As content marketers, it’s our job to engage our audience, build brand awareness, and drive interest in our company’s products and services. But to truly maximize content value, you need to have a way to measure your content’s impact.

The analytics are crucial for providing insight into the value of your production. With the right tool, you can track metrics like organic traffic, reader engagement, and content conversions to understand how your assets are performing.

This data can help you make data-driven decisions to optimize your content strategy. So, why is organic traffic so important? What does it mean when your audience spends more time on your articles engaging with the piece? How does this translate to business results?

Let’s dive in and explore how tools like Contently’s Content Value Tracker can help you optimize your content for maximum impact.

Content Value in Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic

Organic traffic and paid traffic are two primary ways to drive traffic to your website or blog. Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes from search engines or other sources without direct payment.

In contrast, paid traffic refers to traffic that comes from paid advertising, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. While both types of traffic have their place in a content marketing strategy, there are some key differences between them.

One of the primary benefits of organic traffic is that it can be more cost-effective in the long run compared to paid traffic. With organic traffic, you can rank for high-value keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business without paying for each click. This can result in a higher return on investment (ROI) over time.

Organic traffic can also help build brand credibility, as users trust organic search results more than paid ads.

On the other hand, paid traffic can provide more immediate results compared to organic traffic, as it allows you to target specific audiences with precision and generate traffic quickly.

Paid traffic can also be a useful tool for promoting time-sensitive or seasonal content, such as holiday sales or limited-time offers. However, paid traffic can also be expensive, and the results are often short-term, meaning that you need to continue paying for ads to maintain traffic levels.

Overall, the decision to focus on organic traffic or paid traffic in your content marketing strategy depends on your goals and budget. While paid traffic can provide quick results, organic traffic has long-term benefits and can result in higher ROI over time.

By understanding the differences between organic traffic and paid traffic, you can make an informed decision about how to allocate your content marketing resources.

Contently’s Content Value Tracker

https://player.vimeo.com/video/486097536?api=1&h=4f775112d0

Contently Analytics and Content Value Tracker Overview from Contently.

Contently’s analytics dashboard provides a comprehensive solution for measuring your content’s organic traffic, audience engagement, and freelancer productivity. One of the key features of the dashboard is the Content Value Tracker, which allows you to measure the impact of your content on your business goals.

The Content Value Tracker uses a proprietary algorithm to assign a dollar value to each piece of content based on its performance. This allows you to track the ROI of your content marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.

Our analytics suite shows content’s full impact down to the dollar — and it all starts with our Content Value Tracker.

Our proprietary algorithm calculates what your organic search traffic is worth to your business every month based on how much it would cost a competitor to replicate your success through paid ads.

With dollar values for SEO Traffic, Average PPC, and Net Value compared to other publications in the Contently platform, this approach captures how well you’re reaching your audience at the crucial research stage in the buying cycle, building the expertise, authority, and trust that Google’s algorithm values most.

But that’s not all: Contently’s analytics features help you optimize content performance across the entire marketing funnel. You can drill down to story-level data for topics, formats, traffic sources, and more.

Overall, the Content Value Tracker enables marketers to optimize their content strategy based on organic traffic data. By identifying top-performing content and improving SEO, marketers can increase organic traffic to their sites and achieve their business goals more effectively.

For example, if you find that a particular blog post is driving a significant amount of organic traffic, you can use that information to create more content on similar topics to attract even more traffic. Additionally, by monitoring search ranking data, you can optimize your content to rank higher for specific keywords and drive even more organic traffic to your site.

Analytics, Content Value, and You

Content marketing analytics is a crucial aspect of any successful content marketing strategy, and the Content Value Tracker is an excellent tool for measuring the value of organic traffic.

Using the insights provided by the Content Value Tracker, marketers can make data-driven decisions that can help them achieve their business goals more effectively.

Whether it’s creating more content on popular topics or optimizing existing content to rank higher in search engine results, the Content Value Tracker enables marketers to make informed decisions that can have a significant impact on their bottom line.

Overall, if you’re looking to maximize the value of your content marketing efforts, it’s essential to have a robust analytics tool like the Content Value Tracker in your arsenal.

By leveraging the insights provided by this tool, you can create a more effective content marketing strategy that drives organic traffic, builds brand awareness, and generates leads and revenue for your business.

To learn more about Contently’s analytics, reach out to schedule a demo. We’d be happy to show you how your organization can showcase content value.

The post Realize the Value of Your Organic Traffic With a Content Value Tracker appeared first on Contently.

Engagement content metrics are a powerful way to gain deeper insights into our content’s performance and determine whether or not it’s having the desired effect. These metrics measure how well users interact with content, such as how long they spend on an article, how many shares it receives, or which sections of a page are clicked.

By leveraging these types of metrics, you can gain invaluable insights into what resonates with your target audience and what doesn’t. Engagement content metrics can also help you determine the best times and formats for distributing your content, as well as which topics generate the most interest.

Metrics help us make data-driven decisions to improve our strategies. Without metrics, content marketing efforts can become directionless and ineffective, wasting time and resources. So how do you know which ones are most important for your goals?

Why Engagement Content Metrics Matter

The shift towards engagement as the best metric for measuring consumer sentiment and brand effectiveness can be attributed to several factors. Engagement content metrics such as likes, comments, and shares provide a more comprehensive view of how audiences are interacting with your brand and what you produce.

Engagement content metrics measure brand sentiment and affinity, identify what resonates, and begin an authentic relationship-building process.

Audiences are actively engaging with content rather than simply consuming it. So engagement is a clear indicator that audiences are interested and invested in the content and the brand behind it. By tracking engagement content metrics, content marketers can gain insights into how audiences are responding to their content and their brand, developing an understanding of brand sentiment.

Positive engagement metrics are an indicator of brand affinity, while negative engagement metrics can signal issues that need to be addressed. Engagement content metrics provide a more accurate reflection of the customer journey.

Content marketers can track engagement metrics at different stages of the customer journey to understand how audiences are interacting with content and how it is influencing their decision-making process. This helps them optimize their content strategies to improve engagement and ultimately drive conversions. By focusing on engagement rather than revenue, content marketers are prioritizing a positive customer experience, building brand loyalty, and improving overall business performance.

This authentic relationship is better than multi-touch attribution back to revenue because it showcases that customers are interacting with a brand at different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Overall, the shift towards engagement as the best metric for measuring consumer sentiment and brand interaction reflects the importance of building authentic relationships with audiences, understanding the customer journey, and prioritizing the customer experience.

Improve Engagement Through Customer Experience

So how do you improve engagement? Start with personalized customer experiences. When customers feel valued, appreciated, and understood, they are more likely to return to the business and recommend it to others. Here are some reasons why providing a positive customer experience is essential for improving engagement:

• Builds trust and loyalty: When a customer feels valued and appreciated, they are more likely to trust the business and become loyal to its brand.
• Increases customer retention: When customers are happy with their experience, they are more likely to return to the business and make additional purchases. This not only increases revenue but also helps to build a loyal customer base.
• Improves brand reputation: When customers have a positive experience, they are more likely to share their experience with others, leading to positive word-of-mouth marketing for the business.
• Encourages customer feedback: When customers feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to provide feedback on their experience, which can be used to improve the business’s products, services, and overall customer experience.

Why Engagement Tells a Better Story Than Revenue

Personalized and relevant content can be a powerful tool for brands to improve engagement with their target audience. Here are some examples of how brands can use personalization to improve customer experience and enhance engagement metrics.

• Personalized email campaigns: Brands can use email marketing to send personalized messages to their subscribers based on their previous purchases, interests, or behaviors. For example, a clothing retailer can send an email with personalized product recommendations based on the customer’s previous purchases, or a beauty brand can send personalized tips and tutorials based on the customer’s skin type or beauty concerns.

• Personalized product recommendations: Brands can use data analytics to offer personalized product recommendations to their customers based on their browsing and purchase history. For example, an online bookstore can recommend books to customers based on their reading history or wishlist, or a streaming service can recommend movies or TV shows based on the customer’s viewing history.

• Personalized social media content: Brands can use social media to create personalized content for their followers. For example, a food brand can create recipes for their followers based on their dietary preferences or cooking skills, or a fitness brand can create personalized workout plans based on the customer’s fitness goals or activity level.

• Personalized landing pages: Brands can create personalized landing pages for their website visitors based on their search terms, referral source, or demographics. For example, an e-commerce brand can create landing pages with personalized product recommendations or promotions based on the customer’s search terms or referral source. In addition, account-based marketing strategies target specific companies or clients to create more personalized experiences for high-dollar target accounts.

• Personalized chatbots: Brands can use chatbots to offer personalized assistance to their customers based on their queries or preferences. For example, a travel brand can use a chatbot to offer personalized travel recommendations based on the customer’s budget, destination, or travel style, or a customer service chatbot can offer personalized solutions based on the customer’s issue or feedback.

Brands can use personalized and relevant content to improve engagement by offering customized experiences that cater to their customers’ preferences, interests, and behavior. By using data analytics and technology, brands can create personalized content that resonates with their target audience and builds long-term relationships with their customers.

Engagement Content Metrics vs. Revenue Attribution

Engagement metrics and revenue metrics are both important measures of a brand’s performance, but they serve different purposes and have different limitations. Let’s explore how engagement metrics compare to multi-touch attribution calculations. Which provides a more comprehensive view of the customer journey?

• Engagement metrics: Engagement metrics measure how users interact with a brand’s content or social media accounts. They include metrics such as likes, comments, shares, followers, and click-through rates (CTRs). These metrics help brands understand how users engage with their content and how effective their marketing strategies are in building brand awareness and engagement.
• Revenue metrics: Revenue metrics, on the other hand, measure how much revenue a brand generates from its marketing efforts. They include metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS), customer lifetime value (CLV), and conversion rates. These metrics help brands understand the financial impact of their marketing strategies and how effective they are in driving sales and revenue.
• Limitations of revenue metrics: Revenue metrics have some limitations compared to engagement metrics. For example, they don’t capture the full picture of a customer’s journey or the impact of non-financial factors such as brand loyalty or customer satisfaction. They also don’t account for the indirect or long-term effects of marketing strategies, such as the impact of brand awareness or word-of-mouth marketing.
• Comprehensive view of the customer journey: Engagement metrics can provide a more comprehensive view of the customer journey by capturing the interactions that users have with a brand before and after they make a purchase. For example, engagement metrics such as likes or shares can indicate brand loyalty or advocacy, which can lead to repeat purchases or referrals. Engagement metrics can also help identify areas for improvement in the customer experience, such as identifying common pain points or areas where users drop off in the customer journey.

Engagement metrics and revenue metrics both have their strengths and limitations. While revenue metrics are important for measuring the financial impact of marketing efforts, engagement metrics can provide a more comprehensive view of the customer journey and help brands understand how users interact with their brand beyond just making a purchase.

By using a combination of engagement metrics and revenue metrics, brands can gain a more holistic understanding of their marketing performance and develop more effective content strategies.

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The post Why You Should Prioritize Engagement Content Metrics appeared first on Contently.

For years, I have been chasing the capsule wardrobe.

That chase to streamline your wardrobe is similar to the quest to create and measure evergreen content. Compared to trend-based commentary, evergreen content provides consistent value to your audience (and a reliable stream of traffic to your site). For most B2B companies, it’s the most effective way to create content that makes an impact.

However, few of the brands I’ve worked with personally have a dedicated and repeatable process for ideating, creating, and measuring evergreen content. I understand why—it might seem more appealing (especially for folks with journalism experience) to react to industry trends and be part of the current conversation. But these people are missing opportunities to future-proof their content destinations.

What’s needed is a strategic approach, which includes a way to measure the success of this very specific type of content.

Finding the evergreen score

My solution to this challenge is the evergreen score. This metric helps marketers understand and amplify their most timeless content pieces.

While no content marketing metric is a magic bullet, this one focuses on impact after the first wave of engagement on your piece has come and gone. Buzzsumo, one of our trusted data providers, calculates evergreen score by taking the sum of all backlinks and social actions associated with a piece 30 days after publication, comparing that result to other content in a similar timeframe.

While they keep the exact details of their formula under wraps, you can preview your own content’s evergreen scores in a free trial on their site. Clients of Contently’s Strategy Services programs have access to this metric through our internal tool, StoryBook, but you can also make an approximation of your own with some Google Analytics customization.

When you rank your own content by evergreen score, your top performers will often be different from what you’d expect, especially if your current goals focus exclusively traffic or attention time. For example, on The Content Strategist, “What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing?” is one of our most evergreen pieces, even though it hasn’t received as much traffic as something like “The Latest Insights on Gen Z.”

Keeping up with the times

After calculating your own evergreen scores, you can (and should) take a few actions. First, update your most evergreen pieces. There are comprehensive guides on how to do this well from an SEO perspective, but any opportunity to add new, helpful information, or update statistics is always a safe bet. It’s also a good idea to check that structural elements are in place—like clean, descriptive headers and helpful images.

Secondly, you can use your successful titles to predict what new evergreen opportunities might be worth exploring. Our most evergreen pieces on TCS define and demystify marketing concepts or provide in-depth instruction on how to improve your content program. I might pitch something like “What’s the Difference between Brand Voice and Tone” because the format (“What’s the difference”) has evergreen potential for us, as does the topic of voice and tone.

Generally, explanatory pieces and well-structured lists make good candidates. If you’re up for a challenge, you can also analyze the most evergreen content of your competitors and your favorite publications to get an idea of what’s performing in your space. Sorting by evergreen score is a great way to filter out the noise from blue chip publications that cover news but also provide really good evergreen content too (like TechCrunch or NerdWallet).

Calculating evergreen score won’t solve all of your content marketing challenges, but it can help clarify where you’re already providing lasting value for your audience. If you use it well, you might just build a ‘capsule’ content collection of your own.

The post Evergreen Score: The New Content Metric You Should Care About appeared first on Contently.

Over 700 people signed up, and we got a ton of questions. We tried to answer them all, but I spent a little too long breathlessly explaining how to work with compliance teams. So for this month’s Ask a Content Strategist column, I thought I’d dive into some of the best questions that went unanswered.

As a content team of one, I struggle holding onto the roles of creating the strategy, campaigns, assessment, graphics, etc. to avoid the chaos that always ensues. What should my primary focus be? And what are absolutely necessary technologies to invest in?

-Paul, Colorado

It’s never fun being a one-person team. No one realizes you’re responsible for 1,000 percent more than just creating content. And there’s usually that one guy who thinks he could do your job way better than you. (You may think you can write, Chad. But you can’t.)

When you’re a one-person content team, you’ll always be tempted to focus on just creating more. More content. More campaigns. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s much easier to just focus on the rote tasks in front of you.

But to be successful, you need to take a step back and focus on your content strategy. You’re one person. You can’t do everything. So it’s all about honing in on the few channels and tactics that are getting you the best results.

This is essentially the 80/20 rule. If you’re getting 80 percent of your leads through email and SEO campaigns, but spend the vast majority of your time trying to maintain an always-on social and blog cadence, you’re wasting time and effort.

Focus on the channels that work best for you, and then put all of your energy into creating a few pieces of high-quality content specially crafted for those channels.

As for the technologies you’ll need: It depends. A B2C startup focused on paid social video has a much different stack than a B2B company focused on email campaigns and partner webinars. But there are a few must-have buckets.

Analytics: The biggest key to growing your program is showing results. If you’re B2B, you need to show that your content drives leads. If you’re B2C, you need to show that people who engage with your content come back and buy something within a 90-day window.

Google Analytics is free, awesome, and can track both engagement metrics as well as basic conversion pathways. But to provide a full picture, you’ll need a good CRM as well. For most smaller companies, HubSpot is the easiest to plug in and get working.

Calendar and workflow: These tools are important for your own sanity and organization, but they also provide transparency to other teams you work with (sales, demand gen, accounts, etc.) so that they can know what content is coming. A lot of Fortune 2000 and fast-growth companies invest in a content marketing platform like Contently, but if your program isn’t ready for that yet, you can use a more general workflow/calendar tool like Asana.

Social media management: The free version of Buffer is awesome for smaller companies. For enterprise companies, Sprinklr and Spredfast are client favorites.

CMS: For owned content, you need a strong CMS that you won’t spend half your time troubleshooting. WordPress remains the easiest platform to design, maintain, and use. Plus, there are tons of great plug-ins to create different content formats (interactive, quizzes, parallax scroll, etc.) and templates that boost conversions and sharing.

What’s an example of a “big rock” asset in the consumer content world?

-Woo, San Diego

Usually we refer to “big rock content” in a B2B context—white papers or e-books that then get repurposed in a bunch of different ways: blog posts, infographics, videos, social posts, and interactive content that relies on the foundational research in the original asset.

But B2C companies create big rock content too—just look at Spotify’s “Year in Music” research, which it remixes as everything from personalized playlists to 100-foot-high billboard ads. There’s also Red Bull’s epic music and extreme sports documentaries, which the brand slices into “social cuts” specially designed for their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

One of our customers, Silversea, creates big rock “Collections” that serve as travel guides for specific destinations around the world. Each component within them—like these awesome Planet Earth-esque travel videos—serves as a divisible piece of content.

Just look at that freaking walrus!

What are the most effective ways to track ROI for each individual piece of content you produce?

-Sam, San Diego

Here’s the truth: I really do not recommend trying to quantify the hard ROI of every individual piece of content that you create, as opposed to your content program as a whole.

It will lead you down a terrifying rabbit hole in which you have to match up a ton of web analytics and CRM data, and you’ll spend 90 percent of your time making those calculations instead of, you know, actually making cool stuff.

That being said, here’s an in-depth guide on one way to measure the full ROI of individual content pieces. And here are some key metrics you can look to in order to identify top performers.

Conversions: Track which pieces of gated content generate the most leads. For instance, in 2015, I wrote a series of five content marketing playbooks for Contently. They were extremely popular, generating tens of thousands of leads.

Each playbook was classified as an individual campaign, which we then tracked as the lead source in Salesforce. If a deal closed as a result of a playbook, it got credit. As a result, we were able to attribute millions of dollars of revenue from that campaign. (I’m still waiting for my cut…) And guess what? We’re rolling out an updated series of playbooks in the coming months to try to recapture the magic.

SEO: Three things I love about SEMRush—it’s cheap, easy to use, and tells you the monetary value of your primary organic keywords. If a piece of content is ranking for a high value keyword and driving a ton of traffic, this is an easy way to show hard ROI for an individual piece.

Here are some other ROI guides that should help:

The content metrics that really matter.

How to show the ROI content has on your brand.

One last piece of advice: Find the friendliest marketing or business analyst in your company, bribe them with booze and cupcakes, and get them to set up an automated dashboard that pulls in your most important KPIs each month. (In all likelihood, they already use Looker, Domo, Tableau, or Google Data Studio.)

It’ll mean the difference between looking like this at the end of every month…

Versus looking like this instead…

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

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