You scramble to explain how that blog series probably helped a few deals move forward. You gesture vaguely at that product explainer video that likely nudged some prospects along. You say “engagement” a few times. And the CFO nods — but not in the good way.

Marketing budgets have plateaued at 7.7% of company revenue for two consecutive years, according to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey. At the same time, the Content Marketing Institute finds that fewer than half of B2B marketers say their organization measures content performance accurately.

Flat budgets and fuzzy metrics aren’t a sustainable combo. To keep your seat at the table (and your budget intact), here are five plays that tie content to revenue in ways your finance team will actually care about.

1. Track Every Pass on the Field

If you’re only tracking last-click conversions, you’re missing half the game. Most content does its best work long before someone fills out a form by tackling intangibles — planting ideas, building trust, and answering questions a simple product page just doesn’t cover.

To show that impact, start mapping each asset to a stage in the buyer journey: Awareness, Consideration, or Decision. Then connect those stages to your CRM or marketing automation platform, so when a deal closes, you can see the full content trail behind it.

How to start:

• Look back at the past few quarters of content
• Assign a stage to each piece (gut instinct is fine to start)
• Add those tags to your lead or opportunity records going forward

This doesn’t need to be perfect or overly technical. Even a simple tagging system can surface patterns — like that one product-focused blog that keeps showing up in early-stage deals. Once you spot an asset like that, you can double down on its strengths or repurpose it for sales enablement.

2. Graduate to Multi-Touch Scoring

Content doesn’t win deals alone and rarely wins on the last touch. Think about the webinar a customer watched before even talking to sales —  those moments matter. And they don’t typically show up in a last-click report.

That’s where multi-touch attribution comes in. It spreads credit across the full buyer journey so you can see which pieces actually pull their weight, even if they don’t get the glory of the final click.

There are plenty of examples of this process in action. Take, for instance, NineTwoThree Studio. The product design and engineering firm — a Contently client — used time-decay attribution to link AI-optimised articles to ChatGPT-driven sessions and generated more than $1 million in qualified leads within 90 days. The firm now ranks in the top results for 92% of its target AI queries.

You don’t need a team of data scientists to get started. Tools like GA4, Adobe, or even a well-structured spreadsheet can help you test different models, like:

• Linear, where every touch gets equal credit
• Time-decay, where newer touches get more weight
• Position-based, where you emphasize the first and last touch

Simple first steps:

• Grab six months of data from your CRM or analytics tool.
• Try out a basic model — even just assigning 40% to the last touch, 30% to the one before it, and so on.
• Compare it to your current reporting. Which pieces show up that you’ve been ignoring?

Chances are, a few early- or mid-funnel assets will suddenly look like quiet power players. And once you know what’s working, you can invest more strategically (and stop chasing disappearing clicks).

Contently’s analytics make this process even easier. Our Content Value dashboard automatically maps every asset you create on the platform to the buyer journey, and showcases how each piece contributes to pipeline, revenue, and retention. You can dig into performance by asset type, persona, funnel stage, or even custom goals, all without wrangling a mess of spreadsheets. Customers using this dashboard report seeing multi-million-dollar organic ROI and average audience growth of 40% in six months.

3. Trade Vanity for Value Metrics

Executives aren’t looking for vibes. They’re looking for value. So it’s time to swap out vanity metrics like views, likes, and bounce rates for numbers that actually tie to revenue.

Two great ones to start with:

• Cost per Assisted Opportunity: how much you spent on a content cluster, divided by the number of deals it helped close.
• Net SEO Value: a rough estimate of what your organic traffic would’ve cost if you’d paid for it via search ads.

Here’s a quick back-of-the-napkin formula:

Net SEO Value = (Organic Sessions × Avg CPC) – Content Costs

If that number beats your paid search ROI, you’ve got yourself a strong case for more investment in content — and fewer eyebrow raises at budget time.

The point of this exercise is to speak in a language your finance team already understands: efficiency, cost-per, and net return. When content starts showing up in those terms, it stops sounding like a gamble.

4. Turn Data Into Boardroom Stories

If you want your content program to resonate in the boardroom, ditch the 10-tab deck and boil it down to one powerful slide per initiative — your “Money Slide.” It should include:

• One standout chart
• One clear headline
• One quote that brings it to life

Here’s an example:

 Headline: “Financial-literacy hub influenced $4.2M in Q2 pipeline — up 27% from last quarter.”
Quote: “This content made it easier to explain our product to clients.” — a relationship manager

This approach works especially well when showcasing cross-functional wins. Say your team localized hundreds of articles in a single day and saw a major bump in regional engagement. That’s a story. It’s also a great way to make future budget requests a lot less painful.

Here’s how one team turned a simple metric into a story that stuck: A leading financial-services enterprise recently localized 252 articles across 3 languages in one day, using Contently’s AI-powered workflow. 

5. Tighten the Feedback Loop

Attribution is an ongoing rhythm. Set a recurring time (monthly, quarterly — whatever works) to check in on what’s performing, what’s lagging, and what needs a second life. That could mean trimming underperformers, refreshing outdated blog posts, or chopping long videos into clips people actually finish.

Small tweaks. Big lift. And just in time for the next budget review.

These days, it’s not enough to say content works. You’ve got to show how much it works — in language your finance team actually understands.

So map every piece to the buyer journey. Use multi-touch models to surface your real MVPs. Trade vanity metrics for ones that tie to revenue. Turn your reports into stories that stick. And keep refining as you go.

Do that, and the next time someone asks what content has done for the business, you won’t even need to say a word — your slides will do the talking.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

1. What if we don’t have fancy attribution software?

You don’t need a new tool to get started. A basic spreadsheet with deal IDs, content touches, and journey stages is enough to start spotting patterns. Over time, you can layer in GA4 or your CRM’s native reporting — no data science degree required. 

Platforms like Contently can also help you scale when you’re ready by offering built-in attribution tracking, journey mapping, and cluster-level insights designed for marketers who want proof without pulling an all-nighter in Excel.

2. Our leadership team still wants last-click numbers. Now what?

Run both. Put last-click and multi-touch side by side to highlight what’s missing from the old model. Early- and mid-funnel content that gets ignored in last-click reports often looks a lot more valuable with context — which tends to win over skeptics.

3. How often should we review content performance?

At least once a quarter. Block time to audit what’s working, what’s slowing down, and where new opportunities are emerging. The more you build this into your rhythm, the easier it gets, and the faster you’ll have proof ready when budget season rolls around.

The post The Most Effective Ways to Tie Content to Revenue in 2025 appeared first on Contently.

To get those insights, you need to make use of the best marketing analytics tool for your goals. The features that tool needs will vary depending on what those goals are. It’s less about finding one tool with all the features listed in this article and more about seeing which of these components fit your needs.

1. A user interface you can actually use

Here’s probably the most important quality a content analytics tool should have: You can actually use it.

Some tools like GA4, the newest version of Google Analytics, offer a ton of powerful features. You can get nearly real-time insights into big-picture topics like what a typical user journey looks like or dive into granular information like how many viewers scrolled through at least 90 percent of the content on a sign-up form page.

Unfortunately for everyone who’s not an analytics expert, understanding GA4’s user interface can feel like trying to read a dead language. Luckily there are marketing analytics tools out there built with ease of use in mind — there’s been a lot of good things said about Plausible, for instance. That and similar tools make great options if you’re looking for something to tell you how your content is performing at a glance.

2. Audience analytics beyond the basics

Successful content marketing is all about crafting pieces specific to your audience’s needs, preferences, and motivations. Good luck doing that if you don’t know who your audience is, though.

That means you need a tool with a solid audience analytics component. Most website analytics tools can give you a basic overview about things like the age and gender of web visitors. If you’re using a customer relationship management platform, though, you can get extremely deep insights through tools like Salesforce’s Audience Studio. The better you design your buyer persona, the better content you can produce.

3. Info on user behavior and experience

A lot of content marketing analytics tools can show you user journeys and content funnels, letting you determine what pages your readers entered and exited. That’s important information, but trying to understand a user’s experience that way is like trying to visit a city by looking at it on a map.

You can get a user-eye view of how people engage with the content on your site by using tools with heat maps and user session recordings. Heat maps are just what they sound like – they show where users are scrolling, clicking, and engaging the most with your content. User session recordings can show you actual recordings of users navigating a certain page. That means you can see from their perspective exactly what’s working or not working with your content.

If you’re looking for website analytics tools specializing in these areas, check out Contently’s Docalytics tool. You can use it to not only optimize your case studies, white papers, or blog posts, but improve the conversion rates of your landing pages for gated content as well.

4. Competitive keyword analysis

You can’t stand out from your competitors if you don’t know what they’re doing. Some analytics tools have features letting you track how your competitors’ content is doing compared to yours based on different variables. That means you can see how they’re ranking for different keywords you’re targeting, as well as where they’re earning backlinks.

Based on this information, you can determine where the whitespace is for upcoming content, helping ensure your editorial calendar stays unique. You can also determine what battles are worth fighting when it comes to certain keywords or phrases you’re trying to rank for – some may just not be worth the effort.

5. An SEO strategy assist

The key to successful SEO content is, first and foremost, quality content. That doesn’t mean the technical side of things doesn’t matter. You’re going to need a tool that lets you see how your site is ranking for various keywords, gives you word count recommendations to make sure you’re not publishing thin content, and whether broken links are torpedoing your traffic.

The good news is you’ve got a lot of great options here. Contently offers a ton of tools for planning out your SEO keywords using cost-per-click insights, info on search volumes, and more. Most of the other big players in this space like Moz or SEMRush will let you get some basic info like keyword suggestions for free.

6. Breezy reporting capabilities

Like most of you, I’m sure, I find the most rewarding part of content marketing is making decks showing how different assets are performing. I love it so much and don’t find struggling with Powerpoint soul-crushing in the slightest.

For real, though, a lot of different content marketing tools can generate automatic reports or dashboards that are easy to understand and visually interesting. That lets you spend less time wrangling decks and more time on the valuable parts of your job.

7. Channel performance data

Audiences are scattered across so many different channels these days. LinkedIn. TikTok. X (yeah, still, I know). However, not every content marketing tool is suited for tracking how different pieces are performing on social media.

The built-in analytics available on individual social media platforms offer some info, but that can make it hard to get a consolidated view of how your content is doing across each channel. Platforms like Sprout Social or Hootsuite can help bring together multiple channels into a single view.

Wrapping it up

Finding the right content analytics tool is a process, and knowing what to look for will help you align your needs with a product’s offerings. Contently’s content optimization tools could be what you’re looking for. If so, contact us to set up a product demo.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs

What role do content marketing analytics play when building out individual pieces of content?

Analytics tools can do more than just give you the lowdown on what keywords to include in your copy. You can use them to develop a better understanding of your audience, which is the foundation good content is built upon. Done right, the best marketing analytics tools help you write content that people and search engines will love.

What are some actual examples of how I could use heatmaps to improve content?

Let’s say you’re looking at a heatmap and notice a bunch of people clicking on an image. This may indicate that these users are expecting that picture to be linked to a different page – and that they’re getting frustrated when their clicks do nothing. That’s exactly what we saw when using heatmaps to review content. Fixing this led to a better user experience.

Other than analytics, what are some of the best ways I can get to know my audience better?

Marketing analytics tools aren’t the be-all-end-all for developing a better understanding of your audience. Make sure you’re regularly reading reviews, conducting surveys, and monitoring social media to see who your readers are and what they’re talking about.

Are you ready to build a data-driven content strategy? Contently Analytics has you covered.

The post 7 Features the Best Marketing Analytics Tools Will Have appeared first on Contently.

As a content marketer myself, I felt the collective “Uggggh!” reaction that statement just triggered. And for those that don’t know why it’s so frustrating, let me clue you in. It’s because there is no way to calculate content’s impact in exact monetary terms.

Creating a Unique User Experience

Content is part of the user experience, and it plays a huge role in what marketers have coined “the buyer’s journey.” The problem? While it may seem obvious that everyone’s journeys are different, those individual journeys are also never linear.

Take, for example, your decision to buy a new couch. Maybe you have a brand affinity for a specific retailer, or maybe it’s your first apartment, and you’re shopping for furniture for the first time. Maybe you hated your old couch and want to try a new brand. Everyone has different experiences, so their journeys will be different.

Source: Angi’s List

Many times, consumers usually start their research online. What companies offer the size, color, and fabric that I want on my new couch? How are the reviews of the company’s furniture in general? What do people think about individual products? Is leather better than microfiber or cloth, for example? In this B2C example, after some online research, the customer (in this case, me!) will generally visit a store to help make the final decision.

This process may take weeks. It may take months. But one thing is for certain. Most people do not start by searching for “couch,” finding said couch, and clicking purchase. There’s a lot of customer interaction that goes on in between.

So, is all hope lost? Not necessarily. Let’s explore some ways you can measure your content’s value using innovative technology.

Utilizing Tools That Showcase Your Content’s Value

Your content team worked hard to develop content that connects your audience to your mission. You want to know how it performed, after all. By measuring content impact using tools built into your content marketing platform (CMP), you can identify the following:

• The total number of readers per piece and their engagement rate (how long they spent reading).
• Where your readership comes from (e.g., organic search, direct visitors, social media platforms, email ads or newsletters, internal visitors, etc.).
• Content value using the Contently Content Value Tracker, which measures the amount of money your brand would have spent on paid Google Ads to get the same amount of organic traffic achieved by each individual piece of content.
• Contributor performance, including total views, engagement, finish rates, and total minutes read for all the content they create.

Content Value Tracker

Contently’s analytics feature provides an innovative solution to 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 measures the total cost to acquire your organic search traffic and keyword rankings with Google Ads. This proprietary calculation quantifies the value of your organic content production, allowing you to demonstrate the costs saved by creating quality content optimized for organic SERP performance.

The next time your boss asks you how much your content is worth to the business, you’ll have a monetary value to provide. With the Content Value Tracker, you can:

• Quantify Your Success: Our tool calculates the value of your organic search traffic each month based on the cost you would incur to replicate your success through paid ads.
• Assess Long-Term Value: As your content program grows and you rank for more keywords, the Content Value Tracker captures the increasing value you deliver to your brand over time.
• Boost Your ROI: With these tangible results, you can track the ROI of your content marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to optimize your content strategy for better performance.

In addition, you can see your content value by topic pillar. Contently’s content strategy enables you to identify the pillar topics that are most important to your brand. In the CVT dashboard, you’ll be able to dial into the measurable impact your content is making by the content pillar.

Contributor Analytics

Contently’s analytics don’t stop there. In fact, this comprehensive content marketing platform offers incredible insights into your freelance team’s impact. In Contently’s proprietary Contributor Analytics section, you’ll see a list of all the freelancers you work with alongside a list of metrics for a particular date range.

The example below shows the last 90 days of performance from The Content Strategist’s Creative Marketplace contributors. The metrics include the total number of people viewing this person’s articles, the percentage of those people that engaged with the content, the average time spent on the articles, the percentage of people who finished the articles, and the total attention time given to this freelancer’s content.

When you expand on each individual freelancer, you can see these same metrics broken down by the individual content piece for a more granular view of the freelancer’s impact.

Docalytics

Successful marketing strategies require data-driven decision-making to understand how your audience engages with your content. Traditional metrics provide high-level insights, but long-form content like eBooks, white papers, and presentation slides often become an information black hole, with little to no understanding of how they perform after download.

What if you could go deeper? Imagine understanding exactly how your audience interacts with your marketing content and sales enablement collateral. That’s the power of Contently’s Docalytics.

Understand where readers are engaging on PDFs and leverage measurable insights that point to where readers are engaging most. Demystify the metrics around long-form content and create strategic optimization plans based on heat map data.

With Contently’s Docalytics, heat maps showcase where readers engage on a PDF, highlighting the most eye-catching content and providing marketers with the data they need to optimize their content for better performance.

Get even more granular with page-by-page analytics for engagement, total views, people, average time on page, and drop-off rate. This in-depth insight helps you understand where your content assets are most effective and where you can improve.

Contently’s comprehensive analytics toolkit enables content marketers to prove the value of their content through budget saved, analyze what topic pillars are performing the best, decipher which big rock content assets are delivering the best results, and how freelance contributors are performing against their peers.

Unlock growth, one piece of content at a time. Transform your strategy with Contently. Request your discovery call today.

The post Leverage Analytics to Prove Content’s Value in Impactful Ways appeared first on Contently.

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.

A few years ago, this expensive hobby motivated me to draft up a new year’s resolution to spend less money at restaurants. It went really well—all I had to do was drink enough espresso martinis with the meal to forget I even spent $150 in the first place.

I’m only kidding—don’t be like me and make vague new year’s resolutions because unsurprisingly, it’s about that time of year where nearly two-thirds of all resolutions have already been abandoned.

Both personal and professional resolutions have one thing in common: in order to stand a chance at success, they need to include measurable goals and a plan-of-action.

In the digital era, more and more companies are relying on data analytics software for their content analytics. With strategic content methodologies, intuitive engagement metrics, and a remarkable talent network, Contently helps these brands optimize their content to tell great stories and see quantifiable results that a lackluster new year’s resolution just can’t deliver.

If you’re looking to expand your content, you’re in the right place. Here is an inside look at five influential tech success stories from our flipbook of 47 Content Marketing Case Studies That’ll Inspire You to encourage your brand to make meaningful changes in the new year. 

1. How Dell Perspectives Grew Its Audience 200 Percent and Launched a Digiday Award Winning Content Site Through Bold Impact Storytelling

In order to reach the c-suite of tomorrow, Dell knew it had to target a younger audience with an emphasis on social impact stories. With Contently’s technology, editorial team, and freelance network, the tech giant was able to build a staff of writers of all races, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations to tell great stories—and tell them right. Dell tackles racial bias in tech, challenges facing women in STEM and LGBTQ+ telehealth issues, and boasts noteworthy growth as a result of focusing on the topics their target audience was passionate about.

2. How Document Analytics Optimized the Length, Quality, and Cadence of Microsoft’s Downloadable Assets

Microsoft wanted to track the performance of their content beyond clicks and open rates to determine if reader engagement was dependent on where they encountered the content. Using Contently’s Document Analytics heat maps and page-by-page engagement metrics, Microsoft was able to narrow down where its audience focused their attention, understand how behavior differed across channels and thus optimize their demand-gen stream.

3. The Strategy That Increased Gild’s Audience by 574 Percent

Gild not only wanted to introduce a new recruitment technology into the market, but also change the way people thought about hiring software by establishing a unique brand voice and creating a scalable content program. Working closely with Contently’s brand editors and a thorough content methodology, Gild increased its investment in talent and distribution to generate a 995% rise in total attention time and a 14% spike in engagement.

4.How Contently Built a Customer-Centric Content Strategy for Xerox

In order to change audience perception during its rebrand, theveteran B2B services company needed to scale content production and drive traffic to its website. Xerox partnered with Contently to develop a customer-centric content strategy that utilized our workflow infrastructure to scale content and deliver everything from expert interviews to e-books, case studies, social content, and SlideShare presentations.

5. How HotPads Increased Blog Traffic By 4,000 Percent Through the Power of Original Content

HotPads needed to ramp up traffic and grow a loyal, engaged audience of locally targeted personas with more high-quality, original content. To appeal to hyper-local markets, the company utilized the Contently network to find qualified, vetted journalists all over the country to cover assignments. Our talent managers helped HotPads source storytellers who collectively published over 270 stories last year and increased website traffic by 4,000% in just 7 months.

The post 5 Tech Brand Case Studies That Will Inspire You appeared first on Contently.

The real game-changer, however, was data. With hand history, you could build a perfect database of every opponent, tendency, and mistake. It didn’t take long for technology like heads-up display (HUD) to come along to track how someone gambled. Playing too loose in early position? Overplaying hands like pocket nines or pocket tens? The database would tell you all and encourage you to improve the leaks in your games. Instantly, my results improved and profits increased.

A few years later, in 2007, I decided to record every poker hand I played in a notepad. I was playing quite a bit at the time, so when I sat down at a table, I wanted to make sure I had a data-driven advantage. In addition to online games, I played roughly 10 tournaments that year, including a few events at The World Series of Poker. In total, I logged more than 1,000 live hands.

Looking back over a decade later, I’m not sure I made the wisest decision. Sure, it sounded great in the moment, but I didn’t improve as much as I hoped. The goal became to collect as much data as possible instead of trying to become the best possible player and make a little money. (I didn’t cash at the World Series, but the 2017 main event winner took home $8.15 million.) By the end of the year, I came to my senses and put the notepad away for good. Frankly, I found that data alone was not the solution. In order to be at my best, I needed to optimize my decision-making more than my data collection.

You may be surprised to hear me push back against data collection. I’m Contently’s VP of revenue marketing, which means my days are filled with Salesforce reports, spreadsheets, and discussions about ROI. To be clear, marketers need strong quantitative evidence to prove the value of their investments, especially to executives and boards of investors. My issue, though, is that many of them seem to be fixated on gathering all the data when they should really put all of their chips into finding the right data.

It’s easy to see why. Every marketing solution on the planet promises that it can measure the most important metrics for your business. The truth is some can; some can’t. Just like poker, the lure of both real-time data for better decision-making as well as databases for more serious analysis can be seductive. But when marketers pile their stacks with more software, they wind up drowning in data. A 2018 study from InsightSquared and Heinz Marketing found that “the more experienced a marketer is, the more likely they are to be dissatisfied with their marketing automation system’s reporting and attribution capabilities.”

Data alone was not the solution.

So what can you do to use analytics more effectively? The answer, gleaned from a few of our clients, is deceptively simple: start with one data point that shows clear business impact. That’s it. Walmart, for example, started to gradually get more budget and buy-in over the years when the editorial team discovered that customers who engaged with content had an average order size 7 percent larger than customers who went straight to shopping.

Of course, Walmart couldn’t coast on that one stat. As the editorial team got smarter about what content to create, there were other signs of progress—bounce rate improved by 22 percent, for instance, and time spent jumped by 30 percent. But the larger point is marketers can’t get hung up on showing success 10 different ways when that’s rarely plausible in the early days of a content program.

We love to talk about storytelling here. And while I’m definitely more of a numbers guy than a scribe, I do appreciate a good narrative. When I comb through those spreadsheets and calculate the ROI of our internal marketing efforts, I think of it as telling a story with data. It’s my job to build trust with my audience—without overwhelming them or straining my credibility.

There’s an interesting parallel here between content creation and content analytics. Brands have mostly adopted a quality-over-quantity mindset for storytelling. They’d rather prioritize one great e-book that has lasting impact than five blog posts with ambiguous results. For whatever reason, that level of thinking isn’t as widespread as it should be on the business side in a lot of organizations. But as brands start to understand what they can do with a few powerful stats, I bet that’s going to change.

The post Make Sure Data Isn’t Your Downfall appeared first on Contently.

When I asked my new boss for direction, he pointed to the freshly painted mural on the office wall. It read: “Those who tell the stories rule the world.”

“Just do your thing,” he said. “Tell awesome stories.”

Of course, content marketing is more complicated than that. You need to create content that will educate and inspire your target audience and drive meaningful business results. You need a smart distribution strategy and a mechanism for constantly optimizing your content. But if you don’t have great stories, you’ll fail.

For the past six years, I’ve been obsessed with understanding how storytelling can transform a business. While most people are looking for a magic solution or singular trick, the truth is that storytelling is an art and a science.

Contently co-founder Shane Snow and I recently wrote a book called The Storytelling Edge revealing all of our research and guidance—check it out here. Or better yet, learn more from best-selling author and content marketing luminary Jay Baer, who read the book and distilled his favorite storytelling lessons into a nine-minute video.

1. CMOs embrace content

Seventy-eight percent of CMOs at large companies think content is the future of their job.

2. Stories change everything

Just ask poet Jacques Prévert.

3. Stories impact your brain

When more of your brain is at work, there’s a greater chance you’ll remember what you’re processing.

4. Relatability is a great story

Relevancy is the killer app.

5. Fluency is a great story asset

The best stories are about more than vocabulary or structure.

6. Use the Sludge Report

Cut your story in half, see what happens.

7. Perspiration, not inspiration

Great stories aren’t a miracle. They’re a combination of hard work and optimization.

8. Measure average finish

If people don’t finish your story, it’s time to change something.

9. Measure email conversion

Is your work nudging people to ask for more?

10. Good enough is not enough

Mediocre stories fail, and paid distribution won’t fix that.

11. Culture matters

If you want to be consistent, your entire company needs to believe in the power of storytelling.

Check it out, and let us know what you think @joelazauskas, @shanesnow, and @JayBaer.

The post 11 Storytelling Lessons That Will Transform Your Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Yesterday kicked off my favorite event of the year. No, I’m not talking about SXSW Interactive, the annual tech festival where I attempt to turn myself into a beer-soaked taco. I’m talking about NFL free agency.

This year, the Moneyball approach to team-building has finally made its way to the NFL, and I’ve spent the past two days texting fellow data/football geeks at Contently with the advanced stat metrics for key signings. Advanced stats aim to tell you how good a player really is by going beyond the “vanity” stats like yards or touchdowns.

For instance, Player A might have 1,000 receiving yards simply because his quarterback threw the ball his way 150 times, while Player B had 800 yards, but accomplished that with only 75 targets. If you only looked at yardage, you’d think Player A was better than Player B, but in fact, Player B is far superior because he’s much more efficient. If your team is looking for a new wide receiver, you want to sign Player B and throw him the ball more.

And if you suspect I’m about to tell you that content marketers can learn a lot from this approach, well, you’re absolutely right.

According to a TrackMaven study, branded content production is up 35 percent, but engagement is down 17 percent. Some would say this is a sign that content marketing is getting less effective. But I’d make a different argument: A lot of marketers don’t do a very good job of evaluating their content and doubling down on what is effective.

Content planning for efficiency

As Contently’s director of content strategy, I talk to a lot of people eager to invest in content marketing. They’re often so eager that they want to plan their content for an entire year. This instinct comes from a good place, but it’s often a big mistake.

Instead, I advocate for them to plan three months worth of content based on comprehensive research on their audience’s needs and a white-space analysis of where content can make the biggest impact. Then, marketers can set themselves up for continuous success.

The first step is to tag your content by key attributes. This tactic lets you evaluate how different types of content perform. These are the seven we currently use on The Content Strategist:

• Content pillar
• Story format (article, infographic, video, etc.)
• Funnel type (top, mid, lower)
• Target vertical (finance, insurance, tech, etc.)
• Target region (U.S., Europe)
• Month/year
• Column (we organize our calendar through a dozen different content columns)

It helps to have a content marketing platform like Contently where you can add these tags in seconds when you create a new story. But it’s also possible to add them to a CSV of analytics data in Excel. Next, you want to sort your data using tags to compare production metrics to performance metrics. That way, you can see which stories are under- or over-performing against various KPIs.

Here’s an example from the Contently Analytics dashboard.

In this case, I’m using Contently’s analytics cards to compare production metrics and performance metrics side by side. In this screenshot from last year, I was able to see a few clear trends: Stories on the media underperformed (we’ve since cut those articles), martech stories performed well despite constituting only 6 percent of our content mix (they’ve since become a staple), and “content strategy” is our bread and butter (I know, shocking).

This approach with tags allows you to see which types of content drive results for your business and evaluate the tactics you should abandon. Comparing production and performance metrics closely is also key because you always want to track what’s generating the best results on a story-by-story basis.

The goal in content marketing and football is the same: You don’t want to waste money, you don’t want to waste time, and you really hope that no one gets a concussion today at work. Now if you’d just go ahead and share this story—or even click on one of the links above and buy some legitimately awesome content marketing software—it’d really help me hit the performance-based bonuses in my contract.

The post Production vs. Performance Metrics: The Key to ‘Moneyball’-Style Content Planning appeared first on Contently.

Twenty-four years ago, the PDF, or portable document format, was released. In the digital timeline, that’s practically the age of dinosaurs. Yet the PDF, which is the go-to downloadable format for most businesses, has barely changed since its prehistoric beginnings.

When Contently acquired Docalytics two years ago, we knew it had the potential to change how businesses use downloadable content. But I’m not sure we were aware of just how much it would become our secret weapon.

Nowadays, Docalytics is used across departments—from sales to accounts to marketing—to perform a variety of functions thanks to its unique feature-set. Let’s go over a few of them below.

1. Sales enablement

In the past, when a salesperson sent downloadable collateral to a prospect, that was the end of the process. The salesperson wouldn’t know if prospects read it, what they read, or if they even bothered to download it in the first place.

Thanks to Docalytics, however, our sales team can track all of this—and more. For example, here’s the engagement report for a pricing deck one of our salespeople recently sent to a prospect. (Each green vertical bar represents one page in the deck.)

By using Docalytics, we know that the prospect only spent about 40 seconds with the collateral and skipped right ahead to pages five and nine. Page five includes the pricing outline, so it’s not surprising that a user would jump straight there. But take a look at what the person did on page nine:

Ah ha! It looks like this prospect wanted to know more about our pricing for additional publications. Now armed with this information, our salespeople can tailor the next call with this prospect knowing this was a main point of interest, a huge advantage they otherwise would not have been able to access.

2. Embedding and SEO activation

If you’ve ever tried to embed a PDF in an article, you know how much of a headache the process can be. Major content management systems (such as WordPress) don’t come with the ability by default, requiring you to download and install third-party plug-ins before you can even think about including your latest whitepaper in a relevant article.

Docalytics makes the process easy. Every Docalytics file comes with an automatically generated iframe embed code you can copy and paste into your CMS’s HTML. Here’s an example using one of our e-books:

And yes, Docalytics still captures the same analytics from an embedded document as it does a normal document page. One more key activation feature: Docalytics also allows you to customize the domain URL, meaning our SEO team can easily make our documents SEO-friendly.

2. Consistency and control

Let’s face it, a lot of companies have trouble keeping track of all their digital assets. The decks, brochures, e-books, and one-sheets just keep piling up. And over time, some of those assets need to be updated. Without any sort of organized library or system, it’s a strain on everyone’s time to send out new versions whenever there’s a tweak or major change.

Docalytics has eliminated that headache for our team. Thanks to version control, when a file in Docalytics is updated, every single version of that file gets updated as well. We don’t have to worry about Cyrus on the account management team sending an outdated version of a product one-sheet.

Docalytics also allows for sharing control. So if there is a sensitive file that needs to remain private, we can easily restrict the ability of users to post on social or print it out.

3. Content optimization and strategy

There are plenty of tools out there that analyze the performance of articles and infographics. But when it comes to downloadable assets like white papers or e-books, trying to gather useful data can feel like going back to the dark ages.

That’s why Docalytics has been such a valuable resource in our ideation process. When evaluating e-books and other big projects (which are often the most expensive to create), we get to see deeper levels of engagement.

Last July, for example, we published “Content Methodology: A New Model for Content Marketing,” which has been one of our best performing assets in the last year. We know that, on average, people have spent three minutes and 50 seconds with the asset in the last quarter. Eighty-two percent were engaged (meaning they looked at it for at least 15 seconds). But only 25 percent of readers actually finished the report.

Most intriguingly, we know exactly which pages resonated with readers. In the image below, the purple squares illustrate the mouse activity on each of the report’s 35 pages, starting with page one in the top left corner.

As you can see in the heatmaps, pages 13 and 14 got way more activity than any other pages. Let’s take a closer look at those two.

Both pages have visual elements that directly address our methodology. On page 13, people couldn’t get enough of the visualization of our methodology or the sidebar on the right. On page 14, people loved the table connecting business goals with KPIs.

From this data, we can assume two things: One, people love visuals and “chunky” text like the sidebar. They make for easier reading and can help simplify complicated subjects. Two, our prospects want to know how to tie content, business goals, and KPIs together.

As we brainstorm future story ideas, the edit team now has evidence that points to a need for more visuals, tables, and sidebars when explaining key concepts. And the more we can produce, the more evidence we can gather to test our assumptions.

Our sales team, meanwhile, knows to focus on tying content with business goals when explaining our platform to prospects. And our marketing team realizes it should send more in-depth information on executing a content strategy in any sort of drip campaign.

4. Lead generation

Docalytics has one more tool up its sleeve: the ability to easily embed lead forms within an asset. And because of that heatmap technology I mentioned above, marketers know where to place that lead form in the asset for maximum impact.

Take our methodology report: Since we know most people spend their time on pages 13 and 14, and that most keep reading on from there, it makes sense for us to add a form after page 14. Docalytics makes that easy with our CRM integrations.

Voila, we’ve inserted a lead form—not too early, not too late, but in just the right spot. And that’s the beauty of Docalytics: data, optimization, and integration for a format that has traditionally had none of the above.

Read more about how Microsoft used Docalytics to transform its demand generation strategy.

The post How Docalytics Became Our Secret Weapon appeared first on Contently.

In a survey of 1,000 paid respondents, the content analytics firm found that people who spent more than a minute reading an opinion article more clearly understood its thesis, and more successfully recalled facts from the piece, than those who spent fewer than 15 seconds reading it.

The piece in question was an op-ed in support of the United States working with Iran to launch air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

When asked a series of multiple-choice questions, 81 percent of respondents who were engaged with the article for more than a minute were able to correctly identify the article’s overarching point, compared with just 42 percent of readers who spent fewer than 15 seconds reading it.

The group that read the op-ed for more than a minute also had greater success answering questions about factual details included at the beginning and the end of the piece.

Charts via Chartbeat

While it is not necessarily shocking that people who spent more time reading an article came away with a better understanding of its contents, Chartbeat’s latest study adds to a growing body of research supporting the use of attention time—also known as engaged time—as a measure of branded content’s success.

Previously, Chartbeat had found that readers who spent more time on an article during their first visit to a website were more likely to return the following week, while a Yahoo study found that more engaged readers had a better chance of remembering the brand associated with a sponsored story.

All of this serves to validate the decisions made by publishers like Forbes, Medium, and Upworthy to use attention time in how they evaluate and sell sponsored content on their sites.

Meanwhile, brands that publish content to their own platforms, like Coca-Cola and General Electric, can see the results of Chartbeat’s latest study as a reminder that it is not enough to merely drive people to a website or get them to look at a magazine. Both of those brand publishers, to their credit, use attention time as a key metric for measuring the success of their branded content.

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola and GE are Contently clients.)

Indeed, once visitors arrive at a website or open a print publication, it is crucial that they are greeted with stories that are truly worth spending time on. Otherwise the content will not have the lasting impact brands need to build strong customer relationships and drive sales.

Speaking of lasting impact, Chartbeat also found that readers who spent more time engaged with the op-ed were likelier to agree with the author’s opinion that the U.S. should work with Iran to combat ISIS.

While it’s possible that people continued reading specifically because they agreed with the author’s opinion (or stopped reading because they disagreed), these results are nonetheless something to consider for brands hoping to use content to persuade readers to adopt a certain perspective on an issue.

This is especially true for B2B and financial services brands, which frequently analyze complex ideas that readers may have difficulty understanding.

While there is still room for further research—we’d love to see a study charting whether readers with higher engagement times were more likely to adopt a different opinion on a topic from their previous position—it seems more clear than ever that the ability to hold people’s attention is an important component of successful branded content.

The post New Study Further Indicates Attention Time Could Be the Key to Branded Content’s Success appeared first on Contently.

Why 2015 Will Be the Year of the Chat App for Publishers and Content Marketers

Consider this: According to The Economist, even the papers of China’s propaganda machine are embracing chat apps as a powerful way to distribute their content. That goes to illustrate a larger point: Publishers and marketers simply can’t ignore the biggest revolution in social media for any longer.

The rise of chat apps as a content distribution platform is a multi-faceted phenomenon. In a country like China, it’s certainly the byproduct of restrictions and censoring placed on more traditional social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But more broadly, it’s a sign of how social media is changing, as mature social networks become oppressively large, particularly for younger people. Read it.

Why BuzzFeed Is Massively Underrated (and 9 Things Publishers and Brands Should Learn From It)

Contently co-founder Shane Snow is here with his first monster post of 2015. Shane’s been caught quite a few times subtly trash-talking BuzzFeed in recent months, but here, he breaks down why BuzzFeed is a master class in media genius that everyone in the industry needs to pay attention to.

BuzzFeed is easy to bash; a fast-rising rocket ship is a visible target. And they do produce some pretty silly content. But when you discuss the future of journalism, BuzzFeed always seems to show up at that intersection between crazy and smart where genius so often lies. What’s actually crazy is seeing most everyone try to copy BuzzFeed’s voice and play catchup to its trendy listicle format at one point or another—from old media, including the Times, to new media like Digiday, to opportunistic startups like Playbuzz. When I say that publishers need to “stop chasing BuzzFeed,” what I mean is that they need to stop imitating BuzzFeed’s style and pay more attention to the brilliant way it runs its business. Read it.

Is Medium the Next Big Frontier for Content Marketing?

Next in social media platforms you’re probably not paying enough attention to: Medium! The beautiful, engagement-focused blogging network is quickly becoming home to the most thoughtful and well-crafted content marketing out there:

What’s the appeal of Medium to advertisers like Marriott and BMW? It’s more publisher than blogging platform, offering a wealth of content and themed collections on every topic under the sun. By some accounts, Medium now receives 17 million monthly unique visitors, an increase of 4 million since March. The site’s clean design puts stories front and center, a content discovery system allows users to file posts under relevant categories, and a social media-friendly infrastructure helps posts generate shares. Read it.

The Top 5 Free Content Analytics Tools

Every publisher and marketer wants to up their analytics game, but not everyone has the budget to afford Chartbeat (or Contently! #selfpromotion). Fortunately, there are a number of free platforms that can help you get your content measurement game in gear. Read it.

This Puppy-Heavy Content Marketing Will Save You From Your First-Week-Back Stress

Listen, the first week back after New Year’s is hard on content marketers. Everyone in your company has plans to take over the world, which is awesome, except that such plans require 17 e-books by Valentine’s Day, which is can be, y’know, stressful. Especially when the only major questions you’ve had to contemplate for a couple of weeks have been Which pie should I eat next? and Do I actually like college football or am I just too lazy to get off the couch?

Luckily, I have a piece of content marketing to save you. Read it.

Oh, and I also have a picture of Beast, our newest office puppy. Just look at that puppy. How can you be stressed out while looking at that puppy?

Happy weekend! See you bright and early on Monday.

The post Content Catchup: Medium, Chat Apps, and More Big Content Marketing Trends for 2015 appeared first on Contently.

Presidential opinion polls are often tricky to understand because they rely on subjective measurements. Content strategist Marko Hurst believes gauging the candidates’ websites is less amorphous.

With enough data he says he can measure anything — including the effectiveness of presidential campaign content.

For this week’s Content Campaign ’12 Series installment, Hurst, a principal at strategic consulting firm Content Analytics, analyzed the health care sections of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s websites.

He compared the term “health care” because of its prominence in this election and because it’s not a branded term like ObamaCare or Medicare. In order to extract meaning from this comparison, Hurst ran a number of algorithms on open, third-party data available about the candidates’ sites, such as Quantcast to learn demographics and Google Trends to find online search trends

While Hurst uncovered a great deal from these exercises, the results can never compare to the discoveries possible using proprietary data, particularly the candidates’ own data measured against their personal strategies for their websites.

“If you have your own set of data, business intelligence, analytics, marketing, sales, etc,” Hurst said, “you can build out a full measurement program that can help an organization make data-informed decisions about content, user experience, research, ROI, budgeting, and more.”

Given what he was able to access in this situation, Hurst, who is the former content strategy director at Huge, was able to make a “baseline comparison” of the candidates’ relative success on multiple fronts, including page design, search engine optimization and audience.

We’ve included some of Hurst’s analyses below.

Page design

Obama:

Romney:

Winner: Romney

Using Attention Wizard and its eye-tracking algorithm, Hurst determined, with greater than 75 percent accuracy, where viewers’ eyes would go in the first five seconds of looking at these pages. Warmer colors show where viewers would pay more attention.

According to Hurst’s analysis, the main focal points on Obama’s page are on videos and images, with the warmest color currently on a little girl’s face — not the headlines or content. But without knowing completion rates — who is actually watching these videos all the way through —  you “can’t tell if Obama’s message is getting out there.”

Near the focal points on his health care page, Romney places data points about why his plan is better. Hurst says placing data points in these very visible areas is an effective way to get viewers to remember your message.

Search Engine Optimization

Obama:

Romney:

Winner: Obama

Overall both pages rated excellent (A+) for using best practices in search engine optimization, according to page reports by SEOmoz. Obama’s health care page comes up on the second page of a Google search for the term “health care.” Romney’s is on the fourth.

According to Hurst, for a non-branded term like health care, where there’s lots of competition from other websites, these page rankings are “very good.”

However, according to SEOmoz, Obama’s health care page ranks as the 139th top page on BarackObama.com, while Romney’s equivalent page ranks second on his main page.

Hurst said he couldn’t be certain of the reason without more data but said it could have to do with Obama’s site having multiple health care pages or different the candidates’ different audiences.

Audience

Obama:

                                       Romney:

Winner: It depends on the target audience

Hurst used Quantcast to measure the demographics of the candidates’ audiences, which it compared against the internet average demographics for North America. Obama’s website has much higher percentage of females and African Americans, whereas Romney’s dominates in the area of Caucasian males.

Perhaps surprisingly, considering how well Obama did with the youth vote in the last election, the number of younger people going to his site is below average.

But these are only findings the public can glean from readily available information. It pales in comparison to the revelations the campaigns can discover from mining the analytics on their sites.

The post Presidential Campaign Report: How Much Does a Website Reveal? appeared first on Contently.