Breaking Down Digital Content Metrics: Engagement, Efficiency, and More (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but I'm tired of hearing that content is king. We get it. Hey guys, welcome back to this week's video. Thank you so much for tuning in. We're still talking about the altimeter groups report, the 2021 state of digital content. Now if you missed last week's video, then I would suggest watching that first because we're going through this report and we're talking about the data points, some of the ones that I found interesting. And then I'm going to provide some context and some best practices on how you might overcome some challenges that the report highlights. So thanks again for tuning in and let's jump into it. So today's kind of a continuation from last week where we talked about goals and metrics and altimeter kind of breaks it down one step further. They go one layer deeper around metrics and specifically engagement. And they ask the question, what is the most common metric you use to measure how your content is performing? Now let me just read through some of these data points and then we will kind of drill down a little bit further. So the first one is a 36% engagement. Then you have efficiency, inbound, conversion, and reach. Now I would classify these a little bit differently, but let me first explain just some general thoughts. I would not consider a click an engagement, right? I might put that in inbound, but that's again, my preference. Engagement's important, right? It tells you how content is resonating with audiences. So that's definitely really smart. Efficiency. Now I talked about this last week, how when you're creating content that supports customers, that helps them find information, then that will result in a decrease in calls to the call center. It may also decrease, you know, emails into the call center or chat messages as well. So that is a way to kind of really demonstrate an ROI on content by looking at cost savings and then your inbound, right? That is looking at your analytics for Google analytics or Adobe analytics. You know, it's time spent on a website. It's unique visitors. Is it growing? Is it, is it, is it decreasing? It's looking at bounce rate, top content, top referral, referring URLs. All of those things are, are going to help you understand how people are engaging with the content on your website and where they're coming from. And then also you have conversion, right? So that is your lead gen or some refer to this as demand gen or direct sales if you are selling direct to consumer. And then lastly is reach. So likes, views, impressions, things like that. Now I said this also a couple of times that these data points are probably different if depending upon who you ask, they might be in reverse. If you were to ask, you know, if the respondents were predominantly in marketing versus PR, but these are all really important. These are all very important to measure. And I would do it a little differently. I would try to map a measurement framework to the buyer's journey. And so this is a buyer's journey that, that I've started kind of working on for several years and honestly no buyer's journey is accurate because everybody is different. Everybody purchases software or, you know, sneakers differently. And this is actually more aligned to a, you know, a B2B buyer's journey. But I would look at the content that I'm creating from everything from, you know, issue, what is the issue to these different kinds of reasons why, or what I call purchase factors on why someone might be interested in purchasing new software all the way down to, you know, solutions explorations. Now this was actually built and it was framed from the Gartner buyer's journey back in 2019, but I would build my measurement framework around the content and map that performance of content to here. Now I would look at engagement, conversions, reach all these things within the context of the buyer's journey. So to me, that's a little bit more actionable because it can, it tells me where I need to shift my content, maybe align it differently or try different types of digital assets or storytelling kind of techniques in order to move the needle somewhere within this buyer's journey. So that's how I would do it. But again, everyone's different and all of these metrics are important. It's just how you frame it and where you place the priority. And that my friends concludes our time together. Thank you again for tuning in. Thank you for your feedback and conversation as it relates to this report and content in general. Stay tuned for next week. We're going to continue this dialogue around the Altimeter group and their report they released on the state of digital content for 2021. So until I see you next time, hope you have a great day and a great rest of your week. And I'll talk to you soon.