With the amount of data we marketers have at our disposal, it feels verboten to admit the following: I don’t know how my content contributes to revenue.
But that was the case for our team. At least until now.
Here, we’re sharing our own marketing team’s struggle to prove the business impact of our content — and how we got to the ROI light at the end of the tunnel. We’ll also share how a few simple experiments and a commitment to practicing what we preach helped us re-prioritize our content strategy around the right outcomes.
Getting from leading metrics to ROI metrics
As a marketing team, we use business outcomes to measure our success. For us, that means we need to deliver a certain number of qualified opportunities to our sales team every quarter. We track a whole host of metrics to get there.
- We use our own marketing analytics platform to measure the impact of our blog, social channels, earned media, and more.
- We benchmark our marketing performance against fellow marketing analytics companies.
- We track industry thought leaders like the Content Marketing Institute to keep us at the forefront of the latest marketing trends and conversations.
- We rely on Google Analytics, Marketo, and Salesforce to report on the success of our marketing programs.
From a content marketing POV, we compare the pages driving the most traffic and goal completions (via Google Analytics) with those receiving the most social shares (via TrackMaven) and optimize accordingly. We use Marketo and Salesforce to track the impact of our marketing programs. We know which campaigns, ebooks, and webinars contribute the most sales accepted leads and opportunities. But despite all of this data, there was still a glaring knowledge gap between our top-of-funnel engagement and bottom-of-funnel conversions.
When hard-pressed about ROI, I looked to leading metrics: web traffic, conversions, report downloads, and more. But I couldn’t definitely answer, “Are the resources we’re investing in social and content worth it?”
Then came our new multi-channel marketing attribution product, TrackMaven Attribution. Eating our own dog food has never tasted so good.
Moving beyond last-click marketing attribution
You know how demand gen teams can track every qualified opportunity that comes from hosted events and paid ads? Our content team now has that same level of visibility.
Based on integrations with Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, and other platforms, TrackMaven Attribution lets us see which pieces of content are driving leads, opportunities, and revenue.
We can see exactly which blog posts were read by the individuals who turned into opportunities, as well as those who ultimately became TrackMaven customers. We can even see the social content they engaged with along the way.
Having this insight into the opportunity generation of our content has dramatically impacted our editorial calendar. There were a few surprises in which content resonated the most with our sales-qualified prospects. Here are a few of our takeaways:
What we learned from our content marketing ROI
Being helpful pays off
Helping marketers succeed is central to our mission as a company. Perhaps the most optimistic takeaway is that we can now prove that being helpful through content pays off for us (literally).
Several of the blog posts that influenced opportunities in our pipeline delivered timely information and advice. Pieces like What Marketers Need to Know About the Instagram Algorithm, for example, helped marketers respond to changes in the world of digital distribution.
It also turns out that we drive the most opportunities with content that is prescriptive about our bread and butter: analytics. Our “Metrics that Matter” series, for example, performed well for us both from a brand engagement and opportunity generation perspective. That’s our content marketing sweet spot.
Communicate the value of new product capabilities
We’re constantly iterating on our platform to make marketers’ jobs easier. In a clear product marketing win, TrackMaven Attribution shows us that our audience pays attention when we communicate about product updates quickly and clearly on our blog.
Blog posts introducing our new capabilities like our Executive Dashboard, Facebook Paid Content, and Social Insights all contributed to our opportunity pipeline in the last 45 days.
Actionability matters
We publish loads of content based on our analysis of the tens of thousands of brands in our database. But the content that really moved the needle didn’t just surface insights — it went one step further and answered the “so what?”
By the “so what?” I mean, “What can marketers do with this information, and how should their behavior change as a result?” We’ve learned that it is not enough for us to publish marketing research. We need to connect the results of our research to tactics and best practices that help marketers succeed.
Closing the loop between the top and the bottom of the funnel
As the content lead on our marketing team, being armed with this content-specific visibility into opportunity contribution is euphoria-inducing. But we can take it a step further.
Let me reemphasize: We can now see exactly which pieces of content are driving qualified leads and opportunities. And the content that is generating opportunities is content worth distributing. So how can we double-down on this content with better distribution tactics? Again, using the TrackMaven platform helps us to answer these questions.
Let’s use our 2016 Social Media Inflation Index as an example. Our blog post introducing this piece of research was one of our opportunity-driving posts. But how effective were we at distributing this research?
The TrackMaven Content Feed gives us the answer. I used the keyword search function to filter for “social media inflation index” and sorted the results by “relative impact”. Our relative impact score identifies how a piece of content performs relative to our brand’s average engagement level on each platform.
From an earned media perspective, I can quickly see that we had some major wins, with several media placements that outperformed our average mention:
From a social media perspective, I can also see the exact social media posts about the Social Media Inflation Index that saw the most engagement. This particular piece of content had the most impact on Facebook:
We can also clearly see which copy resonated the best with our audience. When we asked the slightly provocative question, “Is your social audience depreciating?” we saw more engagement than when we were more declarative about our findings:
Armed with this data, we can keep greasing the feedback loop to improve our distribution strategy. It’s a simple, cyclical experiment that helps us identify our best content and get it in front of the right audiences.
How might visibility into top to bottom-of-the funnel content ROI empower your marketing team? If you’re interested in learning more, we invite you to check out our overview of TrackMaven Attribution and sign up for our early access program. Or simply request a free custom demo, and we’d be happy to share insights with you from the TrackMaven platform, using your brand’s own data.