Creating content is relatively straightforward but how do you measure its success?
Customer journey mapping, attribution modelling and segmentation will all help and are used at Marketing PRojects. The techniques build on the Masterclass talks we give.
- Identify and document content goals
It’s important you create clear goals for benchmarking, or shall I say benchmarketing!
Customer journey mapping helps you better understand your customer’s experiences through their interactions and touchpoints with your organisation, wherever the customer may be in the lead cycle. Document the five stages of your customer’s journey: awareness, interest, evaluation, decision, and retention. (This used to be the old ‘Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action’ for ads campaigns years ago.)
Next, set out some goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each stage.
For example, your overall goal could be to increase leads 15% or boost white paper downloads by 50%.
Consider tracking the following KPIs to get started:
- Awareness – keyword rankings, impressions, and overall search visibility
- Interest – webinar registrations, white paper downloads, and marketing-qualified leads
- Evaluation – quote requests, demos, and sales-qualified leads
- Decision – conversions and total customers
- Retention – shares, comments, subscription renewals, and social community engagement
After documenting your goals and KPIs, audit your current content and assign it to the appropriate customer journey stage. This will help you create stronger and more realistic goals, while also helping identify gaps in your content coverage.
- Apply attribution modelling to understand channel performance
A successful attribution model will help you see how your marketing channels work together to create a lead, conversion, or sale while ultimately identifying where you should invest resources.
Some common attribution models include:
- First-touch attribution – full credit is given to first customer touchpoint
- Last-touch attribution – full credit is given to last customer touchpoint
- Linear attribution – credit is evenly distributed among all customer touchpoints
- Time-decay attribution – credit is given to each touchpoint based on the amount of time that passed between the first touchpoint and conversion
- Participation attribution – full credit is given to each touchpoint that participated in a conversion
- Position-based attribution – a majority of the credit is given to the first and last touchpoint and any remaining credit is distributed evenly amongst the middle touchpoints
The key is to find a model that balances the data you need without being too complex, which could cause analysis paralysis.
For most content marketing strategies, I recommend staying away from first- or last-touch attribution because it doesn’t show the entire customer journey.
If you’re newer to attribution modeling, I would start with the linear or participation attribution model to get a general idea of what touchpoints your customers use before converting.
For example, the first touch could have come through an organic search result to your blog, second touch was a white-paper download, third touch from a social media link, fourth touch from another blog visit, and finally, last touch from a product-spec download. Position-based attribution gives credit to the assisting visits — and helps you identify the value of your channels.
- Use segmentation to understand content performance
Segments are subsets of your analytics data that can help you better examine your customer trends by drilling down into your data. You can segment each channel (e.g., only people who have bought, males over 40, residents in the UK).
Segmentation can become complex, so you should use it to answer specific business questions.
For example, say that you are developing a content marketing strategy for next quarter. The goal is to increase conversions 25% and you’re tasked with scheduling and creating high-converting content.
Start by segmenting visitors who have made a purchase and ask questions such as:
- What channel(s) attracted these customers?
- How old and what gender are these customers?
- Are these customers using a desktop or a mobile device?
- What content did they read before becoming a customer?
With segmentation, you can answer these questions, identify trends, and better inform your content marketing strategy moving forward. Contact us if you need any support.