Understand Why Before ROI with Content Marketing
The rush towards the content marketing bandwagon can seem as chaotic and nonsensical as most of the adventures of Alice in Wonderland. There are Cheshire Cats offering ambiguous advice and Red Queen business managers demanding results now or, “off with their heads!”
There is no satisfaction from investing in creating more content if the purpose (or porpoise) is not clear. This is why “the why” of content marketing is so important. Joe Pulizzi makes this quite clear with his recommendations in the Content Marketing ROI eBook:
To see if you’re on the right path, use the Why? Exercise:
Put “Why?” at the top of a piece of paper.
List all the different channels you are creating content for (e.g. your blog, website, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) down the left side of the page.
List “Why” you’re creating content for that channel. (The Why? needs to be either sales, savings or customer retention/loyalty.)We’ve performed this exercise with dozens of billion-dollar brands. Not once has one of these brands had the Why? for every one of the channels for which they create content.
This is a problem, and one you can fix.
Indeed you can. Below we have an infographic created by Christie Anderson from TopRank, citing the 10 content marketing ROI experts featured in the Showing Real ROI for Your Content Marketing eBook. They include Nicole Smith, Joe Pulizzi, Jay Acunzo, JoAnn Sciarrino, Michael Brenner, Andrew Davis, Julie Fleischer, Robert Rose, Pawan Deshpande and Ardath Albee – a true “A-List” of content marketing smarties.
A combination of useful and entertaining, “infotaining” as I like to call it, this infographic and eBook draw upon a select group of speakers that will be presenting at this year’s Content Marketing World conference. Here are some of their “tweetable tips”:
Joe Pulizzi, CEO at Content Marketing Institute
“Skip analytics reports for your CMO. Instead, focus measurement reporting on performance: sales, cost savings, and customer retention.” @joepulizzi Tweet this
Julie Fleischer, Director, Data + Content + Media at Kraft Foods
“Without attributable sales results, you must get creative measuring content ROI through cost savings, marketing efficiency, and specialized insights.” @jfly Tweet this
Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy at NewsCred
“Content marketing is the thing that will save marketing itself, because it works. Track costs, measure results & trace those metrics back to business value.” @BrennerMichael Tweet this
Nicole Smith, Managing Editor, Tech Page One at Dell
“‘Get real’ with content by surveying your audience, through usability testing, listening socially & folding that data into your content strategy.” @NicoleSatDell Tweet this
Andrew Davis, Author at Brandscaping and Keynote Speaker
“The more you focus on measuring market size vs. market share, the more revenue you’ll generate. Create content to grow your entire market.” @TPLDrew Tweet this
Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions
“Determining ROI in the B2B space takes creativity. Measure content relevance to boost performance & manage content quality to increase sales follow through.” @ardath421 Tweet this
Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer at Content Marketing Institute
“Traditional ROI measures are flawed. Focus on measuring content, vs. teams, both quality and quantity, and see ROI as progress, not a destination.” @Robert_Rose Tweet this
Pawan Deshpande, CEO at Curata
“To gain insight for more effective content marketing strategy, focus on 3 metrics: performance, operations & ROI.” @tweetsfrompawan Tweet this
JoAnn Sciarrino, Knight Chair, Digital Advertising & Marketing at UNC Chapel Hill
“Your brand lives in the consumer’s mind. Measure the emotional or brand attachment between people and brands.” @JoSciarrino Tweet this
Jay Acunzo, Director of Platform & Community at NextView Ventures
“Determine the biggest problem facing your buyers and create a resource that solves that problem.” @jay_zo Tweet this
Click on the image below for the full sized content marketing ROI infographic PDF.
To Get ROI, You Must Invest – In Yourself!
The Content Marketing World conference is coming up fast, Sept 8-11 and you won’t want to miss it!
Learn how to co-create content with industry influencers. I will be presenting at Content Marketing World on Sept 9th at 3:30pm on how companies can attract, engage and recruit industry influencers to partner on content projects, just like this one.
If you work for a technology or software company, we have the ultimate content marketing workshop for you: Susan Misukanis and I from TopRank Marketing will be hosting a content marketing workshop for Tech/Software companies (Sept 11 from 9:00am to 3:30pm) with co-speakers from LinkedIn (Koka Sexton and Deanna Lazzaroni), Dell (Connie Bensen), and a Pam Didner, a former Intel Global Content Marketing Manager and author of the new book: Global Content Marketing.
To help you get Content Marketing World on your calendar, here’s a $100 discount code: TopRank
