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.

For Red Bull, breaking new ground in content is old hat. So when launching projects for the brand, how can content creators continue to find new territory for innovation?

According to Seile and Williams, it’s about relationships, setting the right goals, and watching for the right opportunities. That philosophy has led them to work with clients such as Teva and GoPro to create action sports content that is unique, fresh, and some of the best branded content on earth.

“At the end of the day, when you have real life in there, it creates its own drama,” explains Seile, who cut his content teeth at Red Bull before launching Become Co. in 2010, says. “You set the checkers on the board, but you have to be comfortable letting it play out. Consumers are really savvy, and they when know they’ve been played. They know if you’ve faked anything.”

Building great content with great relationships

The genesis story of many Become Co. projects centers on a conversation between the firm and an athlete. In the case of Dreamline, the race concept began with a chat with professional BMX rider Anthony Napolitan.

A similar conversation with professional mountain biker Paul Basagoitia turned into a project for Teva that chronicles Basagoitia’s unprecedented natural-terrain double backflip on a mountain bike. That project, like the aforementioned Dreamline, is a perfect example of Become Co.’s commitment to defying the standard athlete-meets-brand formula.

Whereas many brands see athletes as little more than passive money-making entities, Become Co. and the brands it’s worked with give athletes the opportunity to meet their own goals.

“A common theme among all BMX dirt bike riders is that contests were getting really scarce and didn’t showcase what the core of that sport truly was,” says Seile. “What we tried to do is look at that as an opportunity.”

Instead of hosting another run-of-the-mill contest with straight jumps, they took Dreamline through winding tree-lined trails, allowing the athletes to show off a level of skill they rarely had the chance to do otherwise. With Basagoitia, they helped him fulfill his lifelong dream of landing a double backflip.

Bold decisions like that are what get fans of the sport really excited—an excitement that extends to social media. Dreamline, Williams says, “takes over the entire BMX industry for a month, and you still see it being shared for months after.”

Metrics? What metrics?

Try to get Seile and Williams to talk about the success of their projects in terms of metrics is kind of like fighting a steep uphill BMX course, so to speak. Numbers rank notably low on their list of project goals.

“Being credible is the top of our list,” Seile says. “There are a lot of ways for us to promise X amount of views, but to us it just doesn’t make sense. There are little tricks you can use to get an extra ten to fifteen thousand views. Are those credible views? Probably not.”

Instead of luring online oglers with excessive wrecks or people getting hurt, Become Co. focuses on great storytelling, with the philosophy that such content will remain high-quality—and will continue to be shared—indefinitely. Those are the credible views, resulting from sincere interest in the story, that Seile and Williams believe benefit the brand, and therefore truly count. Which are pretty tough to measure as of yet.

“With branded content being pretty new, it’s still not necessarily about the numbers,” says Williams. “It’s about creating a content that lasts for a lifetime.”

While Seile and Williams acquiesce that each brand has their own definition of success based on metrics, they measure success in a way that changes with each project. In the closing sequence of the dramatic Teva video, Basagoitia says, “It wasn’t easy. I knocked myself out a couple of times, broke a couple bikes, but finally accomplished what I’ve been trying to do for years.”

That’s it: That’s what Become Co. was going for. Not the overt promotion of Teva’s new mountain bike shoes, but creating an authentic “in” to mountain biking culture by funding an athlete to attempt a never-before-completed trick on new terrain.

In the case of Dreamline, their even loftier goal of disrupting the BMX contest space was no less metric-free. They didn’t focus on the number of people attending the event; creating a great event organically attracted enough attention in itself—now even NBC Sports shows up to broadcast the event.

The joy of serving content-focused clients

Seile and Williams understand how privileged they are to work with inventive brands that don’t put the highest priority on sales metrics. With Red Bull, for example, “it’s the easiest partnership,” Seile says. “They’ve figured it out over the last ten years.”

The good news for others—and Become Co.’s growing client list—is that Red Bull is no longer an anomaly in the industry.

“We work with incredible companies, so we’ve never had anyone say they’ve wanted the easy way out and to get quick impressions,” Seile says. “They know who they are. They just need to know how to put it out into the world.”

That saves Seile and Williams from doing branded content education for their clients instead of concentrating on the projects themselves. They credit much of this shift to an increasingly enlightened field of marketers, influenced in no small part by Red Bull’s long-established content success.

They see this in the projects of others as well, such as the Foo Fighters’ Sonic Highways project with HBO, which documented the band’s eight-city recording tour that resulted in a collaborative album frontman Dave Grohl calls “a love letter to the history of American music.”

“I don’t even like their music, but you’re hearing stories from these amazing musicians, and I’m more compelled now to buy their album,” Seile says.

The Become Co. team expects this trend—of more brands following the path blazed by Red Bull toward brand-boosting, non-salesy, pure-entertainment content that is less hindered by metric expectations and more focused on great storytelling—to continue. Content-focused firms everywhere are most certainly hoping Become Co. is correct.

The post Meet the Men Behind Red Bull’s Explosive Content appeared first on Contently.

This is the question nearly every content marketer asks today—and if they’re not asking it, they should be. At the Contently Summit last Thursday, I had the honor of being the least impressive person on a panel tackling the audience-building topic. After 40 minutes of jamming with Steve Rubel, Edelman’s industry luminary and resident tortured Jets fan, and Audrey Gray, a lead communications strategist at MetLife and an incredible journalist-turned-marketer, five trends stood out:

1. Agencies will push brands toward sponsored content in 2015

Rubel was bullish on sponsored content—the act of brands sponsoring content that runs on publisher sites—pointing to a comprehensive Edelman study that showed sponsored content can succeed when it’s relevant to reader interests, tells a story, and comes from a trusted brand. With those factors in place, Edelman found sponsored content can deliver a significant boost.

“If you publish with The New York Times, Slate, Vox, The Atlantic—all these high end publishers, you can see a 33 percent increase in favorability.”

Rubel also noted that there are tons of lessons brands learn from publishers when they work with them.

“The best practices for audience development are in the media world, they’re in Hollywood,” Rubel explained. “They’re not—with all due respect—with marketers. This is why I spend the bulk of my time with publishers: They know how to build an audience. Especially the digital-native publishers—if you look at BuzzFeed and Business Insider and Vox and The Huffington Post, if you spend time with them, you learn how they test and try different formats. Those best practices can be reverse-engineered and applied to marketing.”

I then questioned Rubel about whether it really made sense for brands to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent a publisher’s audience instead of investing that money in building their own audiences. Rubel responded that he’s most interested in sponsorship models in which a brand “carves out a section of the [publisher’s] site that they own.”

From the conversations I’ve had in recent months, I think Rubel’s stance is representative of how agencies at large will push brands towards native advertising in 2015. Native advertising fits the campaign mindset many brands are accustomed to; and for agencies, coordinating native campaigns is simply a safer proposition than attempting to build owned publications on behalf of brands—especially since brand publishing efforts typically take months, if not years, before they really start to pay off.

2. Go where your audience is

Now that most brands are at least somewhat comfortable creating content, the real challenge is getting people to actually consume it. Rubel advocated for sponsored content can be a powerful way for brands to introduce themselves to a publisher’s loyal targeted audience, but also noted that “a lot of old school channels can be overlooked.”

“Email!” Gray cut in.

“A lot of the time I go in and talk [to clients] about email and they look at me like I’m from the ’40s—and I am,” Rubel joked. “But the data supports it. There’s a study out there about how executives consume content, and email ruled.”

I agreed, noting that email is the biggest driver of traffic for us at Contently, sparking the daily wildfire of social shares of our content. I also advocated for brands to use paid social distribution to get more eyeballs on their content.

For instance, The Content Strategist’s content performs extremely well on Twitter; the social network is the driver of a large chunk of our daily traffic. While we don’t do much paid distribution, we do dabble in Sponsored Tweets to seed our best content in front of new audiences, and it works brilliantly, often sparking a wave of social shares. We also test the hell out of our tweets and optimize accordingly. As a result, we often end up paying just a few cents for new readers and get a ton of value out of our relatively limited content budget.

For other brand publishers, their channel of choice might be Facebook. Or LinkedIn. Or Tumblr. Regardless, brands need to explore different avenues for getting their content out there.

“If you come at your audience [strategy] with data that gives you an educated guess on what they’re consuming, and balance an experimental approach with tried and true, you can get somewhere,” Rubel said.

3. User-generated content is about to make a comeback

“User-generated content to me is the holy grail right now,” said Gray. “And it’s gotten so much better over the last year or so.”

Gray helps create content for MetLife’s 60,000-plus global employees—a task she likens to running a small-town newspaper—but her most successful content series wasn’t something she created. Recently, MetLife put out a call to employees to submit selfies while holding up a sign that summed up their relationships with clients in one word.

The series generated a tremendous response on MetLife’s internal site, with high-quality submissions pouring in from all over the world. Gray said the support was indicative of how user-generated content is back on the upswing, which presents a huge opportunity for brands. “User videos used to be terrible,” she said. “Now, they’re just great.”

4. Bigger, better, richer stories are the future

Rubel said brands need to look to Hollywood for best practices on audience development—and as a model for how to tell dynamic stories that capture people’s attention. Now, brands need to do more than publish simple blog posts. Multimedia must be a core component of every brand’s content strategy heading into 2015.

“When stories are told well, you see changes in metrics that quarter,” said Gray, who’s a big believer in the power of visual mediums. “We do some very beautiful video work and I always try and make a big case for it. I feel even more strongly about photography. You can get just beautiful photography—you pay a Getty photographer about $1200 a day and that’s totally worth it because people are just as likely, maybe even more likely, to scroll through a photo slideshow as they are to watch a 3-minute video.”

Final thoughts

It may sound obvious, but it’s worth spelling out: If brands want to become publishers with large audiences, they need to act like media companies. That means testing and tracking success with deep engagement metrics, experimenting with new forms of content and distribution, and doubling down on what works. There’s no single answer to the question, “What does it take to build an audience?” You have to do many things, and do them all well.

Dig into the session more with this amazing graphic representation by artist Kelly Kingman:

This article has been amended to correct some factual inaccuracies about Audrey Gray’s role at American Express.

The post 4 Audience Growth Trends for 2015 appeared first on Contently.