or entry-level manager, start thinking of ways to carve out time to create innovative methods to take to your boss.
• Where can you start to build collaborative networks within your business?
• Where can you begin to delegate the tasks that simply describe the value of your business?
• How can you start to carve out a position that creates innovative value in your company?
Marketing truly has the opportunity to be the differentiating force within the business.
Take, for example, Kraft’s Julie Fleischer, our Chapter 6 hero. When she was challenged with a potential dead end in managing a print magazine in which the company saw a future, Fleischer transformed the entire print magazine strategy into an innovative process that created exponential value for her company.