As I noted at the beginning of this section, once your storm reaches the "tropical disturbance" stage, it starts spinning around a central eye as it continues to build strength from the wind and water around it.
Aptly illustrated by that spinning storm, your effective content marketing strategy creates a continuous cycle in which re-evaluating the effectiveness of every piece of content you create provides the necessary final step that allows you to restart the cycle with renewed confidence and skill.
Monitoring Your Content
As each piece of content is distributed, your predetermined strategy should have dictated what you expect that piece of content to accomplish.
In some cases, the goal could be very simple, such as gaining a certain number of visitors or a certain level of engagement on social media channels. Or, for other content pieces, you may be moving a visitor along the sales funnel toward an eventual sale or repeat sale.
In all cases, you need to be sure you can monitor the effectiveness of that piece of content so you can determine how successful it is and use that precious knowledge to inform future content creation and distribution choices.
Monitoring online content
One of the most common monitoring tools available today for online content is Google Analytics.
Although it can be somewhat intimidating to begin with, a lot of really great tutorial information exists online and Google itself provides very detailed help features along with this comprehensive, free analytics tool. A number of other paid and free options exist as well, some of which work along with Google Analytics, others of which are fully independent.
In an excellent blog post on the subject of what metrics content marketers need to be most interested in, Convince and Convert's Jay Baer{11} had these recommendations:
Content cannot be measured with a single metric, because no one data point can successfully or satisfactorily tell you whether your program is working. Instead, you need to create an array of metrics that are selected from four primary buckets:
1. Consumption Metrics – answering the question “How many people consumed your content, measured as page views, downloads, or views?”
2. Sharing Metrics – answering the question “How often do consumers of your content share it with others?”
3. Lead Generation Metrics – answering the question, “How often do content consumers turn into leads?”
4. Sales Metrics – answering the question, “How often do content consumers turn into customers?”
By covering all these bases, you'll be in an excellent position to determine how effective each piece of online content is from a business perspective.
Of course, your own personal and business goals play a large part in determining which aspects of this monitoring effort matter most to you.
For instance, during the initial deployment of a content marketing strategy, it makes sense to focus almost exclusively on the level of consumption and sharing occurring with your content.
However, a year into the strategy, if your content is being consumed and shared like crazy, but isn't generating any sort of leads or sales, it's failing, pure and simple.
Monitoring offline content
For offline content, monitoring its effect is a trickier job.
Direct response advertising principles can apply to much of the content you produce offline, assuming your goals for the content include some sort of engagement with the audience.
For example, including a direct response device, such as a coupon or order form, along with a call to action asking readers to turn the device in can give you some solid numbers to work with as to the effectiveness of your content.
Likewise, using offline content to push people toward your website via mobile QR code, or coupon codes can help bring offline interactions and advertising into the online analytics realm, making it easier to track.
A real old-school, but still effective, method of tracking the effectiveness of offline content in real world situations is to ask customers, “how did you hear about us?” or any other question that's appropriate to your situation and gives you insight into what promotional tools are working, and which ones may need some fine tuning.
If the content is strictly informational, such as a book, then sales figures may be your only offline option for monitoring its success, but you can be creative with this and eek more information out of offline sales than meets the eye.
For example, many authors have been very successful at creating large audiences online by including additional, unpublished information on their website that is made available for free – but only to people who have purchased their book.
From a monitoring standpoint, any time you can move transactions online, you have a much deeper and richer wealth of information at your fingertips.
Using That Information
The second half of the re-evaluation equation is using the information you gather to constantly improve your content marketing strategy.
I like to think of this aspect of content marketing as a form of kaizen, a principle responsible for the incredible technological and industrial turnaround that occurred in Japan after WWII.
The basic concept involves continuous improvement through tiny, incremental, logical changes to what you're doing and how you're doing it.
Toyota is famous for requiring any line worker who notices and abnormality in an automobile part or process during assembly to stop the entire line and immediately involve a supervisor in order to initiate “a kaizen event”: discussing potential improvements to the part or process in order to improve the entire product.
And we all know how dominant Toyota has been for decades now in global automobile sales, so the concept works.
Six Sigma® and other similar quality control processes are based on a similar idea. You can apply the same philosophy to your content marketing strategy.
As you're constantly monitoring your outgoing content and how it performs, you may notice, for instance, that your videos are enjoying a slightly higher level of engagement than your text blog posts.
That doesn't mean you automatically scrap your blogging and put all your efforts into video content. It means you incrementally test variations in the current strategy to help optimize your blog content to take advantage of what appears to be an audience preference for video. And you keep monitoring and making those adjustments until your total strategy success rate improves.
Likewise, if you put out two display ads in two local papers, one with the headline, “Eat at Joe's!” and the other with the headline, “Kids Eat Free at Joe's!” you should be able to determine fairly quickly if your target audience cares about bringing their kids in for a free meal. If they don't, then you know that that particular promotion probably isn't a winner for your audience. You move on to something else.
This is a huge subject, and this book isn't the place to truly give it the treatment it deserves. We will discuss some more aspects of monitoring as we get more into targeting and other related subjects in the next two sections.
But for now, we'll leave it that continuously monitoring your content efficacy and using that information to apply constant incremental improvements to your strategy is the single best way to get that Content Marketing Hurricane spinning faster, and heading toward land!
Exercise #16 – Monitoring Your First Piece of Content
1. Based on the publishing method used in Exercise #15, review your options for monitoring that content.
2. Set a reminder to check back on the content's progress in a day, a week, and a month.
3. Don't worry if no one ever sees your first piece of content. The beauty of self-publishing it online as that it will live forever and you can always go back and use it again later. But if you do notice you've sparked some interest, make note of what sorts of reactions you get and what kinds of people you attracted.
4. Use the insights you gain from this monitoring process to determine how to improve your content for the next time.
5. You've made it a long way! Tell us your story at the CMH Stormwatcher's Community!
6. Read the next chapter.