Content measurement that matters: Not everything that can be counted counts

Content measurement that matters Not everything that can be counted counts Hilary Marsh Content Company, Inc. Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

or, Is Your Content Working?

Content is working if it achieves its goal

In fact… Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, effective content.

If you measure, you can • make better decisions about content format • use the most effective wording • understand what to create more of, what to stop

Agenda 1. 2. 3. 4. Three kinds of content Success criteria Measuring effectiveness Best practices and traps

Takeaways 1. Make sure content has the right goals 2. Measure wisely 3. Use what you’ve learned Photo by Lucie Dawson on Unsplash

Three kinds of content Photo by Elena G on Unsplash

Promotional Informational Core • home page/newsletter/ social media blurbs • promotional video • information about the webinar/ registration page • takeaways • help content the webinar itself

Promotional content Examples Considerations • Blurbs for landing pages, home page, e-newsletters, social media • Ads • Many blog posts, videos, infographics • Testimonials • Press releases • Always exists as a pathway to something else • Sometimes substitutes for informational content • Usually written by marketers

Informational content Examples • Event description • Registration page • Details about a program, product, or service • Help content • How-to information • Summary of a long PDF document • Case study Considerations • Descriptions of offerings • Often written by content professionals: communicators, writers, content designers

Core content Examples • • • • • • Report Webinar Advocacy initiative Clinical practice guideline Course Conference session presentation Considerations • Related to the organization’s mission/purpose • Often created by subjectmatter experts, not professional writers

True success: All three levels Promotional Informational Core Succeeds when it sends people to informational Succeeds when people proceed Succeeds when people use or act on the content

5 whys 1. Why do you want to publish this content? 2. What is that latest news? 3. Why do you give those grants? 4. Why do you want people to know about this information?

1. Because we want to share an update about our program 2. That we have given grants to several more organizations 3. It’s part of our mission, to improve society 4. To increase donations, supporting our mission

Measuring effectiveness for each kind of content Photo by patricia serna on Unsplash

Overview General measurement process 1. Create measurable success criteria for each piece of content 2. Identify how to do the measurement, and do it 3. Communicate the results, use them to inform future content decisions

“Return on Content” http://bit.ly/return-on-content-worksheet

Where to start if you don’t know the goal 1. Benchmark – – Collect metrics for current content (baby steps) Compare with expectations 2. Set preliminary goal – Desired outcome – what would “better” look like? 3. Measure, share, and learn/evolve

Effectiveness for promotional content

Overview Sample promotional content goals • Get the right people to read the informational content or use the core content/offering • Get more people to share the informational or core content • Increase awareness of the offering • Generate more leads • Increase the number of people who discover the informational or core content from external search engines • Fuel more word-of-mouth activity per enthusiast by giving customers easy-to-share narratives and pictures (Forrester, ROI of blogging white paper, 2007) • Change audiences’ perception of the organization

Effectiveness for promotional content Did it get those results? • Did the right people read the informational content or use the core content/offering? • Did more people share the informational or core content? • Did you increase awareness of the offering? • Did you generate more leads? • Did you increase the # of people who discovered the informational or core content from external search engines? • Did you fuel more word-of-mouth activity per enthusiast? • Did you change audiences’ perception of the organization?

Example

Example ’ e e t tttttttt t t 1’1’ t 1’ t 1’1’ t 1’ tt t 1’ 1’ 1’ t t t 1’1’ t 1’ tt t 1’1’ 1’ 1’ 1’1’ 1’1’ 1’1’ ttt 1’1’ 1’ 1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’ 1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’ t1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’ N\ 1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’1’ :::51 The 2012 campaign was responsible for approximately 100,000 smokers quitting permanently and helped prevent 17,000 premature deaths. One million people have quit smoking because of this campaign Even with counseling, medication and other expenses to help smokers quit, Tips still costs FAR less than the $50,000 benchmark for cost-effective health programs. Source: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, December 2014. Learn more at www.cdc.gov/tips

Best practice Sometimes less is more • Increased social media engagement by 1.83% by posting less content. • “One year, only 25% of our award press releases were picked up. So, the following year we only issued releases for strategic awards and achieved 78% pick up. We also saved time not writing releases that had no media pickup.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lets-talk-communications-measurement-rachel-tolhurst/ • Reducing the content on a page and having only one call to action made a huge difference in click-throughs – Jeff MacIntyre

Effectiveness for informational content

Overview Key questions for measuring informational content • • What impact/outcome do we want this content to achieve? If we’ve published similar content before, how effective was it, and what would “better” look like? Or to put it in some different frames: • What is the content’s job? • What is its KPI? • What is its OKR? Yes, I mean THIS specific piece of content — success is different for different pieces

Make your KPIs specific KPI How to evaluate What you’ll learn Reduce calls to the call center by 5%. Numbers from call center Indicates improvement in your audience finding the information they need online. Web analytics Increase percentage of completed transactions after visits to transactional areas of the site by 10%. User testing Users can accurately predict what they’ll find on a page after scanning page content for 5 seconds 80% of the time. How well customers can use the website to initiate and complete tasks. Increase average duration of watching video content by 25%. Web analytics https://contentstrategyinc.com/using-kpis-to-measure-content/ Whether headings and visual cues are descriptive and effective, and support users in finding the right content for their needs. Whether users are interested in your video content, and where they are dropping off.

Informational content goals when it’s about core content • Get the right people to read or use the core content/offering – Register, download, act, etc. • Ensure that the information about the offering is clear and adequate • Decrease the number of phone calls to customer service about the offering • Ensure that the audience finds the offering compelling and that its relevance is clear

Goals when information is the destination • Make sure the content is written to be findable and usable • If task-focused, make sure the audience can accomplish the task easily and quickly • Ensure that the audience finds the content trustworthy and that its relevance is clear

Example Sometimes less is more Site redesign required a news article for each update on the home page • Volume of news articles they published overwhelmed the staff • Viewership to each article was relatively low Fixed the CMS, published fewer news articles, and…

Success Success vs. value • More people apply to a university • The right kind of student applies • More people sign up for a charity event • 500 potential investors attend a product launch Example Value • The right people apply • The right kind of student accepts/enrolls • Raising 50% more donations than previous • 30 people invest https://www.slideshare.net/SarahRichards2/confab-2017

Best practice Numbers can tell part of the story… • Did people read the content or watch the video all the way through? • Did people take the next step you wanted them to take? • Did the same user search for the same terms another time?

Best practice More than numbers “Pageviews aren’t the goal. Your goal is the goal.” — Mike Powers, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Best practice

Effectiveness for core content

Overview Core content goals • Business goals – Solve an audience pain point – Address an organizational goal (revenue, e.g.) • Passion/purpose for creating the offering in the first place • Outcome, not activity

When to define the core content goal? we usually think about the goal here we actually know the goal here

Outcome, not activity 1. Okay to start big: • Make the world a better place • Change a scientific practice • Enable families to resolve conflicts 2. Work to make the outcome specific enough to be measurable “Measure observable microgoals — activities that are indicators of their outcomes” – Stacey Barr https://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/how-tomeasure-non-profit-outcomes/

Make each goal measurable • KPIs • May involve multiple systems and techniques – User interviews, post-event surveys, path analysis, etc.

How to actually measure? • Ensure that systems work • Gather data – ideally, include historical data from similar content • Especially for core content, goals may need to be inferred from other data points • Content testing – A/B, heatmaps, eye tracking • Qualitative too – surveys, feedback • Next steps people take: exit %, search again, etc.

Unnecessary content 401k information Answer to an employee question about 401k Who is in charge of the information about this program? Accountability Example

Effects may evolve A/B testing headlines Revenue up, but headline quality down Reputation, customer satisfaction, subscriptions down https://simplicable.com/new/impact-evaluationisfaction, and subscription rates.

Measure what matters Photo by Camila Ferrari on Unsplash

Connect with outcomes • Member retention/customer loyalty • Audience satisfaction with the organization (end of the journey) • Impact – Did the law pass? – Did people change their practices? – Did the audience change their behavior because they were more knowledgeable?

Use the right data to tell stories • Tailor internal messages about insights to the audience – Execs need different takeaways than content creators and owners

Don’t measure what doesn’t matter

Vanity metrics • Visits alone – “HITS” • Time on page • Net Promoter Score • Sentiment

Not every measurement is quantifiable Photo by Melanie Weidmann on Unsplash

Use what you learn Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

• Would your audience respond more to different headlines, styles, formats? • Would promoting with different channels or timing improve results? • Are you, indeed, measuring the right things?

Takeaways 1. Make sure content has the right goals 2. Measure wisely 3. Use what you’ve learned Photo by Lucie Dawson on Unsplash

“Return on Content” http://bit.ly/return-on-content-worksheet

Thank you! Hilary Marsh hilary@contentcompany.biz https://contentcompany.biz @hilarymarsh on Twitter Newsletter: https://contentcompany.biz/newsletter/ Community: https://content-strategy.com Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash