How to Analyze and Evaluate your Content Marketing Strategy with a Single Metric. Part 1.

Do you agree that almost any company is interested in effective content marketing? I think so. There are many well-written guides about building an effective marketing strategy according to your needs.

But what does effective content marketing mean?

Probably, you would say that well-done content should drive a lot of traffic to a targeted product or services. But what about sales? Sometimes even huge traffic doesn’t provide any conversion. So, people see it but don’t buy it. Maybe you can mention that good content must provide a value for readers: answer a question, teach something new and useful, provide a right solution for a problem. As we can see, good content can be described in many different ways. What is the right way?

 No one of content marketing strategy evaluation is right until it is based on real numbers

So, let’s ask several more questions:

What is a good content marketing strategy and how can we identify it?

Let’s say we are looking at an article or group of articles about a completely unfamiliar topic. Can we say something about the quality and usefulness of the article? We need a clear definition of content wellness and working methods of its identification.

Are there any numerical characteristics that allow us to analyze, evaluate or compare certain pieces of contents? 

If we have thousands of articles about a certain topic, we should be able to evaluate and compare articles using real numbers instead of our own preferences.

This article provides you with answers containing 2 big parts:

• What is effective content and content marketing, and what metrics identify and evaluate them
• Practical content evaluation guide with cases studies

The second part provides a working methodology of numerical content analysis, finding “thin” and effective content, analyzing not only own content but also competitor’s websites and their content marketing strategy.

What is effective content and how to measure it?

Why to write something?

Let’s define all possible goals for a piece of content creation. Nowadays good content costs a lot, so companies or persons will not do it just for fun. They have specific goals. How do you think what are the main goals for people who create content?

Let’s start with a regular paper book that has already been written. Any writer wants to have as many readers as possible to become popular. Probably, an author will not give the book for free. More likely an author will try to sell as many copies as possible to earn a lot. For this purpose, the author might run several advertising activities to make people read your book: a quiz with prizes, TV show or something else.

Now we can say that the main goal of each content owner is to distribute and to monetize own content as much as possible.

In our example, the author (or publishing house) may spend a lot of money to promote a book. But if advertising expenses exceed the book sales, such a deal has no economic sense unless it is a nonprofit book.

Obviously, sales generated by a book or any other commercial content should exceed expenses for its creation and distribution.

Digital content is very similar to the real one with one main difference: publishing expenses are very low. Anyway, there are expenses for the creation and promotion of content, and we shouldn’t ignore them.

Digital content should be profitable.

To be profitable, a piece of content should be monetized.

Digital content can be monetized in two ways: being sold or selling something else.

First case, if a piece of digital content is a good itself. For instance, eBook. In this case, sales of these books should overlap all related expenses for this book creation and distribution.

Second case. A piece of content Is not good and cannot be sold directly. Should we treat such a piece of content differently? I don’t think so. Any digital content could be monetized. There is only one way to monetize such content: sell something using this content.

Don’t forget about expenses for promotion. Being created and published almost for free, digital content needs significant effort and money to be delivered to numerous readers. To be profitable, sales generated by the piece of content should exceed advertising expenses. It means this content should provide cost-effective sales.

Let’s call such content as effective content.

What is effective content?

Effective content provides cost-effective sales.

It means we shouldn’t spend too much money to promote such a piece of content. Advertising costs a lot. So if we have a budget for advertising, much better to spend it advertising a product directly.

Cost-effective sales mean there are no or small additional costs for promotion.

In other words, effective content should be self-promoted and generate sales.

Contents effectiveness means an ability of a piece of content to promote itself and a targeted product or service.

Effective content vs Selling content

Do not mix up effective content and selling content.

To be clear, selling content is a content strictly related to your product or service. Usually, such content is placed on a product page, but you can find such content in user guides, support articles, reviews, etc.

Selling content should convert a visitor (reader) into a buyer. Landing page (in terms of advertising campaigns) or product page usually contains such type of content. In contradiction to effective content, selling content is assumed to be promoted via different channels such as SEO and PPC. So, it is not self-promoted. The main goal of such a page is to convert incoming traffic into sales.

In its turn, the main goal of effective content is to attract as much convertible traffic as possible. Such content refers to the reader’s interests, problems and provides valuable information for them. Usually, when we are talking about attracting convertible traffic, we refer to landing pages for such traffic. It means an entrance page in terms of Google analytics.

We may have one selling product page and many entrance pages that attract traffic and transfer it to the product page.

In general, ecommerce product page, a landing page for PPC campaign, and traffic-catching and visitor-engaging landing page are different pages with different goals.

Blog post with effective traffic-catching and visitor-engaging content starts the process of buying decision making. A product page is aimed to finalize decision- making process with a purchase.

Blog post written about product advantages, usage cases and user review is a sample of effective content that is being self-distributed via search engines and social media to attract potentially interested customers, engage them and transfer them into a product page.

Key differences in short:

Effective content attracts potentially interested visitors (cold) by exploring their interest and needs and converts them into potential customers (hot).

Selling content converts these (hot) visitors into buyers. Selling content could be placed on a product page itself or on other product-related pages such as customers review, promo actions page, etc.

In general, content effectiveness means its ability to promote itself and to achieve a goal it has been written for. So, content electiveness hardly depends on its goals. Let’s go through a content evaluation process via all possible goals achievements.

3 main goals for effective digital content

Drive traffic

Actually, we are interested in any inbound (external) traffic sources:

• search engines
• referral links
• social media
• direct traffic

Each type of traffic can be evacuated easily for a whole website, part of the website such as a blog or for certain page

Drive sales

To evaluate the content ability to drive sales, in the following part we will consider all the main ways of website traffic conversion to sales that can be grouped into 3 website monetization models.

Engage visitors and drive attention

By engaging visitors in certain activities, you may significantly increase your content abilities to generate traffic to your website and sales.

Moreover, engaging content will drive attention to a brand, product or website itself and increase brand awareness – people ability to recognize a certain brand. Brand awareness is measurable.

Brand Awareness might not provide recognizable traffic or sales directly, but has a huge impact on them. A visitor may enter a website directly or by searching brand name in a search engine.

Next part 2