Over recent years, I’ve dedicated most of my effort and inquiry into content marketing and content strategy.  I’ve written a book on the topic, as well as published more research in the field than any other individual.

Content is the distillation of all my professional passions. I’ve worked as a marketer, editor, journalist and analyst – all media, all the time. Since the beginning of digital I’ve been at the forefront of search, email, social media, digital advertising and digital publishing. All these (and more) couldn’t exist without content. All media, in fact, are containers for content.

I’ve also been studying how content works; how organizations plan, strategize and resource for it, and how content flows between paid, owned and earned media.

Today I put my brand-side hat on again and will begin to practice what I’ve been preaching. I’m proud to join Teradata Applications’ smart marketing team to oversee content for their global marketing operations.

Some friends and colleagues have asked what precipitated the move. Here are my reasons for making the change.

1. The opportunity to practice – and to put into action – the principles I’ve been studying and the analysis I’ve conducted.
2. Getting my hands dirty. As a strategic advisor I’ve been helping organizations from agencies to publishers to big-box retailers, financial institutions, healthcare and non-profits with their content strategies. Now I can be there for execution, too.
3. Going global – as a marketers, I was always involved with bringing brands across borders. While I speak internationally, the lion’s share of my work has been US-based since I crossed over from the brand side. Having lived and worked abroad extensively, I’m looking forward to taking up global initiatives again.
4. The position – organizations are only just beginning to organize for content. Few are a forward-looking as to put an executive in charge of content initiatives. I’ve researched this trend, and am excited to be one of the very first (of many to come) senior content marketing executives out in the wild.
5. The organization – I believe in Teradata’s product, and in its people. The company is consistently called out as one of the best in its field, most ethical, and most sustainable companies in the world.

So wish me luck, keep in touch, and I’ll keep you posted on insights from the inside.

Oh, and don’t think for a moment this move with move me out of the traffic. I fully intend (and am fully supported by my new employer) to keep speaking, writing, and staying thought-leader involved in all things digital marketing and media.

Nothing matters more in search engine optimization than content. Nothing.

And, while search visibility is a high priority for most brands (and as SEO providers rebrand themselves as “content marketing” companies), in a survey I conducted of more than 75 very senior marketing executives, most at Fortune 500 brands, SEO ranked dead last on their list of content marketing priorities.

Yet when it comes to having a well-optimized Web presence that’s visible to search engines, content is the alpha and omega of those efforts — more specifically, written content. Search engines can only crawl, index and understand text — not images, videos, podcasts, photos or any other type of graphic or multimedia content.

That’s not to say you can’t optimize non-text content marketing elements.

Keywords Are Key

Strong, optimized written copy is the most critical part of any SEO initiative.

But before the first sentence, tagline or headline are written, first venture into the heart of search optimization by identifying those keywords and key phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for your website, articles, blog entries or other content initiatives, as well as for individual pages or specific pieces of content within a website or blog.

These are the words and phrases searchers use, not necessarily the ones you use back at the office when you’re talking with colleagues. Perhaps you’re a medical professional who bandies about terms such as “myocardial infraction.” The average Web searcher is more likely to seek information on “heart attack.”

The first step in the keyword research process is simply to brainstorm a list of the words and phrases a searcher might use to find your site or business.

The trick here is to be specific. Forget broad terms like “shoes.” Focus instead on “running shoes” or “wedding shoes” or “nike running shoes” or “black patent leather high-heeled pumps.” It can be helpful to ask outsiders such as friends, family, clients or colleagues what terms come to mind.

Once the initial list is in hand, the next step is to determine how useful these terms really are. That’s where keyword research tools come in handy. (Both Google and Bing offer free keyword research tools. They require you to first sign up for an advertiser account, but no worries — they don’t compel you to run ads to use the free tools.)

By running the list of proposed keywords through a keyword research tool, you’ll learn how many searchers are actually conducting searches for a given word or term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other analytical information. These tools can also make you aware of words not on the list, or synonyms.

This information should narrow down the selections to a final list of keywords. Plug these into a spreadsheet that helps you to visualize at a glance each word or phrase’s conversion rate, search volume, and competition. This list helps narrow your focus and concentrate on the most important terms for your content.

Don’t completely eliminate very broad terms such as “shoes” — this helps searchers get a general feel for the content. But it’s the very specific, targeted terms (“pink suede ballerina flats”) that attract the targeted traffic at the bottom of the purchase or conversion funnel.

The best keywords have:

• Strong relevance: terms for which you have content to support.
• Relatively high search volume: terms people actually search for.
• Relatively low competition: terms with a small number of search results.

Once you’ve determined which keywords to target, both for an overall content marketing initiative as well as for specific, smaller campaigns, it’s time to build content around those terms.

Bear in mind that search engines reward high-quality, original content more than virtually anything else out there. This is why content aggregation is fine (and relevant), but also why aggregation should almost always be regularly supplemented with well-written and researched original content.

A major way that search engine algorithms determine quality content is by examining how many links there are to specific pieces of content. Links can almost be considered “votes” vouching for quality content.

As far as search engines are concerned, this isn’t the most democratic process in the world: A link from a major metropolitan daily such as The New York Times is a higher-ranking vote than one from, say, a random tweet on Twitter. And links from sites that are semantically similar obviously make more sense — and therefore count more — than a link from something willy-nilly, say a site about politics linking to a page about Christmas cookie recipes.

One of the best strategies for getting people to link to you is, of course, to link to them.

Another approach is to follow relevant sites, blogs, online video channels and social-networking presences in your particular vertical and to comment on them, with appropriate and relevant links back to your own content.

Authoring articles and other types of content for third-party sites is also a valuable link strategy; most of these will have an “about the author” blurb that creates a link back to your own site or blog.

Internal links are also highly valuable, as links are what search engine spiders follow to find content in the first place. This is where site maps, tags, category pages, and well-considered taxonomies come in handy. They not only help visitors find relevant content, but help search engines find it, too.

Making content as sharable as possible is another valuable link-building strategy. It’s why so many sites contain those small icons encouraging visitors to “share on Facebook or LinkedIn or Digg or delicio.us,” or “tweet this.” Individually, social media links might not be as valuable as that New York Times citation, but many sites are seeing highly significant portions of their traffic originating from social media sites thanks to such efforts.

To this end, content authors should also be regarded as important link-building sources, particularly guest or third-party content contributors who can leverage links through their own websites or social networks to build links that benefit both parties.

Optimize Images And Multimedia Content

As stated above, search engines can’t “read” anything other than plain old text. They can’t “watch” a video, “listen” to an audio file, or assign a thousand words to a picture. So in order to optimize images and multimedia content for search, you have to create the words for the search engines.

What all these files types have in common is a need for clear, descriptive names or titles. These are not by all means the default name spit out by audio, video or image software — e.g., img230769.jpg. File names should be as descriptive as possible and match what the file represents.

If you’ve got a shot of an apple, for example, call it a “New York State Macintosh Apple” or “Ripe Harvest Orchard’s Macoun Apple,” not just plain old “apple.” For all a search engine knows, that “apple” could be a computer, or even a mobile phone.

Such descriptive names are not only found by search engine spiders, but often have the added advantage of appearing above, below or by the image itself, enhancing the user experience as well. Beyond any other optimization tactics, file names are accorded the most weight by search engines when it comes to ranking.

It should therefore come as no surprise that websites that regularly use multiple media files require a naming strategy or protocol to ensure consistency in the names used for graphics, audio or video.

After giving media files clear, descriptive names, don’t forget to add more descriptive text (or meta data) to the “alt” attribute in the file’s tag. Make it short and to the point, like the file name.

This is an opportunity to go a little bit broader. That New York State apple, for example, might be from Olsen’s Orchards, or have been a product of the 2011 harvest. Or perhaps this is the place to indicate it’s a sweet, crisp, delicious and nutritious apple.

Online merchants might want to use this field to add information such as a manufacturer, product category, or UPC code. Let’s say you sell DVDs online. The name of the media file, in this case a photo of the cover art, would obviously be the title of the film. The “alt” attribute might include the names of the actors, director, studio, genre, release year, and any miscellaneous information such as “Academy Award Nominee.”

Perhaps the media file in question is named “Lady Gaga on American Idol.” The meta data might refer to the specific contestant in the competition, the names of other judges, or list some of the singer’s credits so the video shows up on more general searches by her fans.

Keyword strategy, combined with content marketing goals, will inform what type of additional data are added in this section.

A caption adjacent to an image or media file helps search engines to “understand” what the file is about, because adjacent text helps search engines contextualize what they’ve found and determine relevancy. The goal here is to function much like a newspaper or a magazine by adding keyword-rich captions to files.

This way, even if someone’s been careless and named an image file “Bass.jpg,” the adjacent text and caption can help a search engine understand if the image depicts a fish, a musical instrument, or a particular brand of shoe. This approach can be broadened to optimize the entire page the media file resides on to further increase the depth of context and relevancy.

In the case of images, file type matters. Photos should be rendered in jpg format, logos should be gif files. The reason is simply that these are standard formats that search engines “expect” to find. Search engines assume a gif file has 256 colors, standard for rendering graphics such as logos, while photos are rendered in millions of colors.

And when using logo files it’s all-important that the file be named with whatever is in that logo. No search engine is smart enough to deduce a simple gif file represents the logo for Bank of America, Ikea or Acme Exterminating.

While it can be labor-intensive, posting an HTML transcript of the dialogue in an audio or video file goes extraordinarily far in terms of optimizing the actual content of these media files.

Given the nature of the medium, it’s best to keep these files short, optimally five minutes or less (particularly in the case of video). Cutting longer media files into shorter segments not only eases viewing, but also affords additional opportunities to optimize the content and to provide extra, spider-able links between episodes or installments. This is particularly helpful in the case of episodic videos or podcasts.

Quality Matters. So Does Specificity

It’s not just content that reigns supreme in SEO — it’s quality content. Google’s own published guidelines on the topic say in essence that anyone hoping to rank well in search should write for their own visitors and users, not for the search engines themselves. The company is putting its algorithms solidly behind this recommendation.

In recent years we’ve seen “content farms,” websites that churn out mountains of garbage content to game the search engines and rise to the top of organic search results, plummet, and in many cases even disappear from search rankings.

Creating a lot of garbage is, of course, cheap and easy. Creating — and sustaining the creation of — high-quality content requires thought and investment (particularly when everyone else is trying to do it, too).

There are plenty of good reasons to keep content interesting, informative, entertaining, engaging, witty, useful, well-written and well-presented. There are dozens of reasons to have a strong taxonomy, descriptive and compelling headlines, tags and other organizational attributes. Now you can add search engine optimization to that list, too.

You may be creating and publishing the best content on the Web — but what does that matter if no one can find it?

This post originally published on MarketingLand.

If you’ve been around digital marketing since the Pleistocene Epoch, which correlates roughly with the mid-1990s, you’ve doubtless noticed a trend. Whenever a new channel or medium appears — and appears to have staying power — marketers’ first instinct seems always to be: throw a teenager at it.

During the Web 1.0 era, businesses were literally hiring the senior vice president’s 15-year-old nephew to build the company website. After all, he knew HTML. When email was ascendant, the first email program managers were a mere notch above summer interns. Search, social media — the operative fallacy is that these channels are for the young, and therefore only the dewiest of candidates are qualified to tackle them. The kernel of truth inside that fallacy is that newer channels are poorly understood, marketers (and the C-suite) are reluctant to allocate budget, so they take baby steps — with babies – and staff that may have tactical proficiency but are lacking in business experience, a strategic approach, an understanding of business goals, and overall maturity.

Now that web development, email, search, and social have developed into fully-fledged disciplines, they often have their own departments, staff, and oversight.

Content marketing? Not yet. Although without content there can be no paid, owned, or earned media, content doesn’t have a formal home in most organizations. Heck, 70 percent of organizations that practice content marketing don’t have a documented content strategy (according to my research, and corroborated by numerous other surveys). Without a formal strategy, there is rarely a budget, an org chart, or an infrastructure for content.

And this gives rise to another wave of amateurism. Too many organizations still subscribe to the “hire an unemployed journalist” school of content marketing. The reasoning is that this low-rent ink-stained scribe can churn out blog posts at a regular cadence, perhaps even thought-leadership pieces and some marketing copy.

I’ve got nothing against journalists — having been one myself for many years — but literacy and a flair for writing isn’t enough. This “content associate” (as these positions are often called) hasn’t been trained in marketing and too often doesn’t understand the core business they’re working for. Ideas such as personas and brand voice are alien to them. Recently, I was regaled with the story of a meal-delivery start-up whose in-house blogger not only wasn’t producing copy, but flat out confessed to having little interest in food, dining, or nutrition as a topic.

Even those organizations lucky enough to land talented, interested writers aren’t going the distance. Content isn’t text alone. Increasingly, it’s visual, and audio-visual. It requires the talents of editors, videographers, and graphic designers. If content is embedded in or reliant on apps, it can also require developers. The content price tag has just shot up considerably from that out of work journalist, hasn’t it?

Business will soon leave the era of content managed by barely-past-their-teens practitioners. Content will be formalized and institutionalized. Organizations are on the verge of realizing no content equals no email, no search, no website, no social media, no PR, and no advertising. All these are channels and containers for content.

Content is growing up. Budgets and organizational structure must and will rise accordingly.

This post originally published on iMedia

Organizations are finally getting the memo: They need a clear, cogent, documented and well-communicated content strategy to govern their content marketing efforts.

My research (at Altimeter Group), corroborated by that of several other studies, indicates that currently 70 percent of companies practicing content marketing lack a documented strategy. But thankfully, this is slowly changing as the need to align content with actual goals, processes and procedures comes into focus.

What are the steps to outlining that documented strategy? The following is a list of my asks the moment I’m brought into an organization to help them develop a content strategy road map.

The first, and most critical part, is goals. What is content trying to achieve? What are the business reasons for creating and publishing content, and how are these goals aligned to broader company priorities?

This critical first step is determining the big “Why” of content. Without the why, there can be no strategy.

Part 2 may be secondary, but it’s of equal importance. It answers the question “How?” People, process, governance, tools, technologies, assets — all of these and more must be present and accounted for, aligned and communicated to numerous stakeholders. How is ongoing, but adheres to a broad procedural schema.

In order to determine Why and get to the How, these are my “Day One” requests when beginning a content strategy engagement.

List Of Tools & Technologies

What tools do you use to create content? To publish it? To store, archive, share and retrieve it? To optimize and measure it? What other tools do these tools have to play nice with?

This list might include Web or social analytics tools, SEO or SEM software, CRM solutions, marketing automation, even intranets and telephony software.

No tool or technology is an island anymore, so a holistic, 360-degree consideration of technology — what’s used today and what’s planned for deployment in the future — is essential.

Content Audit

A content audit is a painstaking, exacting exercise that many would be only too happy to skip. But you can’t.

If you don’t know where you are, you can’t chart the journey forward. A content audit is both a quantitative and, more importantly, a qualitative analysis of all the content for which your organization is responsible.

In order to conduct an audit, you’ll need a list of all your public-facing online properties, from websites to social media. When I conduct an audit I want to see your email marketing, your ad campaigns. I even (this surprises many of my clients) want to examine offline collateral, perhaps that big annual report or research study undertaken annually or semiannually.

It’s not enough to just have at the content itself. I’ll also request access to analytics software (Web, social, email, and so on). The purpose of an audit isn’t just to evaluate whether or not I like your content. I want to see if it’s being seen, found, used, shared and amplified — or not.

A good audit (they vary by purpose and type of engagement) is a 50-point diagnostic. They’re very deep and reveal often-surprising insights, not just about the content itself, but also requirements for the processes and technologies to create and sustain the flow of content. The goal is to define gaps and problems, as well as to identify strengths, and develop specific recommendations for improvement.

Stakeholder Interviews

The stakeholder interview is the most interesting part of developing a content strategy.

I’ll ask for a list of 10 to 15 stakeholders for in-depth interviews on content needs. What are their goals? Their wants and needs? Their vision of process? It’s usually up to my client to identify the stakeholders I’ll interview, but I don’t want all of them to be senior executives. I also want to speak with the techies, the creatives and tacticians to get a pragmatic, from-the-trenches perspective.

I don’t want to interview groups larger than two to three people (otherwise some will clam up), and I don’t want a senior executive present at all my conversations (self-censorship can be an issue).

While stakeholder interviews aren’t a democratic process, really asking people what they want and need around content can be incredibly revealing, and unveil very interesting levels of consensus.

There are, of course, other asks dependent on the size, scope and purpose of a content engagement strategy. But for anyone approaching their organization as a client in need of a content strategy, these three starting points are mandatory.

This post originally published on MarketingLand

To market effectively requires a strategy, but a simple fact that eludes many marketers is that you are allowed to change the strategy. I hadn’t realized how intractable strategy is perceived to be until a few recent calls with clients, as well as a student writing a PhD thesis on content marketing, left me shaking my head. All expressed reluctance to commit to a documented content strategy lest priorities, processes, technologies, or other resources change. What then? Strategy is, after all, inscribed on stone tablets, Ten Commandments-style, when it’s documented. Or so the belief seems to go.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. In fact, this misbelief may be precisely what underlies the fact that 70 percent of organizations that practice content marketing don’t have a documented content strategy. Not only does my research as an analyst point to that statistic, but that 70 percent is corroborated by virtually every study out there.

Strategies can, and do change. They have to. That’s where sustainability comes in. Media consumption patterns change, messaging changes, goals shift, customers change, and so do products. Target audiences might shift, new products are introduced, old ones changed. Budgets rise and fall.

There are a zillion and one reasons why a content marketing strategy can — indeed, will — change. Yet for some reason, marketers believe that once a strategy is established, it’s set in stone, immutable, and unalterable. In the rapidly shifting landscape of digital marketing and media, it’s essential to establish a strategy — to know why you are doing what you’re doing and how that goal will be achieved.

But that in no way precludes frequents checks, shifts, tweaks, and adjustments to stay on course. That’s how marketing becomes fluid, agile, sustainable, and successful.

How, why, and when should a content strategy change? Changes can be large or small, but the following are a few of the many reasons strategy should be reexamined, reevaluated, and re-jiggered to address priorities at hand.

Metrics/KPIs/optimization

What metrics and KPIs are important to gauging the success of a content strategy? Sales are an obvious choice, but there are a panoply of other KPIs that will take on greater or lesser significance as a strategy, as well as organizational priorities, evolve.

Content audit

Audits must be conducted periodically, ideally at least twice per year, to inform content strategy. Audits address what’s working, what’s not, and where gaps exist and how they might be filled.

Products/services

As offerings (and offers) change, so too will content strategy. Shifts might be seasonal, event- or launch-driven, or perhaps a new product line appeals to new customers with different needs, wants, and habits. If the organization itself isn’t static, content strategy will never be a set-it-and-forget-it box to tick.

Audience

Who comprises the target audience? Where are they online? Have they switched their alliance from one channel or platform to another, either in aggregate or by persona? Are personas and buyer profiles changing? What about their needs and wants? These and similar questions help to inform one of the most essential components of a content strategy: defining, and finding, who that content is supposed to reach and to influence.

Channels/formats/media

Ten years ago Instagram and Twitter weren’t part of anyone’s content strategy. They didn’t exist. Mobile was a department, not part and parcel of digital. Video, for many, was a nice to have, not a must-have. Shifts in platforms and the overall digital landscape necessitate periodic reevaluations of content strategy.

Resources

This can include tools, technology, personnel, budgets, processes — anything it takes to get content done. Content strategies don’t just define the goals content is intended to achieve, but also the procedure, processes and governance required to get there. Changes in resources necessitate changes to the overarching strategy.

This post originally published on iMedia

The foundation of content strategy is goals. Without knowing why content will be created and published — to what end, for whom, where, and how — content marketing is at best a spurious, ad hoc activity.

Yet when my colleague and partner-in-research Susan Etlinger and I sat down around a year ago to discuss the state of content measurement, we quickly realized growth in that sector is nowhere near commensurate with the overall growth of content marketing. This lead to research into what KPIs marketers should be working toward and measuring for in content, the subject of our latest research report titled Content Marketing Performance: A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact (free PDF download).

Content can indeed lift sales, but it can achieve so many more measurable, revenue-linked goals associated not only with marketing, but with other business areas, from product development to customer service.  Our research outlines some of these KPIs, but goes further in that it helps marketers determine not just what to measure, but how to measure it.

Following, the key recommendations that resulted from our research:

Measurement must be the foundational principle of content strategy

In fact, there is no content strategy without measurement strategy. Before embarking on a content initiative, irrespective of medium or platform, it’s important to know what you want to achieve. Is it to drive more awareness? Build an audience? Encourage people to convert? Reduce call center expense by deflecting appropriate queries to a digital channel? Each requires different metrics — for content, yes, but also to calculate whether you have achieved your goal. Set and prioritize goals and desired outcomes, develop KPIs to track these, and measure and iterate constantly.

Every measurement strategy must focus on business outcome

Content metrics can be notoriously volume- or vanity-based, rather than outcome-based. This means that counting likes, shares, or organic reach in and of itself likely doesn’t demonstrate business value. To do that, you need to show a business outcome, using the compass in Figure 1. For example:

1. An increase in reach can show audience growth.
2. An increase in shares (preferably combined with other measures of engagement) can show engagement.
3. To understand whether a content strategy has affected brand reputation, you must have a benchmark, measure sentiment, and look at the before and after. It’s critical to have an analyst who can perform this correlation with an eye to other confounding factors. For example, a “viral” video may be immensely popular, but if there is a product recall, pricing change, or other factors, it may be difficult or even impossible to assess the impact on the business overall.
   

Know your metrics and your data

Some signals, like click-through rate, are clear and relatively easy to assess. Measuring sharing behavior requires that an analyst assess multiple platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. — to define what “sharing” actually means. Compounding this issue is the fact that some of the most valuable data — for example, private Facebook data, or Snapchat data — are not available for privacy reasons. So analysts must take that into account as they assess impact and create defensible benchmarks as part of their process.

Be realistic about organizational capabilities and tools

Because content performance data comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, from various platforms, it often requires a great deal of manual intervention to analyze properly. This is simply a reality of the market today; content vendors often supply their own analytics dashboards, while social media tools also serve to measure content reach, resonance, and other (content-specific) outcomes.

It is not uncommon to require a mixture of web analytics, content measurement, marketing technology, and social media tools to assess the impact of content. As a result, content strategists should work with their analysts to develop a realistic (short-term) and aspirational (long-term) measurement strategy. Otherwise, content strategists and business leaders will inevitably become frustrated, while analysts will burn out from all the manual work needed to deliver reports.

This post originally published on iMedia

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Content has become pervasive. It fills websites, social media, advertising and collateral. It comprises words, images, audio-visual material, infographics and a host of other form factors. As media and channels proliferate, so too does content.

Yet, according to recent research I conducted, measuring content effectiveness remains the single most daunting task facing (content) marketers.

On my content marketing maturity model, applying measurement and strategy to content initiatives is the third of five levels of maturity.

But measuring only for sales and leads – or simply relying on volume or vanity metrics such as “likes” and “views” that contain little innate business value or meaning – undermines investments in time, media, employees, technology, and vendor relationships.

Content Metrics That Matter (Beyond Sales)

Together with my colleague Susan Etlinger, whose area of expertise is data, measurement and analytics, I’ve been researching content metrics that matter beyond those applied solely (and rather bluntly) to sales.

Clearly, sales matter. But as participation in content initiatives increases and permeates outward-facing and non-marketing divisions such as human resources, customer service and support, product groups, research and development, etc., which we call the Culture of Content, the metrics and KPIs that are applied to content correspondingly shift.

Non-marketing divisions don’t directly support sales but instead have their own success criteria. To encourage participation in content initiatives company-wide, content marketing must support these other departments’ goals that clearly, while not always in a manner that ties directly to sales, are of high value to the organization. Demonstrating this value only occurs through measurement.

In the course of our research we repeatedly found most organizations are at a loss for how to create and deliver useful, insightful and business-building content, and they’re equally puzzled about what KPIs to put in place to measure content benefits.

Content Strategy Is Fundamental

Content strategy would solve for this as strategy is, after all, founded on establishing goals and benchmarks for content marketing, then selecting the tools, processes and governance that will best achieve these goals. But since most companies still lack a documented content strategy, they also fall short in knowing what they want to  (or can) measure. Additionally, they lack the tools and expertise to understand how to measure it.

Our recently-published research (free with registration) is a portfolio of case studies and examples of metrics applied in ways that illustrate the less-obvious benefits of content across a variety of scenarios: e.g. improved customer service, operational efficiencies, marketing optimization, etc. The reality is that content can support these goals, and all these goals can, in turn, correspond to monetary value.

It surprised both of us how much we had to struggle to find these case studies and examples, which underscores the underdeveloped state of content metrics.

Content Marketing Is Becoming As Integral To Business As Is Social

In 2011, Susan developed  “A Framework for Social Analytics,” in which she introduced “The Social Media Measurement Compass.” We updated that graphic in our current report to apply to content. The intent then was to demonstrate the many ways in which social media could deliver value for the business.

Now, the market has evolved to a point where content — which resides not only in earned media channels, but also in owned and paid media — has become a separate entity that is integral to organizations’ ability to scale their communication efforts.

Beyond marketing and sales, content can play a critical role in improving brand health, augmenting the customer experience, reducing cost and risk, and many other goals of the business.

Here is the updated compass, illustrating the key value propositions of a well-crafted content strategy.

Each point represents an opportunity for business-centric measurement; that is, measurement that directly ties to business objectives and strategies. For example, operational efficiency metrics may refer to cost savings, risk, crisis management, or even productivity improvements.

These six points are by no means exhaustive, but provide a starting point for organizations eager to derive deeper insights from their content performance.

In many cases, the same “raw” metrics can be used as ingredients to answer many types of questions. In other cases, there are business or strategy-specific metrics that require data from other tools or sources, such as web analytics, business intelligence, market research, email marketing or CRM systems.

This post originally published on MarketingLand

My latest research, Content Marketing Performance: A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact is hot off the presses (virtually speaking, of course). Please feel free to download a copy from the link above.

Here’s how my esteemed colleague Susan Etlinger introduced our project today, cross-posted from the Altimeter Group blog:

About a year ago, Rebecca Lieb and I had a series of conversations about the emerging need for analytics that would allow content and marketing professionals to evaluate the success of their content strategies.  We discussed the predominance of “volume metrics” in content performance analysis, and the focus on linking content to conversion.

As we’ve both written before, that can be a significant challenge, for reasons having to do with attribution, browser complexity, and the complexity of human behavior in the buying cycle. So we wanted to take a look at some other ways that content marketers can gauge the success of their efforts.

The resulting report, “Content Marketing Performance: A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact,” is a look at six ways that content marketers can measure value. If that sounds familiar, it is: the social media measurement compass—which looks at brand health, marketing optimization, revenue generation, operational efficiency, customer experience and innovation—is relevant to content’s value as well.

You’ll notice that some of these case studies only include a few metrics; that is partly because some companies are reluctant to share their “secret sauce,” and because we are still in a very nascent state for content measurement. For that reason, we enriched the case studies with other metrics we’d recommend, so you can see how we might approach a measurement strategy to support specific business objectives.

 We hope this report starts a conversation on content measurement, and will be happy to link to substantive posts that discuss the issues in detail. As always, thanks for reading, and we hope you find value in this document.

– Rebecca Lieb and Susan Etlinger

I’d also like to take a moment to extend deep thanks to Senior Researcher Jessica Groopman and Research and Marketing Manager Christine Tran for their unflagging support on this project.

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A content audit is the cornerstone of content strategy, which governs content marketing. The aim is to perform a qualitative analysis of all the content on a website (or in some cases, a network of sites and/or social media presences — any content for which your organization is responsible).

Why perform a content audit, which admittedly is a painstaking and exacting exercise? Lots of reasons.

First and foremost, an audit helps determine if digital content is relevant, both to customer needs and to the goals of the organization. It can help answer important questions: Is content accurate and consistent? Does it speak in the voice of the organization? Is it optimized for search? Are tools and software, such as the content management system (CMS) up to the task of handling it?

Essentially, an audit helps assess needs, shape content governance, and help determine the feasibility of future projects.

Create A Content Inventory First

Start by recording all the content on the site into a spreadsheet or a text document by page title or by URL. Organize this information in outline form, i.e. section heading, followed by sub-sections and pages.

If it’s an e-commerce site, these headings and sub-headings might be something like: Shoes > Womens Shoes > Casual Shoes > Sandals > Dr. Scholl’s. An informational company website’s headings might look more like: X Corporation > About Us > Management > John Doe.

Content strategist Kristina Halvorson recommends assigning a unique number to each section, sub-section and page (e.g., 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc.). This can help tremendously in assigning particular pieces of content to the appropriate site section. Some content strategists also color-code different sections on spreadsheets. It gets down to a matter of personal preference, as well as the size and scale of the audit in question.

It’s also highly recommended that each section, sub-section or page contain an annotation regarding who owns each piece of content, as well as the type of content: text, image, video, PDF, press release, product page, etc. Is it created in-house? If so, by whom? Is it outsourced (third-party content, RSS feeds, blog entries, articles from periodicals)? Who’s responsible for creating, approving and publishing each piece?

The resulting document is a content inventory.

Conducting The Content Audit

Once you’ve created a content inventory, it’s time to perform the content audit. This will essentially involve digging into the quality of the content.

As you go through the audit, it’s helpful to assign a grade or ranking to every page – e.g., a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “pretty crappy” and 5 being “rockstar fantastic.”

Following are the questions you should be asking about each piece of content:

1. What’s It About?

What subjects and topics does content address? Are page and section titles, headlines and sub-heads promising what’s actually delivered in the on-page copy? Is there are good balance of content addressing products, services, customer service, and “about us” information?

2. Is It Accurate & Up-To-Date?

In other words, is the content topical? Are there outdated products, hyperlinks, or outdated and/or inaccurate information lurking in nooks and crannies of the site? As mentioned above, localities, employees, pricing, industry data and statistics and other information change over time. In addition to checking for factual accuracy, content that is outdated should be identified as “update/revise” or “remove.”

3. Does It Support Both User And Business Goals?

Many stakeholders feed into a company’s digital presence: senior management, sales, marketing, PR and customer service (to name but a few).

Different divisions may be trying to achieve varying goals in “their” section of a site or blog, but fundamentally all content must very gracefully serve two masters: the needs of the business and the needs of the customer.

This means, for example, that calls-to-action must be clear, but not so overwhelming that they get in the way of the user experience. The content audit grades content on its ability to achieve both of these goals while staying in balance.

4. Are People Finding And Using The Content?

This is where web analytics comes into play. What types of content — and what pages in particular — are the most and least popular on the site in question? Where do users spend time, and where do they go when they leave? Are they taking desired actions on a page? What search keywords and phrases bring them to the site?

It’s not enough that content is simply there. The data can reveal what’s working (and what’s not) and help inform a strategy that supports more of the types of content users prefer.

5. Is It Clean And Professional?

Is page copy consistent in tone? Are spelling, punctuation and grammar consistent and correct? Are abbreviations and acronyms standard? If the site has a style guide, is it being followed? Are images captioned in a consistent manner, and properly placed/oriented on the page? Do hyperlinks follow any predesignated rules (e.g., open a new page in a separate browser window)?

6. Is Content Logically Organized?

Does the site contain tacked-on pages that don’t follow navigational structure? Does the overall navigation make sense? Are there redundancies, such as a site that includes a “Personal Finance” section in the top-level navigation, then again lists that section in a sub-menu under the heading “Money & Careers”?

7. Does The Content Have A Consistent Voice?

Every brand or business has a distinct voice that expresses its personality. Serious, irreverent, scholarly, authoritative – all are valid, but the tone, language and mode of expression must be a fit and must be consistent with the brand. This step evaluates the content’s tendency to spill into multiple personality disorder.

8. Are Basic SEO Elements In Place? 

Review the page’s title, keywords, metadata, headings and image tags.

Are target keywords and phrases used on the page? Are page descriptions and metadata employed appropriately? Are images and multimedia files captioned, and is metadata employed to make them search-engine friendly? Are headlines optimized for search?

Search engine optimization begins and ends with content, so evaluating to what extent content conforms to best practices in search is an essential part of an audit.

9. What Content Is Missing?

Conducting a content audit focuses so much attention on what’s there that it’s often too easy to overlook what’s not there. An essential step in any audit is therefore to identify weaknesses, gaps and content needs.

A site may be rich in information on how to order, for example; but, are issues surrounding shipping and order fulfillment adequately addressed? Is the press/media section strong on press releases, but weak on photos and video offerings? Does the company blog address company issues heavily, but general industry trends not at all?

What’s missing speaks volumes about the forward direction of a content strategy.

Use Your Findings To Identify Needed Changes/Actions

This is where the rubber hits the road. It’s not enough to produce a giant spreadsheet. The goal is to define gaps and problems, as well as to identify strengths, and develop specific recommendations for improvement.

This post originally published on MarketingLand

Todd Wheatland just published a very in-depth audio interview with me that he conducted for the Content Marketing Institute late last year.

It’s not like me to post an interview with myself on my blog, but this one’s unusual in that I open up quite a bit personally, and discuss my path from film critic to digital media analyst.

You can give it a listen here (since I can’t figure out how to embed it).