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.

You have an internal marketing team, and you manage a team of freelancers—writers, designers, editors, etc. Email and Google Docs are your go-to forms of communication and collaboration. Unless your freelancers don’t have Gmail accounts, then the system breaks down. Freelancers can’t access your documents, so you have to email company assets. But those documents are constantly being updated, and you never remember which version you sent to which freelancer. So, you have to search through countless email threads to find the right one.

Now, instead of doing important work, you’re just retracing your steps to determine who knows what and what needs to happen next.

Alright, our journey is over, and you’re safe and sound now back in good old 2024. While this scenario was typical for marketing teams in 2010, many who haven’t discovered the wonder of content marketing platforms still experience these headaches. Perhaps you’re whispering to yourself: “Shoot, that’s me! What is a content marketing platform?” If so, that’s okay, we’ll bring you up to speed.

What are Content Marketing Platforms?

A content marketing platform (CMP) is an online software solution that allows businesses and marketers to collaborate across teams to strategize and streamline their content marketing processes.

I know what you’re thinking: That sounds a lot like a content management system (CMS). Sure, they both deal with content, but they serve different purposes in the overall content lifecycle. Here’s a quick breakdown of their differences:

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A CMS is a broader tool used to publish and distribute marketing content. It allows non-technical users to easily publish content across channels, edit webpages, and manage layouts (e.g., platforms like WordPress and Magento).

Content Marketing Platforms (CMP)

A CMP is a more specialized marketing tool designed for the entire content marketing process. This includes planning content strategy, creating content, scaling content production, analyzing performance, and distributing content across various channels.

Essentially, the biggest difference is that a CMS is primarily for publishing content to your website, while a CMP is for planning, strategic alignment, content creation, and optimizing content performance.

How do Content Marketing Platforms Work?

CMPs act as a central nervous system for your marketing efforts, helping your team streamline the content marketing process from strategy to results. Here are some of the specialized tools CMPs provide to improve your content marketing process:

Strategic insight: Develop a data-driven content strategy with features like keyword research tools and competitor analyses. Easily identify content gaps and potential audiences.

Organizational alignment: Store, update, and distribute your marketing strategy in one centralized location, effectively breaking down silos between internal and external teams, like freelancers and full-time employees.

Content calendars: Visually map out your content plan with dynamic, drag-and-drop calendar features. Keep your team aligned and organized with a unified calendar to schedule content creation, distribution, campaigns, and project deadlines.

Campaign management: Create and manage multi-channel campaigns within your CMP. Ensure all marketing activities (blog posts, social media posts, email blasts, etc.) align with overall strategy.

Workflow management: Assign tasks, track progress, and set clear deadlines for content creators, editors, and other team members.

Collaboration tools: Share documents, provide feedback, solicit feedback from company executives, streamline legal review, and communicate with your team using built-in messaging, text editors, and task management tools.

Our new dual-editing feature is a real-time collaboration tool that boosts the speed and ease of collaboration when several people are working on a document. Contently is the only CMP that enables real-time collaboration in-platform.

Content performance tracking: Analyze content performance across various channels using detailed analytics.

Team coordination: Keep your team aligned with notifications on project progress, campaign performance, and team activity.

Why Do I Need a Content Marketing Platform?

Every business and marketing team is different. So, is it fair to say they all need a CMP? Yes. Yes, it is. You just need to find a CMP with the right features for your team. So, let’s talk about the benefits of CMPs and what you should look for when shopping for a CMP:

Increased Bandwidth

Marketing teams are always spread thin. But what if you could double, triple, or even quadruple the size of your team? With a CMP, you have access to a powerful network of vetted writers, copy editors, designers, art directors, photographers, videographers, and much more. Suddenly, your marketing team is able to focus on strategy while producing more content.

Without a CMP, marketing teams are forced to pause content creation and publishing while they focus on strategy. But CMPs allow teams to maintain their momentum and continue operations while finalizing their marketing approach.

What to Look For:

Not all CMPs offer a talent network. While some CMPs integrate with freelance marketplaces or offer features to collaborate with external contributors, a built-in talent network of freelancers is not a standard feature.

But the best enterprise content marketing platforms will provide trusted freelancers within their platform. For example, Contently has vetted and trained each of their 160,000+ freelancers in their talent network.

Gain Strategic Alignment

Every good campaign starts with a good strategy. With a CMP, you can document your strategy upfront, create alignment within your team, and provide visibility to your in-house team and freelancers. With custom analytics, you can track each of your audiences, determine how your content is performing, and measure your progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).

What to Look For:

Look for a user-friendly platform that allows each of your team members to customize their dashboards. Whether it’s your CMO or marketing manager using the platform, they can create a dashboard that shows the information and metrics most important to them.

You also want a platform that allows users to provide story briefs or specific instructions to individual freelancers and internal team members. Share insights into audience personas, voice, and strategy without having to attach a 70-page brand book to every assignment. Contently also allows users to templatize their story briefs, so they don’t have to start from scratch with each project.

For your freelancers, use a CMP with a quick link to content strategy, so they can quickly reference goals, audience, and tone with a click of a button.

Scale Content Creation

CMPs can function like growth serums for marketing teams by eliminating repetitive tasks, like scheduling social media posts or resizing images for different platforms. Content templates and pre-designed workflows allow teams to quickly create content consistent with brand guidelines and established processes.

With detailed analytics, teams can see which content resonates with audiences and quickly make improvements. This data-driven approach accelerates the optimization process and helps teams focus on high-performing formats and topics.

What to Look For:

To improve your optimizations and increase ROI, make sure your CMP allows you to test different monetization channels, perform A/B tests, and personalize your content and marketing campaigns using customer data.

For marketers looking for a way to justify their content spend, Contently offers the Content Value Tracker. It actually calculates how much your organic traffic is worth in dollars.

Achieve Brand Compliance

Streamline brand compliance and ensure consistency by incorporating legal and brand requirements into your project briefs, templates, and workflows. Even with strict brand guidelines, you can use brand management tools to flag blocklisted words and phrases and apply a uniform style and tone to each piece of content.

What to Look For:

The best content marketing platforms will include automated quality control features. These tools can scan for plagiarism, assess content for reading level, correct grammar, and optimize for SEO. The best CMPs will also provide AI-generated recommendations on writing quality, such as misused words and double verbs.

Contently’s workflow tools also ensure each team member knows what is required of them and when their tasks are due. Once a freelancer completes a task or meets the project requirements, they are paid automatically through Contently.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs About Content Marketing Platforms

How do content marketing platforms facilitate communication between external freelancer and internal teams?

Content marketing platforms often provide features like built-in messaging, task management tools, and collaborative document sharing to facilitate communication between internal teams and external freelancers, ensuring seamless integration regardless of the tools they use.

Can content marketing platforms assist in identifying and filling content gaps in a marketing strategy?

Yes, content marketing platforms typically offer features such as keyword research tools and competitor analyses, allowing users to identify content gaps and potential audiences, thereby aiding in refining and filling gaps within the marketing strategy.

Do content marketing platforms offer functionalities for brand compliance and legal requirements within content creation?

Many content marketing platforms integrate legal and brand compliance requirements into project briefs, templates, and workflows, while also offering automated quality control features such as plagiarism detection and grammar correction.

If you’re ready to make your work life immeasurably better and add a CMP to your content marketing process, start your search here.

The post What Are Content Marketing Platforms and Why You Need One appeared first on Contently.

Though marketers may have a general sense that content contributes to their company’s bottom line, a staggering 49% don’t understand how their content is performing, according to a recent Parse.ly report.

But when budgets tighten across B2B and B2C organizations, there’s greater pressure to prove content marketing value relative to revenue contribution.

To maximize the effectiveness of their content marketing strategy and ensure a healthy ROI, organizations can benefit from analyzing the latest content marketing ROI statistics and applying best practices for leveraging them.

Eye-Opening Content Marketing ROI Statistics

If you don’t yet have the data behind your own organization’s ROI calculations, these stats can help you make a compelling argument to stakeholders that content marketing is worth the investment:

• Content marketing can generate 3x the leads as traditional marketing yet cost 62 percent less.
• Email marketing sees an average return of $36 for every dollar spent.
• Between 2021 and 2025, the content marketing market is expected to grow by $417.85 billion.
• Seventy-one percent of B2B buyers read blog content prior to making a purchase decision.
• Thought leadership content led to purchase decisions for 48 percent of decision-makers in a global study.

How to Determine Content Value

Based on those statistics, you could argue that most content marketing delivers value to someone in some way. But if you’re trying to put a dollar value on content, there are two formulas you can use to calculate ROI.

The key is first having a content attribution model and lead scoring program in place, plus ways to capture accurate data for several important content metrics.

For a quick refresher: Content attribution is the practice of assigning a sales revenue percentage to content that influenced the sale during the buying process. Lead scoring can help sales and marketing teams determine which leads are most likely to become customers. They do this by assigning a weighted value to actions prospects take, like viewing a sales page or downloading a white paper.

To calculate content ROI as it relates to sales and opportunities, use this formula:

• Average Cost per Opportunity x Average Opportunities Tied to Content = Content ROI

To express ROI as a percentage, use this calculation:

• ROI (%) = ( Return – Investment / Investment) x 100

When determining the total investment cost for a content piece or campaign, don’t forget to include the following:

• Promotional fees like paid placements
• Freelance writing and design fees
• General cost of internal resources tied to the content project

Including these costs ensures your ROI calculations are accurate while also providing insights into areas you may want to streamline in the future.

Common KPIs That B2B and B2C Brands Track

Clicks, visits, and downloads… oh my! With so many potential key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate, marketers sometimes struggle with where to start.

Consider the Content Measurement Maturity Model to evaluate where your organization stands and the steps you can take to tie content marketing efforts to revenue. The model is an easy-to-follow framework content marketers can use to improve their organization’s content measurement.

B2B and B2C brands may have different KPIs, but some common ones include traffic, conversion rate, engagement, and revenue. Tracking these KPIs will help you understand the effectiveness of your content strategy and identify areas for improvement.

How to Identify the Ideal Channels for Monetizing Your Content Strategy

Once you have identified your organization’s maturity model stage and the KPIs you plan to track, the next step is to determine the ideal channels for monetizing your content strategy.

These four points can help you focus on the right channels:

• Identify your target audience: If you don’t already have buyer personas developed, you should conduct research to understand who your target audience is and where they are most active online. Are they more likely to spend time on social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn? Do they prefer to read blogs or watch videos? Understanding your audience’s preferences will help you identify which channels are most likely to resonate with them.
• Analyze your existing channels: Take a look at the marketing channels you’re currently using and analyze their performance. Which channels are generating the most engagement and conversions? Which channels have the highest ROI? This information will help you determine which channels to double down on and which to cut back on.

When it comes to owned channels, blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters represent the largest volume of content activities.

• Experiment with new channels: Don’t be afraid to experiment with new marketing channels to see what works best for your business. Try out new social media platforms or content formats to see if they resonate with your audience. Keep track of each channel’s performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.
• Monitor industry trends: Stay up-to-date with industry trends and emerging marketing channels. For example, user-generated content and live streaming have exploded in popularity in recent years. Keeping an eye on these trends can help you identify new opportunities to monetize your content marketing strategy.

B2B Content Marketing Strategies

The process for B2B buyers is usually longer than B2C and can include more touchpoints. That presents an excellent opportunity to deliver engaging experiences that lead to higher conversions.

Channels that B2B organizations have seen a healthy return according to content marketing ROI statistics include:

• White papers and case studies: Providing in-depth industry insights, survey reports, and case studies can position your brand as a thought leader and generate leads.
• Thought leadership webinars: Hosting webinars allows you to engage with your audience in real time and showcase your expertise. Try not to focus on self-promotion but on valuable and actionable insights that can benefit your potential buyers.
• Email newsletters: Email marketing is an effective, low-cost way to nurture leads and drive sales through list segmentation and targeted campaigns.

It’s important not to place all of your ROI expectations on a single tactic. One deal Contently analyzed included seven content pieces that influenced the sale and resulted in a 15.5x content ROI.

B2C Content Marketing Strategies

B2C companies can use content marketing to boost sales and drive conversions through a variety of mediums. Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are excellent for engaging with customers on a direct level and providing them with shareable content:

• Social media marketing: Social media platforms offer a range of monetization options, such as sponsored posts, reels, and influencer marketing.
• Visual content: B2C audiences are often more visually driven, so investing in high-quality visual content, such as videos and graphics, can help drive engagement and sales.
• User-generated content (UGC): Allowing customers to create and share their own content related to your product or service can help build brand loyalty, drive conversions, and increase revenue. Leveraging the power of influencers is another way to get high-quality UGC that larger audiences will see.

For consumers, user-generated content falls in the same category as word-of-mouth, which makes it a valuable option that brands haven’t fully tapped. One survey found that 79% of customers said that UGC influences their purchase decision.

One of the most successful UGC campaigns was the Ice Bucket Challenge, which helped raise $115 million for the ALS Association. Not only did it take off among social media users, but top celebrities like Taylor Swift and Steven Spielberg  joined in on the viral challenge.

Measuring and Optimizing Your Content Strategy ROI

To ensure that your content monetization strategy is effective, you need to measure results to optimize your ROI. To do this, you should regularly analyze your KPIs and adjust your strategy accordingly.

• Test different monetization channels: Experiment with different monetization channels to determine which ones generate the most revenue. For example, you can test social media advertising versus email marketing to see which channel is more effective in driving sales.
• A/B test: A/B testing can help you determine which content types and formats are most effective in driving conversions. In other words, you can test long-form blog posts versus short-form blog posts to see which one generates more leads.
• Personalize: Personalizing your content and marketing campaigns can help increase engagement and drive conversions. For instance, you can use customer data to personalize your email campaigns and tailor your content to meet the specific needs of your target audience.

Monetizing your content marketing strategy is essential to generating a positive ROI. By tracking common KPIs, identifying the ideal channels for monetization, and measuring and optimizing your content marketing ROI statistics, you can ensure that your content marketing efforts drive tangible results for your business.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C brand, understanding content marketing monetization and implementing the best practices will help you stay ahead of the competition and succeed in today’s digital landscape.

Stay on top of your content marketing game. Subscribe to The Content Strategist to get the latest news in content marketing strategy, digital transformation, and emerging tech trends.

The post Monetizing Your Content Strategy: Insights for B2B and B2C Brands appeared first on Contently.

The ability to map sales back to content is a practice known as attribution, and it’s the black box of content marketing. Every content marketer struggles to achieve success here. Why? Because the ability to understand what drives a customer to ultimately convert is a bit of a mystery.

While there is no ideal way to attribute down to the dollar, there are ways that content marketers can assess what’s working, dump what’s ineffective, and allocate the budget to produce better quality content accordingly. Ideally, the attribution model will inform senior leaders, sales, and other critical stakeholders of content’s impact on business results.

Types of Content Attribution Models

Given how complex content attribution really is, it’s no surprise that Contently’s 2023 survey revealed only 38% of content marketers were satisfied or very satisfied with their ability to measure content’s success. However, marketers that can identify the content performing well at each stage of the buyer’s journey ultimately gain and produce better content strategies, given the data that they have at their disposal.

Yet content attribution models can look different across companies. For smaller businesses with simpler marketing systems, tighter budgets, and shorter sales cycles, a single-touch attribution model may be sufficient. There are two types of single-touch attribution models.

The first-touch attribution model gives all the credit for a lead to the first touchpoint in the customer journey, and the last-touch model gives all credit for a sale to the final touchpoint.

Then, there is multi-touch attribution, which factors in all of the actions a buyer typically takes during the sales cycle. These models can take time to build, especially for newer companies without mature content.

When designed correctly, multi-touch content attribution models are better suited for companies in the B2B space with longer, more complex sales cycles that leverage three or more marketing channels. This can take shape in a couple of different ways.

In a linear multi-touch attribution model, all actions are given the same credit or percentage value, whether a consumer downloads a whitepaper or stops by the vendor booth at a conference. However, in a weighted multi-touch attribution model, each action has a different value or percentage, signifying a difference in the impact these actions have on the buyer’s interaction with the brand.

How Content Attribution Can Drive Your Strategy

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could understand how each content asset actually influences a consumer’s motivation to buy? There would be tremendous value in that! But we’re not psychologists (or mind readers), so we do the best with what we have.

To make reasonable assumptions about consumer behavior, we must look at what content channels, formats, and topics resonate with our audience and figure out when they’re likely to engage with those content pieces. While each individual customer journey is unique, a multi-touch attribution model can highlight key trends among your top personas. Using this unique information, your content strategy and attribution techniques will evolve.

The data you gather from your content attribution efforts can also increase efficiency. For one thing, proving content contributes to conversions is a great way to prove to senior leaders that your hard work is paying off. The data you’re gathering about what assets, which channels, and when your audience is engaging in the buyer’s journey can also help you determine where to allocate your budget most effectively.

Finally, this content attribution work helps align marketing with sales. When you understand how a consumer experiences and interacts with your brand, you can create a more compelling and engaging experience for them throughout every customer touchpoint; using MarTech and sales tools working together, you can map the entire customer journey to get a broader picture of your brand’s engagement.

Dissecting the Challenges of Multi-Touch Attribution

In an ideal world, any B2B marketer would be using multi-touch attribution. But building an accurate model is challenging. You need a well-established marketing pipeline and mature content production to get the whole picture. That’s why it’s the last stage of Contently’s Content Maturity Model.

You need the right tools in your MarTech stack to build an effective multi-touch attribution model. You might even consider more sophisticated attribution platforms like Dreamdata or Rockerbox. To check your results, you can supplement your research with a backup method, like surveys or customer interviews, in addition to attribution software.

As you dive deeper into attribution, you may discover more challenges in building multi-touch attribution models. Remember that no model is perfect, and consider the roadblocks as you find a system that works for you.

Certain content touchpoints may be harder to track.

According to CMI, the consensus among analysts is that roughly 70% of a buyer’s decision-making process happens before they fill out their first form or speak to a sales representative. So how did they get there?

Content. They self-educate! It’s challenging to track self-education because customers often educate before they are in a serious stage of the funnel. How did they initially learn about your brand? What resources helped them decide it was time to reach out? Some content marketers use gating as a way to secure content leads, but this is slowly becoming an outdated practice. A consumer wants information, not to give up their own.

Not all touchpoints are equal in value.

However, once you can track the consumer, you can give a different weight to each interaction they have with your brand. Different interactions along the typical customer journey may hold different weights in driving prospects down the funnel. While possible, assigning weight values to other interactions will be a complex process that may involve intricate calculations. Even with some of the more sophisticated multi-touch attribution tools, there will be limitations on the data. Trust your instincts when they say you have enough information to conclude.

Organizations may not be ideally structured for it.

In larger organizations, budgets are often allocated so that they are tied to specific channel-level goals. Multiple teams may need to align around a unified attribution model for successful multi-touch attribution rather than rely on traditional ways of analyzing success. This can require an organizational mindset shift.

It doesn’t account for other external factors.

Multi-touch attribution, while helpful at a macro level, doesn’t account for the fact that the customer journey is not linear. Other factors are at play, including the role of brand equity or an already loyal customer base. It can fail to account for external factors that significantly impact attribution results – pricing, promotions, seasonality, and the economy.

Attribution tools need to keep up with changes in technology.

As consumer expectations evolve, so does the technology that powers them. Content marketers constantly face new obstacles as tech rapidly advances – changing search algorithm updates, new social media channels, browser privacy settings, and more. These changes pose obstacles when it comes to multi-touch attribution.

In 2024, third-party cookies will no longer be available in Google Chrome. This means more users can browse the internet anonymously, making tracking more challenging. Attribution will become even more complex — and we need to be prepared to innovate and account for uncertainty. It seems that the future is a black box.

3 Examples of Multi-Touch Attribution

So how can you succeed at multi-touch attribution in your organization? It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer. The customer journey looks different for brands across industries and company sizes. Businesses often take various approaches and rely on a range of tools to build successful multi-touch attribution models. Let’s dive into a few examples of brands doing it well.

Mockingbird

After joining Mockingbird, Marjorie Chelius, Vice President of Marketing, recognized the complexities of the typical customer journey for the product. First, half of the strollers are given as gifts, with the purchase cycle lasting three to nine months – a long time for a largely direct-to-consumer product.

Plus, buyers engage in roughly 15 different touch points before purchasing. And with a multi-channel distribution model – selling strollers on its website, at Target, and on sites like Babylist – tracking the customer journey was even more difficult.

Mockingbird decided to take a multi-prong approach to content attribution. A critical element was conducting ongoing market research from the start – scouring customer reviews, for instance, and interviewing moms. The company also collected data from post-checkout surveys on purchases to measure the role of unpaid channels in the customer journey.

Recognizing the need for a multi-touch attribution model to get the full story, Mockingbird turned to Rockerbox, an attribution software tool, to uncover the channels performing well and better understand customers’ paths to purchase. And for Media Mix Modeling, the company purchased the Recast tool.

The key findings? Along with word-of-mouth referrals, many customers learn about Mockingbird via influencers and paid social ads. Interestingly, they often view Mockingbird paid ads on social media and then conduct their research on Google.

With these insights, Mockingbird removed inefficient spending on bottom-of-funnel retargeting on paid social and branded search. “We earned back 15% of our paid spending budget in Q4 2021—and we haven’t looked back since,” Chelius says. “We felt confident that we did not need to put another paid ad in front of customers once they were hooked initially.”

Another contributing factor to the decision: Mockingbird has a position on top recommendation sites (Lucie’s List, Babylist, and What to Expect, as examples), so when buyers visit these sites to do research, Mockingbird already shows up where it counts.

Based on the learnings from its content attribution model, Mockingbird plans to invest in influencers, social channels, and public relations this year.

7shifts

The marketing team at 7shifts, an employee scheduling and team management platform for restaurants, faced a common problem: the inability to track the specifics behind the B2B customer journey and identify which content efforts to replicate. Initially, the marketing team was tracking last-click conversions and then first-touch conversions, but there was a lot of important information they didn’t have.

“Each of (the single-touch models) separately didn’t make much sense,” says Vahag Aydinyan, Content Marketing Manager at 7shifts. “There was something we were missing in the middle.” Default analytics tools (like Google Analytics) simply didn’t cut it.

7shifts decided to purchase Dreamdata, a B2B revenue attribution software tool. Dreamdata integrates with different software (like Hubspot, Google Ads, and Marketo) to give a complete picture.

Through its content attribution model, 7shifts realized the value of product-agonistic mid-funnel content that helped the target audience in the buyer journey, like the free templates and digital tools for restaurant management.

“We realized people downloaded (templates) before converting at some point,” Aydinyan says.

Now, 7shifts has more information, so they can focus their time and finances on what drives results. But Aydinyan warns marketers not to get lost in the weeds of looking at individual customer journeys.

“It’s important to identify the main KPIs you want to track and focus on those,” he says.

Rally

When Kurt Dunphy started as Growth Manager at Rally in June 2020, building a content attribution model was top of mind. The startup, which automates and streamlines legal processes for businesses and their lawyers, was looking to scale up quickly, and Dunphy knew how important it would be to prove the value of his marketing efforts.

“You really can’t perform at a high level if you don’t know what’s driving results,” Dunphy says.

Upon Dunphy joining the company, Rally didn’t have a clear marketing pipeline. They started by launching a paid advertising program, and then organic content came a few months later.

But with limited tools, Dunphy wanted to understand what was driving high-quality leads. So Rally integrated Ruler Analytics software into its MarTech stack, allowing Dunphy and his colleagues to answer that question. More than two years later, and with a more mature pipeline, Dunphy can leverage Ruler to see which organic and paid channels are actually driving revenue (not just leads) through a multi-touch attribution model.

Ruler is Dunphy’s main source of truth, but it’s not 100 percent perfect (as is true for any attribution tool). But by looking at buyer journeys at the macro level, Dunphy knows which content efforts to scrap and which to double down on – and he’s often surprised by what he learns. He discovered, for example, that Rally’s content on TikTok wasn’t contributing to the buyer cycle as much as the app’s ads manager suggested.

Sure, there are ways to attribute content to sales without a tool like Ruler, Dunphy says, but it’s much more challenging. “You can put HTML-embedded links in [blog posts] or forms and see what people fill out,” Dunphy says. “But it’s way more of a black box.”

Getting Started with Content Attribution Models

Remember to start small when building a content attribution model, especially if you’re working at a young company without much mature content or a well-established marketing pipeline. And look at Contently’s Content Maturity Model, a step-by-step framework for content marketers looking to build a long-term measurement plan.

At a high level, the model encourages marketers to focus on content operations and identifying their KPIs, then work their way down the funnel by measuring lead generation. Over time, as your marketing pipeline matures, you can map your content back to the pipeline.

Ultimately, no content attribution model is perfect. But, as Chelius advises, accept the limitations of data and “gut check” your findings using a second method. And remember that, while challenging to build, a multi-touch approach for a complex sales cycle is much better than last-touch alone, which fails to articulate the whole story.

When you can track the buyer’s journey and understand what drives sales, you know what your audience craves at every stage of the funnel. With the right attribution model, you can create a more strategic content strategy that helps you tell your brand story and efficiently leverage your budget and resources.

Request a demo to better understand how Contently can help you create an ROI-driven strategy and content measurement plan.

The post The Black Box of Content Attribution: How to Engage With Consumers More Authentically appeared first on Contently.

How are marketers planning to address those talent challenges? By hiring, developing, and augmenting. Read on to find out what that looks like.

Content Needs to Hire More People

Despite significant employee turnover, the unemployment rate across the U.S. remained at or below 4 percent throughout 2022. That made it a seller’s market for content, including for knowledge workers with digital marketing skills.

We saw that come through in the survey responses. When asked about the challenges of creating great content, 65 percent of respondents included a lack of people resources among the answers. When asked to name the biggest challenge, the largest share, 33 percent, also said a lack of people.

For comparison, a lack of financial resources came in as the biggest challenge for the second-largest share of respondents. That is 15 percent—less than half of those that emphasized a shortage of people.

The obvious consequence is that businesses need to start posting that they want a content marketer for hire if they hope to improve impact. Fortunately, that is exactly what they are doing.

Content Is Developing Skills in the People It Has

Eighty percent of respondents plan to invest in 2023 to grow the impact of their content. Those investments come in two forms, summed up as “do more by hiring more” and “do more with what we have.”

Accessing more people involves hiring more staff or hiring more contractors and agencies. Hiring more full-time staff is in the plan for 23 percent of respondents, and expanding agency usage is on deck for more than 30 percent.*

The second approach of doing more with the people already on the team comes through investments in skill development—which more than 50 percent intend to do in 2023. Skill development can come in the form of online learning platforms, trainings, conference attendance, and so on.

Growing project management skills, named by 38 percent of respondents, caught our eye, in particular for the way it can make teams more productive and therefore increase the outputs of the people you have. With clear processes, expectations, and information, content teams spend more time creating and less time tracking down information or revising copy because the audience or goals were poorly defined.

Finally, it’s worth noting that 29 percent of respondents said their approach to driving impact in 2023 included investments in technology to measure content ROI—key for identifying what works and what doesn’t so content teams can focus on the projects that will drive strategic results.

*Note: Respondents could give more than one answer to the question about what capabilities their organization plans to invest in to grow content marketing impact. As a result, the percentages are non-mutually exclusive.

Content Hope to Augment Humans With AI

Content marketers are leveraging AI content generators for text—like Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, and ChatGPT—and for static images—like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Jasper Art.

In fact, fourteen percent of respondents say they used generative AI in 2022 and an additional 23 percent plan to deploy it in 2023. That’s a 160 percent growth rate!

New solutions are launching every day, including for video generation, which only saw inklings of activity in 2022 but is fast following. With AI, enterprises can produce far more content than they could hope to generate with human creators.

What’s Next?

Investing in the people and the skills to produce great content sets marketing leaders up for a successful year. In particular, your people will be at the forefront of your ability to take advantage of the key marketing trends of AI, ROI, and personalization.

To learn more, download the full State of Content Marketing 2023 report.

The post Content Marketer for Hire—Why Marketers Are Prioritizing Talent appeared first on Contently.

Companies need content, and great content marketers know how to position it… at the right place, at the right time, and on the right channel. So what are the key metrics our content gurus need to pay attention to in the new year? As we look ahead to 2023, these are the top metrics categories to have on your radar. Keeping tabs on these will be crucial to attributing revenue back to content and then conquering the content world… obviously.

Measure Engagement to Assess Thought Leadership & Buyer Intent

We all know that engagement is good. And I’m not talking about marriage proposals (although the flash mob proposals on YouTube smash). Metrics such as clicks, shares, likes, comments, and views are all important. But what do they really tell us about the impact that content has on the business? Every boss for the last ten years has asked me that question.

Here are some common engagement metrics you can use to showcase how your content impacts brand awareness.

1. Unique Page Views: How many individual people have read or interacted with your content? You can track Unique Page Views via Google Analytics.
2. Organic Traffic: How many people found your content organically, without clicking a link on a paid ad or sponsored blog post? This will help you understand how well your post is ranking in Google.
3. Average Time on Page: How long do visitors stay on the page when they click to view your content? This lets you know how engaging your piece is and which topics resonate well.
4. Share of Voice (SOV): Keep track of the number of mentions your content receives compared to other brands or publications. Tools like BuzzSumo or Brandwatch are great for this.

It’s essential that you can articulate to your boss the context behind these numbers. While engagement metrics tell you whether your content is insightful enough to drive brand awareness and share of voice in the marketplace, they also function as a relationship score, showcasing how influential you are on your audience. They offer critical indicators of your market position and should tell you whether or not a piece of content or a web page is performing as well as it can.

Beyond clicks, shares, likes, and comments, it’s about how long prospects will engage with you. These metrics also help highlight the topics that resonate with your audience. Are you meeting their needs? Does your content alleviate a pain point? Once you have data to make educated assumptions, you can use this information to power your content strategy.

Measure Content’s Impact on Lead Qualification & Scoring

Lead scoring helps marketers identify different stages of the buyer’s journey and what specific actions resonate with customers at every touchpoint. Content is an integral part of that process.

Different content formats optimize engagement at each stage. Blogs are typically top of the funnel, whereas case studies thrive at the bottom of the funnel. Regardless of the stage or the format, quality content nurtures relationships with customers and drives sales by converting prospects into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

Sales and marketing teams must work together to identify the criteria for an MQL and SQL. As Hubspot suggests: “Without a defined set of actions, your marketing team might pitch leads that aren’t ready to move on to the sales process. Overall, this will slow down your sales team.”

MQL: Marketing Qualified Leads are individuals who take a particular action on your site and qualify to move further into the sales funnel. Every organization has different qualifiers, but some of the most common MQL actions are one or two of the following:

• Downloading a free gated eBook
• Watching on-demand software demos
• Filling out gated content forms
• Submitting an email address for a newsletter or mailing list
• Favoriting items or adding items to a wish list
• Adding items to the shopping cart
• Repeating site visits or spending a lot of time on your site
• Clicking on an ad to find your site
• Contacting you to request more information

While these actions represent some of the most common prospect actions, it’s not a comprehensive list. It’s a start to determining who is ready for sales. Other information (lead scoring, analytics, and demographics) may impact an organization’s decision to qualify the lead as an MQL.

SQL: Sales Qualified Leads are individuals who are ready to talk to the sales team. Once they’re an MQL, they’re handed to sales which qualifies them as an interesting prospect. Some of the most common SQL criteria include:

• Booking a meeting with a sales team member
• Filling out a demo form
• Returning to a website a certain number of times
• Responding to an email
• Viewing a pricing page

Usually, by the time a lead becomes an SQL, the sales team has identified that the prospect has a need for your product or service, the budget necessary to purchase it, the infrastructure to use it, and a pain point that’s alleviated by your offering. This is the framework for the BANT system (Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timeline). Lead scoring can help you understand if your product is a good fit for the customer when you reach out to them.

Content & Lead Qualification

Lead scoring allows you to assign numerical values to prospects based on lead details and lead behavior, which helps you understand how those leads progress through the sales funnel. This data can then help identify which types of content are performing best according to lead scores assigned at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Creating lead scores for content requires collaboration with sales, customer success, and revenue operations. Revenue operations, a department responsible for coordinating sales, marketing, and customer success, sets the lead qualification parameters, monitors scoring, assesses engagement, and creates cohesion between departments. While content is always a huge part of nurturing a prospect to buy, it is often the most difficult to map back to revenue.

With specific lead scoring parameters in place, companies can set up qualification standards for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Once a lead reaches a specific score, your team can qualify it as an MQL. Scores are determined by several attributes, including the ideal customer profile (ICP) and behaviors the prospect engages in (actions taken with your brand).

Knowing what pieces of content the prospect engaged with to reach the MQL score threshold is critical for improving content performance. With this information, you can adjust your content strategy. For example, a prospect who just reads a blog and downloads an eGuide might not be ready to talk to sales, but they can be a warm marketing qualified lead (MQL) to nurture with similar topics.

Measure Content ROI

We’ve discussed traditional engagement metrics and lead qualification, but what about revenue? That cold hard cash attributed to the investment you made in content?

Once you have established lead scores, you can calculate content ROI by looking at the total lead score from an individual content piece, the number of opportunities created, the average cost per opportunity, and the resulting return on the investment.

By analyzing this data, marketers can understand how successful individual pieces of content were in driving leads and sales. You can use the following calculation to determine ROI.

Average Cost per Opportunity x Average Opportunities Tied to Content = Content ROI

As a percentage, calculate content ROI using the:

ROI (%) = ( Return – Investment / Investment) x 100

By tracking lead scores for each piece of content, marketers can gain insight into what drives engagement and conversion. For example, suppose a certain type of content consistently has high lead scores at all stages in the buyer’s journey. In that case, it could indicate this type of content is particularly effective in lead generation. Content marketers can then use this data to inform their content strategy and better target prospects with content that will lead to conversion.

Content metrics provide marketers with valuable insight into how content impacts lead generation and sales. Using this data, marketers can optimize current campaigns, improve lead nurture strategies, and identify new opportunities for content creation. By understanding the different stages of the buyer’s journey and assigning appropriate lead scores, marketers can tailor their messaging to maximize impact on lead conversion rates.

Want more insight into content marketing trends? Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter to get the latest articles in your inbox.

The post Mastering the Most Important Content Metrics for 2023 appeared first on Contently.

Granted, the writers and content topics aren’t the only culprits; SERPs deserve some blame. Constant search index changes make it tough to keep content optimized and leave a lot to speculation… leading us back to content like how-to advice.

We’ve extensively researched marketing’s “advice problem” and have discovered the sweet spot. Let’s talk about practical advice.

Measuring Content Success

Based on our research, there are four main stages to content success, which we’ve called the content maturity model:

1. Crawl: Here, marketers start to build their content strategy. The focus is primarily on building and engaging their target audience and creating an SEO strategy.

2. Walk: Brands get more strategic, lean into lead generation and engagement, and carve out their share of voice in the market.

3. Run: Brands fine-tune their content’s SEO value, attribute success to lead values, and use single-touch attribution. Most brands are in this stage today.

4. Fly: The ideal stage. It’s all about multi-touch attribution and knowing each piece of content makes the most impact at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

While multi-touch attribution is the correct end goal to strive for, it’s not something you need to rush into if you’re still developing a content strategy and setting up the correct internal processes.

6 Metrics You Should Use to Prove Content Success

Contently research reveals that most companies are in the Walk or Run stages. The first three metrics we’ll discuss focus on the Walk stage, and the last three focus on the Run stage.

1. Leads Generated

What is the difference between content leads and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?

• Content leads are prospects who interact with your content and complete an action like newsletter sign-up or content download. These actions help build your email and nurture lists. Content leads can inform your content strategy. They show you what topics your audience is interested in. Of course, just because someone signs up or downloads content doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy.
• MQLs are ready to talk to sales (in theory). These prospects fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and express interest in purchasing or requesting a demo or trial. These leads are further qualified to continue on the buyer’s journey with your sales team.

Prospects will give you their contact information—becoming content leads—if you have exclusive content or a unique point of view to share. If your landing page effectively communicates the value proposition, like this example from Teamwork, you’ll encourage the prospect to fill out the form. The value has to be there. It’s an exchange of your content for their contact information.

You must nurture content leads and MQLs with relevant, timely content. This will, in turn, build your SEO strength.

2. Lead Engagement

Lead engagement measures the contact’s quality and interest in your brand. Once you have engaged qualified leads (MQLs) in your pipeline, you can start lead scoring.

There are many ways to score leads, but let’s focus on the top two. Lead demographic scoring and behavioral lead scoring are two of the most common ways marketers can gauge the value of a lead. Use your ICP to score lead demographics to confirm whether these prospects qualify for sales. This could mean job title, company revenue, industry, etc.

Behavioral lead scoring focuses on prospects’ actions with your brand. These actions include content downloads, pages visited, and email click-through-rate. You’ll want to partner with your sales team to determine further what qualities they look for to qualify leads.

Ensure your content is timely, helpful, and relevant to gain better lead engagement. Wistia is an example of a company that does this well. Their content is clean, helpful, and educational.

Whether it’s the content itself, your unique point of view, or exclusive research, your job is to delight and educate your audience. Also, keep in mind content gaps or whitespace—good SEO tools like Semrush can help you here. What is no one else talking about in your industry that you can take a unique position on?

Consider how to break up your big content pieces to create other assets and scale your content program. For example, can a whitepaper be turned into an email course, infographics, LinkedIn carousel ads, etc.?

3. Share of Voice

This metric refers to how well your content dominates the conversation and boosts your brand compared to competitors. There are three main types:

• Share of search is the amount of search traffic your content receives relative to competitors (i.e., for the term “small business advice”).
• Share of branded search refers to the amount of search traffic for keywords with your company name relative to traffic for competitor names (i.e., searches for Bank A vs. Bank B).
• Share of social is the number of shares your content receives on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., relative to competitors.

You can calculate your Share of Voice (SOV) with tools like BuzzSumo and Semrush to measure how effective your content is in the marketplace.

4. SEO Value

This is the value of your organic content traffic versus purchasing traffic through ads. SEO value is a metric we’ve pioneered at Contently as part of our performance dashboard. It calculates what a piece of content is worth to a brand based on search traffic and the unique cost-per-click (CPC).

This helps brands determine how much they have to spend to replicate the keyword rankings and visits with paid search ads. According to our proprietary internal data, 67 percent of our customers’ traffic came from organic searches over the past year. But only a small number of our customers had invested in tracking the SEO value of their content.

Forrester Research tells us that executive buyers look at an average of 17 pieces of content before signing a contract. Generating quality content that provides value over time provides a steady stream of qualified visitors without forcing brands to spend money on paid ads.

5. Lead Value

Lead value is a straightforward approach to calculating the impact of your lead generation efforts. It’s the multiplication of the number of leads your content generates and your traditional cost-per-lead (CPL). You should aim to decrease the cost per lead over time while still generating high-quality, sales-ready leads.

Example: 22,000 leads multiplied by $71 CPL equals $1.56M in lead value ROI.

If you successfully track which “opportunities” are generated by content, the same calculation can apply if you know your company’s average cost-per-opportunity. So, multiply the average cost per opportunity by the number of opportunities tied to content. Historically, Contently creates these opportunities with our original research and industry playbooks.

6. Lead Attribution

Single-touch attribution is an attribution model that gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to a single marketing effort. This metric usually takes either the first touch—what initially drove someone into your funnel—or the last touch—what they last interacted with before making a purchase.

We know buyers’ journeys are not linear, so there is a large margin of error here. However, single-touch attribution is still one of the most popular ways to measure content success at companies that do not have a lead scoring process in place.

Single-touch is an excellent first step for marketers who want to tie content to revenue. When starting a single-touch model, pay close attention to trends—they can inform future initiatives.

On the other hand, multi-touch attribution is the white whale of content measurement. This “white whale” requires you to have your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Marketing Platform (CMP) integrated so that the data tracks accurately and you know where prospects consume content throughout the buyer’s journey.

This requires a lot of collaboration with your marketing operations, revenue, and sales teams. Make sure you agree on how to value each touchpoint along the buyer’s journey. Lead scoring can be complex, but once you prove to your organization how content impacts the flow of leads through the funnel, you can start attributing more revenue back to individual pieces of content.

Content Metrics That Matter

There’s a lot to consider when generating leads and setting up your internal processes. How you define a lead, and the strategies and tactics you create to generate leads are vital to proving the value of your hard work.

Contently can help you master your content marketing analytics. Hear from the experts: watch the on-demand webinar, “Prove Content Success: 6 Metrics That Matter.“

The post 6 Metrics That Prove Content Marketing Success appeared first on Contently.

Doing so brings two fundamental benefits.

First, marketing data analytics helps content marketers communicate the benefits of content to non-marketing peers.

Marketers can get buy-in and build stronger relationships with business stakeholders by linking content assets to concrete business results like marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Second, marketing analytics also equip content marketing leaders to make data-informed decisions about where to invest money and talent resources.

Marketers can de-emphasize poorly performing platforms and formats and invest more in higher-performing alternatives. That can increase the ROI from content marketing.

In fact, more than a third of marketers named analytics as the emerging technology likely to impact their strategy. Whether you’re just getting started measuring the impact of content or looking to refine your current program, follow these four steps to define your strategy for marketing analytics.

Step 1: Decide what you want to know from marketing data analytics.

More is not necessarily better when it comes to analytics, despite the availability of free or low-cost marketing analytics tools. After all, every metric you decide to track requires investment from the marketing team to make it useful. You need to track it over time, clean the data, de-duplicate it, and validate that it complies with your organization’s governance policies. And if you want to present it to anyone, you’ll need to visualize the data to make it consumable.

To avoid wasting resources tracking marketing analytics you ultimately don’t use, start by asking what you need to know. Pay attention to the questions you ask while planning your content strategy or quarterly calendar. Examples include: What content formats produce the highest volume of engagement? Which ones produce the deepest engagement (meaning, they drive conversions)? What content surprises do you see in terms of over- or under-performance?

Step 2: Understand what your business partners want to know from marketing data analytics.

You can engage with your business partners to understand their questions and identify corresponding data and analytics that could help answer them. By deciding which marketing analytics will help, you both commit to assessing impact according to the same terms. You also improve collaboration and alignment to determine which metrics to track, retire, or add as circumstances change.

Step 3: Ensure balance in the marketing data analytics you track.

Defining “balance” is up to you. Some organizations may want insights across the buyer journey. For example, striking a balance between “attention” or “attraction” metrics like site visits, banner clicks, and email opens and “engagement” metrics such as repeat visitors, social shares, or weekly newsletter sign-ups.

Other organizations may instead categorize metrics according to the business performance standard of leading indicators, lagging indicators, and operational indicators. Leading indicators predict specific actions, lagging indicators tell you what happened in the past, and operational indicators tell you about the effectiveness of your marketing processes. All three may align better with what business stakeholders expect to see.

Step 4: Leave room for soft metrics.

The evolving world of marketing data analytics can bring immense benefits. But that doesn’t mean marketers can or should abandon all non-quantitative approaches to assessing value. This applies to how marketers view the outcomes they can measure and how they communicate about aspects of marketing that remain inscrutable.

One example of the need for nuance in leveraging metrics relates to timelines. Some initiatives produce clear, short-term, and measurable benefits. A seasonal or event-related campaign is an example of that. Other initiatives, such as branding partnerships, are long-term by design to deliver value incrementally, often in ways that are difficult to quantify. The latter isn’t necessarily less helpful for its lack of transparency, but you need to evaluate it differently.

The core takeaway is that marketing analytics is critical in identifying high-value content topics and formats, measuring content’s impact on business results, and communicating that impact to others. But it is just one input you should use to define your content strategy, create a plan for executing it, and assess how well it served the business.

Stay informed! Subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post (Im)proving Content’s Impact Using Marketing Data Analytics appeared first on Contently.

But is complex always the right path? Single-touch attribution, where 100 percent of the conversion credit is given to one touch point in a buyer’s journey, can still have a place in modern marketing analytics.

Why Use Single-Touch Attribution?

Marketing teams that use single-touch attribution usually choose the first or the last touch point to qualify the lead as derived from marketing. So why use single-touch attribution in a 21st-century marketing context?

1. It’s easy to implement.

Marketers choose one interaction with a customer (often the first or the last) and credit the entire sale to that piece of content, regardless of how many touch points are created for the buyer’s journey.

This could be the social ad you ran on LinkedIn that first caught your customer’s attention which drove them to read a blog (first touch), or the webinar you offered that convinced the customer to purchase your service or product (last touch).

2. It’s easy to understand.

When tying ROI to the content, choosing one touch point is the simplest way to show how your content marketing efforts worked. It’s also the easiest to explain to leadership how you arrived at your conclusion (that webinar worked!) without needing a wall with yarn, pins, and a pad of stickies.

For example, a potential customer sees an ad for your product and signs up for a webinar. After attending the webinar, they purchase the product from the follow-up email. In first-touch attribution, the ad gets the credit for the sale. In last-touch attribution, the follow-up email receives all the glory.

3. Great for smaller companies.

Companies with simple marketing or sales systems (or no sales team at all), a shorter sales cycle, a smaller budget, or teams that only use one or two channels may find a single-touch model is a great option for them. There’s no need to over-complicate a process before it’s ready to become complex.

Challenges of Single-Touch Attribution

While single-touch attribution has a place in marketing analytics, it doesn’t come without challenges. The biggest: single-touch doesn’t capture the entire picture of how a customer moves through the buyer’s journey. Did they purchase your product based on that one ad they saw on TikTok, or did additional touch points (product reviews, blog posts, newsletters, etc.) influence their purchase? To truly understand how a customer went from interest to purchase, you need the complexity a multi- or omni-touch model provides.

The danger of putting all your analytics eggs in the single-touch basket is that the data will be skewed. Single-touch doesn’t look at anything else (touch point or channel) in the buyer’s journey, nor does it show which was the most effective. The buyer’s first encounter with a blog post may have set them down the path to purchase, but was it really the piece that moved them from consideration to purchase? Probably not, but it’s still an important part in the buyer’s journey. We can’t always assume the last touch point was what clinched the deal.

Use Single-Touch Attribution to Test Effectiveness

If you have a complex funnel with a longer buying cycle, it’s likely you use a multi- or omni-touch attribution model. However, single-touch attribution can still be used to test different channels or touch points within your marketing funnel for effectiveness or to answer specific questions you may have about your funnel.

For example, you may use social media, newsletters, blogs, and videos as top-of-funnel content. By taking a microscopic view of each channel, you can discover which ones drive the customer deeper into your sales funnel and can inform where you allocate more resources to drive more customers to a purchase.

Single-touch attribution can also provide insight into bottom-funnel content and how it influences customer decision-making. Do you have a higher conversion rate after reading a case study, or are webinars more effective? Do you see more sales after customers consider a side-by-side comparison with your competitor? Single-touch is also great for sales teams, as it can help determine which campaigns are instrumental to qualifying a sales lead.

Single-touch attribution doesn’t have to go the way of the 8-track just yet. It’s a great way to keep things simple when needed. If you’re already functioning in a matrix model, single-touch attribution can help you evaluate and fine-tune parts of your content marketing efforts.

Stay informed on the latest content trends, industry insights, and news. Subscribe to The Content Strategist to receive weekly updates.

The post Single-Touch Attribution: Mapping Marketing ROI Back to Content appeared first on Contently.

Advancing to this level is difficult—like climbing the Mount Everest of marketing analytics difficult—but it gets a lot easier when you start using a platform to keep track of everything in one place: strategy, ideation, planning, creation, distribution, and analytics.

Contently‘s industry-leading platform makes end-to-end content marketing easy with the tech, talent, and strategic insights you need to attribute efforts back to revenue. It’s almost as if the word “marketing” itself needs a marketing campaign because it no longer encompasses all that goes into building brands and growing revenue.

Keith Johnston, VP and research director serving CMO professionals at Forrester, notes the rise of data-driven communication:

“We’re at the tipping point where we’re trying to decide what marketing really means in this era.”

Evaluate new ideas by potential revenue

New content ideas come from all corners of a company, but you’re also probably sourcing ideas from keyword research, industry news, and events. An end-to-end content marketing platform like Contently can help you evaluate those ideas easily with a content request form that allows you to turn a good idea into an outsourced story in a few simple steps.

The platform also allows you to easily source ideas from our award-winning freelance network with the Pitch function. Send requests to your freelance team to get their unique perspective on an idea, then organize those pitches by tag or status.

Evaluate both pitches and internal requests with Contently’s SEO Story Ideas tool, which evaluates story concepts that are likely to rank well in search based on your content strategy.

Once published, Contently Analytics will show you which articles performed best, so you can double down on what’s working. Gated content can be analyzed using Docalytics. This unique tool provides insight into PDF engagement using heat map technology.

Docalytics shows marketers over 17 metrics to make sense of engagement, including views per page, time spent on that page, and heat maps that show where readers interact with your content the most.

Make content plans that align with campaign goals

I’ve never met a content marketer with only one goal. We’re all out here with at least four: increase reach, increase engagement, generate leads, and impact revenue—usually for several different lines of business or products.

A company blog, for example, might see five new articles published every week, but each with a different goal in mind. You’ll need to aggregate all the content you create for each goal in one place to accurately measure whether or not you’ve moved the needle.

Contently’s enterprise campaign tool allows you to group content by campaign goal. For example, if your company is attending an industry event, you can collect videos, articles, gated content, social media posts, and emails all under one roof and quickly view analytics.

You can also organize and analyze content using a drag-and-drop calendar tool that gives you complete visibility into where each piece of content is in the creation process. Plus, you can filter by a whole host of different variables, including function, campaign, format, and tag.

Create content efficiently and at scale

Content marketers are under the microscope for the cost of their content, which has a reputation for being high. But flocking to find the cheapest content creators isn’t the answer. It will cost you more in the long run when you consider the time it takes to edit the writing. Why? When you don’t pay people what they’re worth, they aren’t motivated to do their best work.

That being said, you can incur additional expenses if your workflow or brief isn’t clear. This often happens when a stakeholder requests an article be completely rewritten because it didn’t match their goals, for example. Avoid those pitfalls with a platform that makes content briefs and workflows clear, notifications automatic, and hiring freelancers easy. In the publication settings of Contently’s platform, you can edit your strategy so that each new project you create will automatically house your content goals, personas, tone of voice, and pillars. This helps keep your freelancers on track from the moment they receive a project.

Contently’s Intelligent Talent Recommendation (ITR) tool uses an algorithm to match companies to freelancers with the right experience and industry knowledge. You’ll also gain access to editors that help you manage those freelancers and their output.

One of the best parts of the platform is the ability to create workflow templates that can be customized each time you outsource a story. They make every stage of the content creation process clear, from strategy to workflows (including outline, creation, review, and approval), content optimization, graphic creation, and distribution. You can even pay freelancers immediately and save your finance department time cutting checks.

Automatic editing tools check for plagiarism, SEO effectiveness, reading time, reading level, and grammatical issues to support editors. Contently’s Tone Analyzer, powered by IBM Watson, drills down on the voice and tone traits that engage your audience the most and provides suggestions to optimize your content to match those traits.

Zoom out to see the big picture with a content command center, which gives a birds-eye view of workloads, delays, and content production time.

Distribute content in many places from one platform

Content is typically distributed across your website, social media, email, and internal teams. Most content marketers keep a distribution checklist. Then, they open up platforms individually to get the job done.

That process is slow and leaves a lot of room for manual error. Contently allows you to connect distribution directly to your workflows. The platform integrates with your content management system (CMS) to automatically port over completed webpages, including images, tags, alt text, categories, feature images, and multimedia. It also integrates with a variety of other tools using Zapier.

Content value is easier to measure under one roof

Proving ROI for content is the biggest challenge marketers face—but it’s not impossible. Contently pioneered a four-stage maturity model to guide content marketers toward the measurement holy grail: multi-touch attribution.

Each of those four stages—crawl, walk, run, and fly—supports content marketers in proving the value of their content marketing programs, no matter where they are in their journey.

Assessing the value of your content marketing operations is so much harder when you’re managing the process across disparate tools. When strategy, editorial calendar, creation, social media, invoice, and analytics are under one roof, the picture gets a whole lot clearer.

An end-to-end solution like Contently sets you up for success in proving the value of your content. Schedule a demo for a consultation on your content measurement strategy today.

The post Prove the value of content by managing the end-to-end process under one roof appeared first on Contently.

Typically, turning a sales prospect into a customer takes much longer in B2B marketing than in B2C. Why? Because there are generally many stakeholders involved in purchases for businesses. Plus, the purchase is usually more costly, requires extensive onboarding and rollout, and involves many end users.

Why Is B2B Storytelling Important—and Challenging?

With so much at stake in a B2B purchase, you can understand the importance of creating content that allows SaaS buyers to connect with your brand personally. In fact, research has shown that in comparison to consumers, B2B customers, on average, feel much more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers.

Despite all the talk about storytelling, many B2B content marketers focus more on promoting the product or service rather than how it can change a potential customer’s life personally or professionally. Many don’t know where to start or don’t have the right tools to execute storytelling properly, said Mark Evans, principal at Marketing Spark.

Evans says storytelling can be challenging to execute in reality. But once you have the right resources to make it happen, it can be a key brand differentiator.

Individual pieces of content—whether blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, and so on—can be presented as a narrative, but the larger customer journey can also be viewed as such. In other words, each piece of B2B content you create can be viewed as a small piece of a larger story that guides a reader from the brand awareness stage through the sale (and beyond).

So, what does storytelling in SaaS content marketing entail, and how can you integrate it into your strategy?

The Customer as “Hero”

“Great stories are ones where there’s a narrative, there’s a hero, there’s some kind of drama,” Evans said. “The audience can completely relate to them because (they reflect) their interests, their needs, their problems, their challenges.”

The format of a B2B story is similar to what you would read in a work of fiction. The potential customer—not your company—should serve as the “hero” of your story, said Ardath Albee, CEO and B2B marketing strategist for her firm Marketing Interactions. You also have an antagonist, which is the problem they need to solve. Finally, the vendor (your company) is the “mentor” or guide who assists the hero in reaching their ultimate destination—like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings or the fairy godmother in Cinderella.

Take customer success stories as an example. Many B2B content marketers structure these as follows: Company X works with Company Y and sees Z results, said Tommy Walker, founder of The Content Studio and former Global Editor-in-Chief of Quickbooks. But this format is missing the human element of why the problem exists and matters to the audience.

When Walker worked at Shopify Plus as the company’s first marketing hire, they published this case study, which Walker feels is a good example of storytelling in action. You can see how the story begins—not only did the co-founder of an online T-shirt company have to deal with a crashed website at 2 a.m., but this happened on the night of his bachelor party, which he had to put on hold. This added a human element that made for a much more relatable story.

Ultimately, the co-founders chose Shopify Plus as an eCommerce platform that would keep up with the company’s rapid growth. According to the case study, Shopify Plus alleviated the stresses the co-founders encountered with technology and allowed them to focus more on the business.

The Customer Journey as Narrative

In SaaS content marketing, storytelling also means providing a seamless narrative that spans the entire customer journey through multiple pieces of content and easily directs the reader from one point to the next. Think of every piece of content in the customer journey as a chapter in a book, Albee said, all the while remembering that a B2B tech sale can take months or even years.

Albee said that the buyer should be able to access the different pieces of a larger narrative to meet them where they are in their current situation. And they may find these pieces in a variety of places.

Good B2B storytelling means showing you understand the buyer well enough to help them resolve the challenges they face and ultimately get the outcome they want.

“We have to think about how do we let (the buyer) drive but still put those guardrails around that experience, that story, so we get them all the information they need to get from A to Z in whatever manner that looks like,” Albee said.

Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Once you understand the basic framework of a story, you can map the different parts of your content strategy to a character’s journey:

• Top-of-funnel content: Show you understand the various challenges buyers face (and how to solve them) in detailed ways. This can be done through blog posts, social media, podcasts, brand awareness emails, and more.
• Mid-funnel content: Help your character overcome the obstacles that might arise in the decision-making process—for instance, internal politics or budgetary concerns. Possible content formats include eBooks or guides, case studies or testimonials, whitepapers, landing pages, webinars, events, or product-focused blogs.
• Bottom-of-funnel content: If your mid-funnel content is executed well, the sale should happen naturally through the “change” your character experiences rooted in the onboarding, implementation, and customer success of your product. But if you do need more content to drive a sale, this can be done through pitch decks, product demos, competitive analyses, and more.

4 Storytelling Tips for B2B SaaS Content Marketers

1. Know your customer.

Understanding your customer’s current needs is key to bringing your story to life—after all, they are the “hero” of your narrative. Storytelling helps them solve real problems by providing directly applicable solutions.

“You have to commit yourself to knowing your audience, knowing what makes them tick, and really understanding the stories they want to hear,” Evans said.

If you don’t have the budget to develop extensive buyer personas, Albee recommends speaking with customers yourself.

2. Know your company.

Remember that your company, as the mentor, is still an important part of the story, so understand its products, services, or solutions very well before you craft your narrative. This will clarify to readers why your company’s offerings are the best way to resolve their problems.

“Whoever is in charge needs to get as many perspectives as they can from within their company and get an understanding of who they think they are and what they’re about,” Walker said.

And when in doubt, you can always ask an internal subject matter expert to review your content before it goes live.

3. Think of your story from a holistic perspective.

A common problem B2B marketers face, Albee said, is that they publish one-off pieces of content that are repetitive or disconnected from one another. Potential customers may read this content, then move on without thinking about it or taking action.

Don’t assume a potential customer will know where to go on your website after reading a blog post, for example. Direct them to the next part of the story.

“We have to proactively package that up for them in a way that they can access it without our help,” Albee said.

This might entail including a call-to-action at the bottom of a blog post that drives readers to a product landing page, for instance. Or, if you cite a source of information or data, you should hyperlink back to the original source or a related piece of content.

Remember that storytelling extends beyond the sales stage of the customer journey. How your customer uses your product is also important and can be told through post-sale customer success content.

4. Get in the storytelling mindset.

Ultimately, keep in mind that consistent B2B storytelling will require a mindset shift, and it may not be easy—but experts say it’s worth it.

“You really have to buy into the idea that storytelling matters, storytelling works,” Evans said. When your audience relates to what they’re reading on an emotional level, they’re more likely to relate to your brand, make a purchase (ideally more than once), and advocate for your company down the road.

Stay informed! Subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post How Storytelling Can Build an Emotional Connection with a B2B Audience appeared first on Contently.

Today’s audiences come across so much mediocre content that looks and sounds the same. Lately, innovative marketing teams have been thinking beyond the standard blog post. They’re investing in new formats and new ideas that can push their businesses forward.

In our brand new report, we set out to highlight tactics that could help your brand thrive. We analyzed the entire B2B content marketing landscape, talked to experts, and broke down case studies from companies like Google, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more.

Here are the five biggest trends you need to know.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

1. Interactive Tools Give Brands a Creative Edge—and Empower Buyers

On Google, there are 260 million search results for “b2b technology.” There are only 214 million for “b2b software.” Based on the numbers, you’d expect b2b technology to be the more popular term. But according to Google Trends, that’s not the case. For most of 2020, b2b software has had about twice as much interest.

Data like that is powerful evidence for B2B marketers who can optimize their sites to take advantage of a keyword inefficiency. Best of all, anyone can access that information, and more just like it. Want to test your site speed? Assess your marketing maturity? Identify untapped markets? You can investigate all of these questions yourself using the Digital Marketing Toolbox on Think With Google.

A few years ago, the search giant launched Think With Google, a content hub for marketers and business owners. “It’s intended to be a resource for everything from high-level insights to deck-ready stats to useful tools,” said Alli Mooney, the site’s former editor-in-chief, who now runs brand content at Waze.

Those types of tools are just as useful for Google’s marketing team as they are for its audience. Interactive tools are one of the most cost-efficient content investments you can make because of their evergreen appeal. And once the content is live, it won’t require much upkeep.

A few good examples of this include CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer and Canva’s Color Palette Generator. Both tools occupy top spots on search rankings, driving more long-term value than your average blog post. According to a study by Demand Gen Report, interactive content was more effective at educating buyers than static content by 23 percentage points.

It’s the difference between telling someone what to do and empowering them to find the answer on their own. Why give a man a fish when you can teach him to how to benefit from your B2B software, right?

“When you let your customers interact with your content, they make choices that are relevant to them, and you learn more about them each time they click,” said Jennifer Burak, who was VP of marketing for Rapt Media, an enterprise video platform, before becoming director of marketing at Techstars. “This helps you create better content and continue to optimize your existing content.”

Interactive content encompasses a variety of formats like videos, calculators, quizzes, and even games. Creating this kind of B2B content can sound complicated if you’ve never done it before, but there are simple ways to get off the ground: calculators and quizzes.

Calculators have become the go-to resource for a lot of companies because they let people consider costs without a hard sell. Salesforce, for example, has a free ROI calculator that promises to show “how revenue, gross margin, and cost control could improve.” To make it as easy as possible, Salesforce asks users to filter by industry, which automatically enters some data based on recent benchmarks.

You can see why a tool like this is beneficial. It makes the case for why you’ll benefit from buying Salesforce, without you ever having to talk to a salesperson.

BuzzFeed’s calling card—quizzes—also works for B2B companies. Only instead of asking people to choose from 13 pictures of Taylor Swift and telling them what kind of dog they are, B2B marketers can develop diagnostic quizzes that point users toward solutions for their biggest work challenges. At Contently, we added a Content Strategy Assessment at the bottom of our content strategy services page on our website to help potential customers evaluate which of our solutions fits their needs.

When done right, interactive tools don’t just drive leads. They qualify them too, providing key information that’ll help you personalize your follow-up and push prospects down the funnel more efficiently.

For marketers wondering how to build awareness and even drive leads, this is one easy way to get people interested in your company. Tools like Typeform, Calconic, and Qzzr offer free trials and have plans for about $30 per month.

We expect brands to test the waters with more tools in the near future. And if that goes well, then they can graduate to our next trend.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Do some research in your field to see what tools already exist and where you can stand out.
• Start simple with a calculator or outcome quiz that your audience can use to discover something about themselves.
• Add value by guiding the user toward a solution like a relevant resource, case study, or product page.

2. Educational Courses Are Lead Gen Machines

Way back in 2011, some employees at HubSpot had an idea. They wanted to create an educational program on inbound marketing for HubSpot customers. So they wrote scripts for a few lessons, shot a few videos, and published them on a landing page. At the end of the course, they included an optional exam. If someone went through the course and passed the exam, they’d receive an official Inbound Certification.

“At the time, we knew it wasn’t the best course on SEO or content marketing or email marketing,” the company wrote in a recent e-book. “But what [the] Inbound Marketing [course] did do well was combine all of those strategies into a framework that really spoke to SMB marketers.”

Almost a decade later, that single project has evolved into HubSpot Academy, which offers over 350 free online courses. Per HubSpot, the Academy educates “tens of thousands of users every month.” In Q1 of 2020, new leads increased 115 percent year-over-year. Anyone can access the database to get certified in disciplines ranging from content marketing to business analytics to e-commerce. All you have to do is fill out a form.

HubSpot was clearly onto something. Virtual learning has boomed in recent years thanks to massive open online courses (MOOCs) like Coursera. Students can go through the material at their own pace, usually for free. Even esteemed colleges like Harvard and Yale have gotten in on the action, letting the public take certain online classes without needing to pay a cent of the $50,000 tuition.

In the professional world, this trend has huge appeal, especially for B2B companies. Workers can add to their skillset or learn something new if they want to switch careers. B2B marketers, meanwhile, can break down their complex products and services into lessons that are easy to understand. The courses also help nurture leads gradually (and improve customer retention). The built-in structure gives people a reason to come back multiple times to finish the lessons on your site.

Every course begins with a landing page. Think of it as a syllabus or outline, packaging the different components. This typically reveals how many lessons there are, who’s teaching them, and how long it’ll take to complete the whole course.

One reason these courses are so popular is because of chunking. The term comes from Harvard psychologist George A. Miller, who, in the 1950s, found that humans tend to memorize information best when something is split up between five and nine segments. If your boss asks you to learn Google Analytics, that sounds daunting. But if you go to Google Analytics Academy and see there’s a beginner course with smaller units for setting up basic campaigns and tracking conversions, suddenly the request seems more manageable.

For marketers, chunking supplies an added bonus: It gives users a clear reason to fill out a lead form. We’re all bombarded with pop-ups asking us to subscribe to newsletters and talk to a salesperson. But it makes sense to give up your email when you’re taking a course so that new lessons can be delivered to you on time.

Most successful courses incorporate video lessons, but you don’t need a huge budget (or an academy) to put together a successful video course. The key ingredient is knowing what your audience wants.

In 2014, three researchers from MIT, edX, and the University of Rochester studied 128,000 students learning through MOOCs. The goal was to find virtual learning trends and provide recommendations for instructional designers and video producers.

After evaluating over 6.9 million watching sessions, here’s what the researchers suggest:

B2B marketers, particularly in tech, already have the instincts to build a course like this, since they’re used to communicating with a digital audience.

“Presentation styles that have worked well for centuries in traditional in-person lectures do not necessarily make for effective online educational videos,” the researchers wrote. “To maximize student engagement, instructors must plan their lessons specifically for an online video format.”

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Review your existing content to find common themes or topics that could become courses.
• Use your content calendar to map out new course lessons well ahead of time if you’re starting from scratch.
• Keep video lessons short and highlight the instructor to give the course a personal connection.

3. Newsletters Have Become the Centerpiece of Content Distribution and Audience Building

There’s always another hot new marketing channel. Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Alexa have all been anointed the next big thing that marketers need to care about. But one of the greatest resources marketers have at their disposal has barely changed in 50 years: email.

As organic social media traffic tailed off last decade and mobile device usage made homepages less essential, email newsletters helped marketers direct readers back to their sites on a regular basis. In a way, the inbox is now the new homepage. And it’s no longer a channel that brands can ignore.

Platforms like Substack have made it ridiculously easy for anyone to start an email newsletter. The appetite is there for this kind of content. It’s gotten to the point where people from places like Digiday and Politico are leaving their full-time jobs to start subscription newsletters.

For marketers, it’s also a more personal alternative than social media. As journalist Casey Newton told The New York Times, “You don’t have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience.” That’s why brands and publishers alike have opted for more personality in their messages, even letting certain employees include their names in corporate emails. I have a last name, but you may know me as Jordan at Contently. I’ve also come across Taco at Trello, Sophia at Yesware, and even Charles the Dog at Lighthouse Creative.

This personality has a point. Per HubSpot, 78 percent of marketers noticed an increase in email engagement over the last year. And according to Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2B Benchmarking Report, marketers rated email newsletters as the best way to nurture leads, ahead of blog posts, in-person events, and case studies.

“We love email,” GE’s Chief Storyteller told us. “It may sound old-school, but email subscription is really a hardwired link to your audience. For us, email subscribers are an extremely valuable audience that we want.”

A big part of email’s value comes from having a reliable connection with your audience. You can link to B2B content on social channels, but you’ll have to pay for distribution for it to have a meaningful impact. (Organic reach on Facebook was clocked at just 5 percent in April 2020.)

It’s like building a house on somebody else’s land. As our head of marketing Joe Lazauskas wrote in his guide to compounding content ROI: “Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.”

At Contently, we developed a model to map out how our newsletter impacts the bottom line. Our blog, The Content Strategist, gets hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month.

For the people who aren’t already subscribed to our newsletter, we put a pop-up on our site that lets them sign up if they’re interested. That pop-up converts at 2 percent. That means that every 100,000 new visitors will yield 2,000 new email subscribers.

Of those 2,000 new email subscribers, about 2 percent will request a demo of Contently over the next couple of quarters.Based on the average value conversion rates of an MQL, those 40 demo requests are worth $200,000 in weighted pipeline to our business.

Additionally, email provides more freedom to customize and experiment compared to other content distribution channels. Marketers have the ability to segment their subscriber lists. This tactic can be really useful if you’re trying to reach people in different industries, roles, locations, and more. Urbansitter, a tech company that connects parents and babysitters, increased conversions by 260 percent just by segmenting emails to its two different user groups.

Sending a newsletter isn’t exactly a new trend. But what’s noteworthy is that companies are beginning to treat email as one of the most important parts of the content lifecycle. It can be the ultimate factor that makes or breaks a B2B content program.

If you’re new to content marketing, look for ways to build your list and feed subscribers with insightful material. Even if the material doesn’t come from you all the time. Email partnerships, content swaps, and content curation can all get you in front of new people.

Morning Brew, which publishes four newsletters including Marketing Brew, has executed this strategy to perfection. The company expects to earn $20 million in ad revenue by the end of 2020, per Digiday. It has over 2 million subscribers across the newsletters and boasts an incredible 42 percent open rate.

Those numbers may seem untouchable right now, but keep in mind that Morning Brew had 160,000 subscribers two years ago. Email growth can happen fast, as long as you send the right message.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Set up lead forms on your site so it’s easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter.
• Give employees the freedom to have personality and share their experiences.
• Segment your subscriber list over time so you can tailor content to different audience personas.

4. B2B Tech Leaders Are Reimagining the Product Story in New, Creative Ways

88 Acres: How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future…

It reads like the title of an award-winning magazine feature. Should’ve been, really. In 2014, Microsoft pitched a bunch of journalists an idea about how a group of employees were analyzing sensory data to revolutionize the way the company used energy across its 500-acre campus.

All of them passed. So Microsoft’s communications team decided to cover it themselves. Jennifer Warnick, the lead writer of Microsoft Story Labs at the time, put the article together. Forty-eight hours after it went live, 800,000 people had read it. To this day, it’s arguably one of the best pieces of content marketing ever created.

“88 Acres” is the platonic ideal of a product story. A Microsoft employee wrote about other people at Microsoft using the company’s products, and it didn’t come across as self-promotional.

When companies write about themselves, we usually wind up with dry, hollow press releases. However, the typical press release machine has become somewhat outdated. Why put an update on the wire hoping a journalist covers it when you can tell your audience directly? Microsoft’s story shows what happens when a brand controls its own narrative.

Over the years, brands have gradually warmed up to the idea. SEMrush uses its own features to analyze its content on a regular basis. Then there’s Typeform, which walked us through a more unusual example earlier this year. When Paul Campillo, head of brand and communications, was working on a story about chatbots, he wanted to insert one so readers could ask it questions about the article. Only problem was, Typeform didn’t have a chatbot. So their dev team built one.

“The article was a huge success,” Campillo said. “Now it’s one of Typeform’s three offerings.”

Marketers have this tendency to sugarcoat everything. But we’ve heard from clients that they liked learning about our trials and errors. They could relate to our challenges and follow each step as we worked to overcome them. At Contently, we think of ourselves as our best case study.

That’s something anyone can do, regardless of whether or not they have a tale as rich as “88 Acres.” And since product stories appeal to both new leads and existing customers, the content can help with onboarding and retention. Think of them like Help Center assets that customers can use to solve problems on their own—only with more creativity than the usual instruction manual approach.

For software companies, these stories can be integrated throughout the product. We’ve started doing this ourselves with a new video series called “Contently In Action.”

When customers reach a certain part of our platform, a short tutorial pops up and explains how we use the feature to optimize results. It may not win an Emmy, but it serves actionable advice at the right time.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Compare a press release and an article side by side while noting the differences in tone and creativity
• Sort through the most popular Help Center articles or tutorials to discover good product story ideas
• Write about your own experiences using your product like an investigate reporter, highlighting challenges and solutions

5. Branded Shows Are the Future of Multimedia Content

The average Netflix subscriber spends two hours per day on the streaming service. When marketers publish content, they’re usually hoping someone will spare two minutes to look at it.

That’s such a stark difference when you say it out loud. At the core, though, a Netflix executive and a B2B marketing executive are after the same thing. Both are building audiences and vying for user attention to increase revenue. So how can we get people as vested in our B2B content as they are in Stranger Things?

The first step is to think in terms of series rather than one-off pieces of content. The biggest mistake people make when setting up a content calendar is treating it as just a daily tracker. The calendar is more than just a to-do list. For your content strategy to work, you need a long-term lens

You never hear someone ask, “What’s your favorite episode of TV?” You say, “What’s your favorite show?” You want to know what series got them hooked, coming back for more.

“To hold attention, the only plan must be to provide your audience with a worthwhile experience,” Jay Acunzo, founder of Marketing Showrunners, wrote on The Content Strategist. “Shows are the world’s best vehicle for doing that. They help marketers create compounding returns on our content investment, since shows are binge-worthy when done right.”

A number of innovative companies are starting to take this track through podcasts, video series, and even feature-length documentaries. Acunzo keeps a running list of over 200 branded shows broken down by B2C, B2B, and non-profit. It might surprise you to see the B2B space represented so strongly with Adobe’s Wireframe podcast, Moz’s Whiteboard Friday, and Lessonly’s Do Better Work, to name a few.

With in-person events paused for the foreseeable future, shows could fill part of the void in the marketing line-up. Like educational courses, video series are good for driving and nurturing leads. They’ve proven to be effective—a study from Animoto found that four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read an article to learn about a product.

One new show that Acunzo recommended is Onboarding Joei, created by 360Learning. The docu-series, which debuted in April, follows Joei Chan as she gets acclimated as the tech company’s new director of content.

As writer Molly Donovan detailed on the Marketing Showrunners blog, the show drove immediate results. In the past, 360Learning had to spend €900 to acquire a marketing qualified lead. For Onboarding Joei, the MQL cost dropped to €25.

“I was able to show that I could bring in a lot of qualified subscribers,” Nicolas Merlaud, the show’s creator, told Donovan. “Moreover, I could prove the show’s ROI.

This approach could even translate to virtual events. (There’s a reason they call it event “programming.”) Standard marketing events tend to struggle with meandering panels, awkward lulls, and dry speakers. Pre-recorded presentations benefit from higher production value, and polished editing grants audiences a smoother experience.

Recently, we adjusted our lead generation efforts to include pre-recorded webinars. The slides and voiceover were edited and uploaded before the event time. After the presentation, we switched to a live Q&A with attendees to address their thoughts.

The move makes a ton of sense because we’re showing the best possible version of our work. At the end of the day, whether you work for Netflix, Google, or a company just starting to invest in B2B content, that’s what we should all be aiming for.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Brainstorm series instead of ad-hoc stories when planning your content calendar
• Invest in video content, budget permitting, to give customers a binge-worthy experience
• Explore turning in-person events into a virtual series with a mixture of pre-recorded and live elements

The post State of B2B Tech Content Marketing: 5 Trends That’ll Get You Promoted appeared first on Contently.

Over 2,400 years later, technology, science, and medicine have evolved exponentially, but many words in the oath are still remarkably relevant: “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.”

Good medicine, like good content, comes down to trust and results. That was true before the common era began. But the rise of digital health content has complicated the way people think about healthcare.

Every day, Google handles more than 1 billion health questions. However, over a third of U.S. adults have low health literacy. And according to a recent Weber Shandwick survey of 1,700 adults, 52 percent are concerned today’s health-related information is either false or misleading.

So it’s never been easier to search and find health content online. Yet that same content can be incorrect, promotional, contradictory, or overly complex. In the midst of a global pandemic, that trend is only going to increase as people look to learn about the latest symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments.

Where are patients supposed to turn? More importantly, what should doctors, hospitals, insurers, and healthcare companies do to improve the state of healthcare content online?

That’s what we’ve set out to answer in this report. We’ve extracted the most important healthcare content marketing trends using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. We spoke to industry experts, analyzed macro content trends using our in-house content strategy technology, and highlighted companies creating great content. We also identified common challenges while explaining ways healthcare marketers could overcome them.

Like Hippocrates said, medicine is an art and a science. The same holds true for healthcare content. Let this be your prescription for success.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

Methodology

Research for this report was compiled in May 2020. We analyzed 1,551 pieces of healthcare content using StoryBook, Contently’s content strategy tool, which measures top-performing topics, formats, social shares. The dataset includes 15 healthcare companies that publish content—none of which are Contently clients.

We also pulled some industry-level benchmarks, measured by Contently’s content marketing platform. This data looks at all content produced by our clients in the spring of 2020.

(To dive deeper on these findings, sign up for our live webinar on the state of healthcare content marketing. You’ll also get the webinar on-demand.)

5 Trends Shaping the Healthcare Industry 

1. Timely COVID Stories Perform Best, but They Have to Be Done Right
2. Healthcare Is Playing Catch-Up, but There’s a Playbook They Can Follow
3. Telemedicine + Healthtech Companies Are Leading the Field
4. CSR Is a Popular Use Case That Often Lacks Creativity
5. Reports + Data Are the Biggest Differentiators

1. Timely COVID Stories Perform Best, but They Have to Be Done Right

A global pandemic impacts everyone and everything. As cases started to spike, it wasn’t long before it seemed like every article, video, and social post tied back to the coronavirus.

For many companies, especially in healthcare, covering the topic was vital. They had an obligation to share their knowledge with the public. For others, though, it was just another trending topic to jump on. Even if it comes from a good place, we don’t need an email from a car dealership that says they’re “here for us during these troubling times.”

To gauge the immediate impact on content creation, we pulled the stories created by our clients across all industries and then tagged any that mentioned relevant terms like “pandemic,” “Covid,” and “quarantine.” In March, content related to the coronavirus accounted for 21 percent of all stories across all industries, a significant increase up from roughly 6 percent in February. The rate held steady through April until dipping slightly in May.

The surge in new content proved to be an interesting case study for healthcare publishers. There’s an overabundance of health content online, but it mostly consists of evergreen information on established domains like WebMD and Livestrong. These sites live off of consistent search traffic, but they typically don’t connect to the news cycle. Once the coronavirus hit, that all changed.

Since great storytelling thrives on specifics, other brands had a new opportunity to create timely content. Some of the top-performing stories in our dataset came from companies putting a unique spin on the public conversation.

For example, in late March, Cleveland Clinic published “Here’s the Damage Coronavirus Can Do to Your Lungs” with expert quotes and a link to a new video featuring an experienced lung pathologist. It was shared over 26,000 times on Facebook. Cigna ran an early how-to story on proper handwashing technique that generated thousands of shares. In April, 23andMe wrote about a research study it was working on to look at the connection between genetics and COVID-19.

If healthcare companies hope to compete with the WebMDs of the world, they have to drive awareness first with these kinds of original stories. Then, once they build trust and increase domain authority, they can fill in their output with more clinical, encyclopedic content.

However, that doesn’t mean healthcare brands should start pursuing journalistic content. These stories lead to conflicts of interest. Plus, brands usually don’t have the resources or infrastructure in place to go after hard news. However, they can break new ground and build an audience simply by reporting on the research and innovations being developed inside their own company.

“In the health category, there’s no such thing as a generalist … think about what your audience is searching for,” said Amy O’Connor, editor-in-chief of Healthination. “Unless you’re like AP or Reuters, it’s really hard to cover the news, and nobody wants you to, because it’s already out there.”

Your time and money would be better spent using trending topics as a springboard to provide insights and analysis the public can’t get anywhere else.

2. Healthcare Is Playing Catch-Up, but There’s a Playbook They Can Follow

The year 2000 feels like a different lifetime. Y2K was supposed to shut down society, the Human Genome Project was completed, and Contently’s co-founders were in high school.

So much has changed in the two decades since. For starters, technology survived the new millennium, and our co-founders graduated (we think?). But if you work in healthcare marketing, life might not look all that different.

“The rule of thumb is that it’s usually twenty years behind,” O’Connor said. “There are certainly exceptions, but one of the reasons it’s twenty years behind is because there are so many rules and regulations about how—can speak to consumers.”

That mindset still holds back many of the industry’s top brands across the globe. Seventy-two healthcare companies qualified for the Fortune 1000 list in 2020. They all earned at least $2 billion in revenue last year. However, 15 of them had no content presence whatsoever like a blog or resource center on their websites, while 30 more had extremely limited content outputs such as corporate newsrooms or bare blogs hidden in the footer of their sites.

This missed opportunity to build trust and reach new patients and customers is holding back these companies from moving up the list.

Right now, TV commercials are the most visible (and expensive) form of healthcare marketing. Total ad spend on pharma commercials topped $3.7 billion last year, according to ad tracker iSpot.tv, which is why it seems like the same drug clips play on a loop regardless of when or what you’re watching. In some cases, pharma companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year to market their treatments. AbbVie topped the list by doling out $465 million to promote Humira.

That system, however, is ripe for change. For starters, traditional TV viewership continues to drop as our media habits evolve. The commercials themselves lack creativity and don’t have enough air time to provide meaningful insights or specifics. And over the last decade, the American Medical Association has repeatedly called for a ban on all consumer ads from companies selling drugs or devices.

Companies can reroute part of these massive budgets to digital content that helps educate consumers while staying within industry rules and regulations. We know they’re capable of this because as the coronavirus spread, almost all of the healthcare brands on the Fortune 1000 list updated their sites and social channels with useful updates—even if they had no other content on their sites whatsoever. The announcements, letters, videos, and articles showed that healthcare companies could adapt quickly if the situation calls for it.

And as marketers revisit their plans for the future, how they allocate budgets for different programs is changing. LinkedIn recently reported that 78 percent of marketers expect budgets for online content to increase as a result of the pandemic.

“Have someone who is a content expert craft the engaging, effective, high-impact story. But work with a medical expert who can fact-check and reality-check what you’re writing,” O’Connor said. “That partnership can really enrich your content. It’s also really important for SEO. Google has higher standards for content that affects your health.”

Other industries like finance and technology are known for sophisticated content programs that build trust and boost the bottom line; there’s no reason healthcare can’t join their ranks. In fact, some companies are already leading the way.

3. Telemedicine and Healthtech Companies Are Leading the Field

Oscar, founded in 2012, has a very simple tagline: “Health insurance made easy.” Those four words tell us exactly what to expect whether we’re visiting Oscar’s brightly colored site for the first time or looking through its robust resource center.

That mission stands out because very few things about the healthcare system deserve to be described as “easy.” Science is complex, sure, but many healthcare companies have struggled to communicate complicated topics to a general audience. Low health literacy plagues millions of people across the world. In “The Great American Search for Healthcare Information,” Weber Shandwick discovered that 31 percent of adults found health information hard to understand.

From our research, it was clear that a new breed of healthcare company is rising through the industry. Digital-first brands in sectors like telemedicine and healthtech see content as a competitive advantage.

In some ways, organizations like Oscar, Epic, and athenahealth are acting more like tech companies than legacy healthcare brands. These newer players developed tools like Open Enrollment checklists and interactive Flu Dashboards to inform the public and heighten goodwill.

Site design is a significant factor here since it impacts how audiences find your content. As Contently VP of marketing Joe Lazauskas argued a few years ago, many Fortune 1000 brands have content hubs that look like they haven’t been updated since 1998—if they have any content at all.

“If the design of a content site is terrible, people won’t give the words a chance,” he wrote. “They’ll perceive it all as low quality.”

According to Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, 46 percent of people believe that “design look” is the number one indicator of a brand’s credibility. It affects everything from time spent on your site to bounce rate to conversions.

Creating visual content also tends to give newer healthtech firms a leg up on legacy companies. Animated videos and infographics, for instance, can make a site come across as more innovative and trustworthy. Seventy-five percent of marketers drive better ROI when they use visuals with their content, according to a joint study we did with Libris in 2019. And content with a video element was eight times as engaging as purely written content.

“Complex topics, simple execution,” O’Connor said. “The more complicated and inaccessible you’re making your content, the less you’re serving your audience. Break it down so anyone in the sixth grade can read and comprehend and take action.”

RealSelf, which helps people find doctors and cosmetic surgeons online, has taken this advice to heart. Its content hub makes use of a simple layout and pastel aesthetic that resembles an Instagram feed (which is likely part of the reason its content generated hundreds of backlicks in our report, second only to Cleveland Clinic.)

It’s actual Instagram feed, meanwhile, is full of short videos that demystify procedures like tattoo removals and botox. Captions complement the visuals with key details like average cost, user ratings, and a brief breakdown of the science involved. These posts regularly rack up over 50,000 views.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_NcsRThvfm/

We expect visual content and thoughtful design will only increase as time goes on. And you don’t have to be a healthtech startup to reap the benefits. During the pandemic, there’s been a surge of coronavirus graphics from publishers and healthcare companies alike that break down complex concepts for visual learners.

On this front, the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) offers resources for improving health literacy through content. The CHCS advocates for elements like white space, clear language, bullets, and more. To simplify information, they even reference tools like the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test, which measures readability, and Sustainability Assessment of Materials (or SAM), which looks at areas like graphics, layout, and cultural appropriateness.

4. CSR Is a Popular Use Case That Often Lacks Creativity

The healthcare industry has a bit of an image problem. The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other country, costs have increased more than 30x since the 1970s, yet we still have one of the lowest life expectancies compared to other developed countries.

According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 70 percent of people have a negative view of the U.S. healthcare system. To counter this narrative, a lot of healthcare companies have focused their content marketing efforts on corporate social responsibility.

This tactic makes sense on the surface, but companies could do a better job developing their CSR efforts into engaging stories that audiences can find. During our research, we discovered that this kind of content was often buried in corporate newsrooms. (Some newsroom pages could only be accessed by scrolling to the footer of the site.) In terms of creative value, CSR stories tend to have the dry tone of a press release.

Publishing this kind of content doesn’t have to be rocket science. CSR topics actually have a more natural fit in healthcare than other industries. Given all of the crucial research and development that healthcare companies are working on, it doesn’t feel as forced to talk about the impact on the community. These companies are saving lives. That makes for a compelling story–as long as you tell it the right way.

Just look at what GE Reports has done.

Over the last decade, GE Reports has become arguably the best brand blog there is. Led by former Forbes editor Tomas Kellner, the content hub highlights inspirational work carried out by GE employees around the world. It’s CSR content on steroids with the polish of a journalistic outlet.

For example, when there was a ventilator shortage, the GE healthcare team sprang into action, using 3D printing technology to increase production in Wisconsin. Naturally, Kellner and his team sprang into action as well, telling an inspirational story that makes GE look good without overt self-promotion.

“The time your audience spends with your content is really a transaction,” Kellner told us last year. “You have to give them back something of value. If the content becomes too promotional, too self-serving, you will lose your audience very quickly.”

Also worth noting: There has never been a better time to be a healthcare publisher. Audiences are hungry for uplifting healthcare stories, especially when there’s a shortage of good news to go around.

Epic, a B2B healthcare software company, has also been active on this front. In addition to webinars and whitepapers about managing COVID-19 care, the company has also profiled a rural Pennsylvania healthcare system helping patients prepare for their first telehealth appointments.

Patient stories are another CSR initiative gaining momentum in the industry. Think of them like case studies from the patient’s perspective that reveal the journey someone took to overcome health issues.

Patient stories should appeal to healthcare marketers because they’re driven by a clear story. They’re also inherently accessible, offering a personal touch that stands out among the complex, clinical info we’re used to.

The key, though, is figuring out how to tell the story respectfully. Some patients will feel comfortable crafting their own experiences while others may want an experienced creator to translate their thoughts.

“To find patient advocates, social media is a great tool,” said Nancie George, head of content at Oshi Health, which specializes in digestive healthcare. “It’s really about working with people who have identified themselves as an advocate and want to be contacted to share their story.”

5. Reports + Data Are the Biggest Differentiators

As the saying goes, write what you know.

If you’re starting from scratch, trying to compete with established content hubs can seem overwhelming. But most companies have a hidden content advantage sitting right in front of them: their own data.

In data-driven industries like healthcare and finance, internal information is a powerful differentiator. Most content adds to an existing dialogue, but proprietary research is newsworthy content. It creates a conversation, drives shares, and lends itself nicely to visual content. For that reason, it’s the easiest way to boost social engagement, press coverage, and backlinks.

In our research of healthcare content, original reports and guides emerged as some of the top-performing pieces that companies published.

Doctor on Demand has The State of Primary Care in America. ZocDoc launched a series called ZocTrends that reveals interesting data on patient behavior. Roman, the “digital health clinic for men” even named its content hub Health Guide. It’s steadily pumped helpful advice, analysis, and resources to patients. Its most recent project is the Novel Coronavirus Resource Hub, which compiles 18 pieces of content in one place, including a free telehealth assessment.

This strategy works so well for companies newer to content marketing because research can be dissected and repurposed for blog posts, e-books, animated explainer videos, and social graphics. So you don’t need a big marketing team or giant budget to make an immediate impact. Also, the results from these big rock projects can help convince internal stakeholders to increase their content investment.

“A few years ago, our company realized we were sitting on a treasure trove of data about healthcare in the U.S.,” John Fox, former executive director of content for athenahealth, wrote on our blog. “We decided to invest in building a robust research team to capture and serve up insights to our B2B clients in medical groups and hospitals.”

After studying electronic health records (EHR) at the state and national level, athenahealth launched the Flu Dashboard. Every year, it tracks the spread of flu over time in all 50 states with an interactive map. Users can also compare week-by-week flu visits and see vaccination trends.

According to Fox, athenahealth was able to notice flu trends faster for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

When the project took off a few years ago, the company doubled down on its content success. Since then, athenahealth has also developed dashboards for Lyme Disease and, more recently, COVID-19.

“We hire field-tested reporters who have a nose for great stories and aren’t shy about tackling complex topics or parsing data,” Fox explained. “With this approach, we’ve reported with original data on trending topics like the opioid crisis, Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, and the rush of IUD visits following the last presidential election. Our in-house designers are visual storytellers who can take in a data dump on chronic health conditions in the U.S. and turn out an interactive tool that demands exploration.”

Even corporate reports meant for shareholders could yield powerful stories that demand attention. Every year, Cleveland Clinic publishes its internal State of the Clinic report that rounds up data on patients and caregivers across its operations. Not all of the info is relevant to the public, but stats about a decrease in patient falls (down 15 percent) or an increase in virtual visits (up 29 percent) could easily be repurposed for a wider audience interested in healthcare.

When you’re turning data into content, make sure you use it responsibly. Improving health literacy takes more than just digestible information. Setting standards—and publicizing them in your work with research methodologies and sound sourcing—will go a long way toward building trust.

“Over the last decade, there are more points of view available in healthcare, which is both good and bad,” George said. “We’ve found internal reporting guidelines to be really helpful. It includes best practices like not overstating your findings, adding timestamps, using primary sources when possible. We have a big responsibility to the public.”

The post State of Healthcare Content Marketing: 5 Trends Transforming the Industry appeared first on Contently.

Dell Perspectives launched in 2017 to showcase the company’s thought leadership and attract the attention of business leaders across the globe. Immediately, the content was a hit. The site earned a Digiday Content Marketing Award for Best B2B Branded Content Site in its first year thanks to a blend of unique research, reporting, and insights.

Heading into 2020, Dell Perspectives welcomed Christina Westbrook from the Global Client Solutions business unit as its new editor-in-chief. “I don’t think I ever wanted a job as badly as I wanted this job,” she said.

As Westbrook took over, her team wanted to maintain the publication’s strong coverage on emerging technology and the leaders behind it. But they also had a goal of appealing to a younger audience that would become the C-suite of tomorrow.

“For Gen Z and millennials, it’s not just a ‘nice to have’ to be aligned with their social impact priorities and beliefs,” Westbrook explained. “They don’t want to work for—or with—companies that they think are tone deaf or disingenuous. So Perspectives is a great platform to discuss the topics that really matter to us as a company and as human beings—like diversity, inclusion, social responsibility, and sustainability.”

One of the first steps was increasing the diversity of voices on the site. “Diverse content requires diverse writers,” Westbrook said. “We didn’t want to be a technology publication publishing a wide range of articles written entirely by contributors of a singular experience. In 2020—in an industry as diverse and innovative as tech—that was unacceptable to us. We worked with Contently to recruit a team of global writers of all races, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations. These folks help us tell stories and tell them right.”

The creative additions proved to be crucial when COVID hit last March, and Dell Perspectives needed to shift its content strategy to address the new challenges it was facing.

Recovering Together

In response to the pandemic, Westbrook and her team developed the Recovering Together Series in April 2020. During a time that was full of non-stop depressing news, Dell Technologies wanted to stand out with stories about incredible innovations that were helping the world fight back.

“We just threw out one giant pitch request on the Contently platform and said: ‘Bring us your stories about how technology is helping us address all these cracks in the system,'” Westbrook said.

The series spanned everything from this fascinating story about a Dell Technologies employee making face shields at home to this fantastic feature on how a new wave of telehealth access was helping address the needs of the LGBTQ community.

“The telehealth story is one of my favorites,” Westbrook said. “It’s not because it was the highest performing, but it was the first one where we really leaned into something we’d never done before. It was article about cutting-edge innovations in queer health written by a queer-identified author.”

The end result was a 23-story series that reached over 24,000 readers and generated over 40,000 minute of attention time—as measured by Contently’s Analytics—all without any paid promotion.

Celebrating diverse innovators in tech

The next big series for Dell Perspectives came in February of 2021, when it launched a Black History Month campaign, which celebrated black leaders and innovators who paved the way for us all.

Ideas for the visually engaging series came from Dell Perspectives’ diverse roster of writers. The stories attracted readers by highlighting incredibly important figures in the history of tech, examining where we’re falling short today, and reporting on initiatives, like the Code Crew in Tennessee, that are building a better tomorrow.

“Dell Technologies believes in the power of diversity and considers it one of our huge strengths,” Westbrook said. “Diversity and inclusion are not just the right things to do, they drive better ideas, better decisions, and even a better bottom line.”

The series was also a hit. Stories saw 34 percent higher attention time on average than other Perspectives stories, an 11 percent higher finish rate, and 1,686 percent more readers.

Following Black History Month came Dell Perspective’s Rebel Women Series in March to celebrate Women’s History Month. The name for the campaign was inspired by the Rebel Girls YA series, and profiled five incredible women in STEM—all of whom are distinguished engineers at Dell Technologies—sharing the path they took to build storied careers.

Dell Technologies’ staff of Contently writers interviewed the engineers, and the journalistic approach unearthed incredibly moving stories.

“All the pieces were about women and written by women. People loved it internally, and it got great results,” Westbrook said. “One woman said her father cried when he read it.”

People loved it externally too. The series generated an astounding 73 percent average finish rate, 50 percent more attention time, a 71 percent higher engagement rate, and 494 percent more readers.

The response led to an important realization: This type of content shouldn’t just be limited to a specific month.

“I have a steering committee meeting every Tuesday and we asked ourselves, ‘Why are we only doing this for women’s history month?'” Westbrook said. “The number of women in STEM is low. We’re trying to encourage women to pursue careers in STEM. So these women’s stories are both interesting and relevant.”

One thing Westbrook appreciates is the way Contently has helped Dell Perspectives take their storytelling ambitions to new heights. “I appreciated the excellent editing and the thoughtful writer sourcing. I don’t have to worry about whether the writers or the graphic designer are up to par,” she said. “They’ll point out things that I don’t notice, and that’s where the partnership is really valuable.”

This month, Dell Perspectives is continuing that ambition with a Pride Series. Stories covers everything from how to be a more meaningful ally at your tech job to a feature story on LGBTQ community groups trying to ease the digital divide for seniors, at-risk youth, and homeless people within the queer community.

“As we enter the second half of 2021 and into 2022, we want to continue to ensure that our Black or queer or women writers, for example, aren’t only given stories that speak to their personal life experiences,” Westbrook added. “Yes, we want them to be the ones to tell those stories on Perspectives, but we also want them to feel encouraged and empowered to write the tech story that has nothing to do with belonging to a marginalized community—the ones that straight, cis, white men have had the privilege of telling from the get-go. That is the future of Perspectives. That is where we are moving toward.”

These efforts are paying off. Dell Perspectives has become beloved internally as the audience grew 200 percent over the past year, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers.

“What excites me is that there’s a lot of confidence internally in what we can do with Perspectives,” Westbrook said. “And there are a lot of people interested in leveraging what we’ve done and scaling it across our entire organization.”

As that happens, there’s no limit to the kind of high-impact, human stories that Dell Perspectives can tell.

The post How Dell Perspectives Grew Its Audience 200% Through Bold Social Impact Storytelling appeared first on Contently.

Because of the pandemic, we’re living within the rectangular screens that sit on our desk and in our pockets. But this reality has a silver-lining for creatives—marketing leaders are shifting their budgets into content.

The one thing that keeps me up at night, though, is how marketers measure content success.

In a recent Contently survey, 95 percent of marketers told us they expected their budget to increase or stay the same this year. But just 36 percent said they were satisfied with their company’s ability to measure the success of content.

This is because measuring content marketing is more complicated than performance marketing. Content has a huge impact across all stages of the customer journey, but you can’t capture ROI with a simple attribution model on Day 1. While everyone wants to attribute content directly to revenue, it’s silly to attempt that before you gauge how effectively you built an audience or generated leads.

Since content marketing is at such an inflection point right now, we wanted to share what we learned about tracking success over the years. So, with the help of our team, I published the industry’s first ever Content Measurement Maturity Model. You can read the whole thing here, but I also wanted to briefly walk through how it works.

Our 10-Step Content Measurement Maturity Model

Our Content Measurement Maturity Model consists of 10 steps spread across four stages—crawl, walk, run, and fly. When companies master measurement and optimization in one stage, they’ll be prepared to graduate to the next.

• The crawl stage is strategic to audience building.
• The walk stage is strategic to lead generation.
• The run stage is strategic to revenue generation.
• The fly stage is strategic to revenue attribution.

In the graphic, you’ll notice there’s only one measurement step in the fly stage—multi-touch content attribution—because it’s incredibly hard to do right, and if anyone else tells you different … well, frankly, they’re lying.

Let’s take a closer look at each stage.

Crawl: Strategic to Audience Building

The crawl stage is all about measuring audience building. You need to attract an audience before you can measure the down-funnel actions people take.

1. Audience Reach. Here, we’re looking at tried-and-true reach metrics, as you’ll see in the table below. According to our survey, this is the step most commonly adopted by marketers, with 80 percent tracking audience reach key performance indicators (KPIs).
2. Audience Engagement. AKA how deeply are you engaging folks with your content? It’s not enough to get people to come. You also need them to stay.
3. SEO Effectiveness. SEO is foundational to building an audience. According to Contently Analytics, 67 percent of all traffic to brand sites comes from organic search. Surprisingly, though, only 57 percent of marketers track these metrics.

Walk: Strategic to Lead Generation

Once you’ve started successfully building an audience, you want to inspire people to take actions that’ll create a deeper relationship with your brand—like signing up for a newsletter or virtual event, using an interactive tool, or requesting a demo.

Here we measure:

4. Leads Generated. The number of people taking a conversion action that’s important to your brand.

5. Lead Engagement. Using a marketing automation system like Pardot, you’re able to track how a lead engages with your brand’s content—the emails they open and click through, the pages they visit, the articles they read—and assign an appropriate “score” for that behavior. Similarly, tools like Contently Docalytics and Adobe allow you to see how a lead engages with “big rock” downloadable content like research papers.

6. Share of Voice. This measures not only how effectively you’re inspiring folks to take an action that pushes them into your pipeline, but also how well your content is controlling the conversation and boosting your brand in the market relative to your competitors.

Run: Strategic to Revenue Generation

In the run stage, we cover the areas that’ll get your CMO and CFO excited—content attribution to revenue.

Our model recommends three complementary approaches that will help capture the full picture of content’s impact on your bottom line.

7. SEO Value. SEO Value calculates how much your organic search traffic is worth to your brand. It’s a leading indicator of revenue returns—we launched Content Value in our platform this past fall, and it’s been a revelation for our customers, allowing them to measure the monetary impact of their content proactively, instead of just retroactively.

8. Lead Value. A straightforward approach in which you multiply the number of leads your content generates by the traditional cost-per-lead (CPL) for your marketing team.

For instance, a leading B2B software company that Contently partners with recently launched a large-scale content campaign that drove 22,000 leads. Since the company’s average cost-per-lead was $71, the marketing team was able to attribute over $1.5 million in revenue impact to their content efforts, a 7x return on their investment.

Ex: 22,000 x $71 = $1.56M

9. Single-Touch Content Attribution. A single-touch attribution model gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to one marketing effort. The downside of a single-touch model is that it’s limiting, particularly in a B2B cotext, when there are many touchpoints across the buyer’s journey. The upside is that it’s relatively simple to implement, as most marketing automation systems and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) make single-touch attribution easy to track.

Everyone wants to jump to this step off the bat, but remember: It only makes sense to focus on attribution once you’ve built an audience and started measuring your ability to drive and engage leads.

On their own, each of these approaches has gaps, but when factored in together, they provide a holistic picture of content’s impact on revenue.

Fly: Strategic to Revenue Attribution

In the “Fly” section of our maturity model is the final step: Multi-Touch Content Attribution.

A multi-touch attribution model factors in all actions a customer takes over the course of the sales cycle, often divvying up the credit on a weighted scale. For instance, it may give double credit to the first and last touch in the cycle, but equal weight to all other touches in between.

We made this the final stage in our model because it’s so difficult to implement—especially inside enterprise organizations with poor data hygiene. It’s the white whale of content measurement—much discussed and desired, but rarely captured, even after a long odyssey.

If you’re still at the crawl or walk stage—you’re not alone. And you can still produce really impactful work there. Less than a third of marketers we surveyed measured are currently looking beyond lead generation.

The good news is that our maturity model is designed to help you reach the next stage and get comfortable with these content marketing ROI metrics. After all, the whole point of content measurement is to make smarter decisions.

Check out the full model here. And to evaluate where you stand right now, take the interactive assessment below.

The post Measure Your Content Marketing ROI With These 10 Steps appeared first on Contently.

With bigger content investments, however, comes increased competition for attention. Brands are not only competing with their competitors for consumer attention, but also every individual content creator and media company on earth. Each year, that competition is only increasing.

To make sense of the changing landscape and how brands can better serve their audiences, we set out to hear directly from consumers. What do they want from content marketing? How do they spend their time online? And what else can brands do to positively influence their purchasing decisions?

Here’s what they had to say.

[If you’d like to read the PDF version, we have you covered here.]

Methodology & Key Findings

At the start of January, we surveyed 1,072 Americans to find out their content marketing preferences. The sample size was proportioned based on U.S. Census data for attributes including: age, gender, region, and income.

Results & Analysis

Branded content has broken through to the masses

In marketing, recognition always matters. Creating great content costs time and money, but with ad blockers so popular and media habits constantly evolving, there’s no guarantee people will pay attention to your work.

For that reason, it’s encouraging that 80 percent of respondents read, watched, or listened to a piece of content from a brand in the last year.

When content marketing emerged last decade, some people viewed it as a side project that wasn’t incorporated into their larger marketing strategies. And when companies did invest in it, they weren’t always sure how to package their content, which led to trust issues. In 2016, Contently partnered with the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at The City University of New York on a study that revealed 44 percent of people were not able to identify the brand behind a piece of sponsored content.

“In marketing, recognition always matters.”

Steadily, though, those problems dissolved as brands felt more comfortable publishing meaningful content (more on this later) and thinking like media companies. There was no reason to hide logos or sponsorships. Now, brands are eager to put their work out there and reach a wide audience. It’s official: Branded content has gone mainstream.

People trust brands more than media companies (and it’s not even close)

A clear majority of U.S. adults (63 percent) now trust brands more than traditional media outlets. In isolation, this is good news for marketers. But it also may be bad news for the civic health of the country.

This data point is complicated. The news industry has withstood an unprecedented attack on its integrity over the past five years, as the Trump administration turned “fake news” into a rallying cry. Numerous studies—like this one from Edelman—have discovered that trust in news media continues to sour.

While consumers increasingly question the motivations behind the news media, the motivations of brands are more transparent: They want to sell you something, even when they’re creating helpful content. Brands that are transparent about their motivations will likely earn more trust as long as their content adds value to someone’s life.

As for the distrust of the news media? That’s a whole other problem that warrants more research.

Most people follow a brand on social media

Social media is a test lab for creativity. It’s a lot easier to send a tweet than hire people to write, edit, and illustrate a blog post. Social networks also offer more freedom than corporate websites. Plenty of branded accounts have found a voice there, and it appears to be working. In our survey, 69 percent of respondents claimed to follow a brand on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Instagram. Nice, right?

We’ve heard firsthand from the people behind successful social accounts for brands ranging from Steak-umm to Merriam-Webster about how they build community rather than plug product pages. There’s no universal blueprint, but the best brands seem to embrace a straightforward, colloquial style. They’re quirky, clever, and quick to join conversations native to the platform.

Many of the brands with big followings and impressive engagement skew B2C. No matter how hard we all try, there can only be one Denny’s. But B2B companies with smaller audiences can still use their platforms to post useful advice, answer pressing questions, and show off a personality. HubSpot does a great job of this on Twitter, mixing in polls, discussion questions, and tips for its 815,000 followers.

Influencers are more like ______

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) November 18, 2020

Only a small portion of HubSpot’s tweets consist of links to their content, but this pays off in the long run. Followers know you’re not just posting for traffic, and they’ll appreciate the interactivity, which was the original point of social media. Then, when you are looking to drive people to your content, they’ll be eager to click on a link and head to your site.

Social impact storytelling drives purchase intent

Contently head of marketing Joe Lazauskas recently crowned social impact storytelling “the hottest content trend” of 2021, and for good reason. We found that 65 percent of people prefer to buy from brands that align with their values.

There’s an additional wrinkle here that underscores the big role content can play. When we asked if people are more likely to buy from a brand after reading a story about the positive impact it’s having on the world, the likelihood they’d make a purchase increased by 9 percentage points.

This suggests content about corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives can have a real impact on purchasing decisions. Covering these efforts is more than just a humble brag. It separates legitimate action from the empty words and gestures that some companies use to score a few PR points.

Patagonia is arguably the best example of a company that has mastered social impact storytelling. In addition to donating 1 percent of all revenue to sustainable causes, Patagonia has also developed longform stories on activism and a series of beautiful documentary shorts about environmentalism. A number of other brands ranging from TOMS to Bank of America have followed suit. And in the last year, the pandemic seemed to galvanize a lot of companies into reporting on their COVID-19 relief efforts.

As Lazauskas explained in his newsletter: “One of the coolest things is that telling these stories will not only help your company’s bottom line—it’ll help the world too. That’s because when you tell great stories about the good your company is doing, it creates a positive feedback loop that encourages your company to invest more in CSR and social impact efforts.”

Most consumers subscribe to multiple brand newsletters, but the competition is heating up

Email hasn’t changed all that much over the past two decades. Yet year after year, marketers consistently vote it as one of their top distribution channels. In fact, marketers rated email newsletters as the best way to nurture leads, ahead of blog posts, in-person events, and case studies, per Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2B Benchmarking Report.

We’re not here to rain on the parade. Email is also one of Contently’s biggest content distribution channels. However, too much of a good thing can lead to negative consequences. Because while it’s very easy to send an email, getting someone to care about it is a different story.

“While it’s very easy to send an email, getting someone to care about it is a different story.”

According to our research, 69 percent of respondents are subscribed to multiple brand newsletters. About 21 percent aren’t subscribed to any.

Given that the average worker receives about 120 emails per day, it’s promising to see a healthy appetite for branded content delivered to their inbox. But with so much competition and clutter, it may be harder for newsletters to gain traction—especially since a 2020 Litmus report found that 54 percent of marketers expected to send more emails than the year before.

To stand out via email, marketers can no longer rely on the same old digest of recycled links. As we wrote recently in our newsletter guide, marketers must ensure their newsletter provides unique information and perspective their audience can’t get anywhere else. They should also consider publishing content that’s exclusive to newsletter subscribers, and personalize and segment email content based on audience data. (We use MailChimp and Pardot to do this.)

Lastly, focus on promoting your newsletter. It won’t grow if nobody can find it. Use prime real estate on your site to set up “Subscribe” fields, and reach out to relevant companies to see if there’s mutual interest in guest posts that could increase your reach.

Consumers crave educational courses

The point of content marketing is to help the buyer. Good content should either entertain you or make you better at your job. Great content should do both.

Educational courses are one practical way to pull this off. We’ve been bullish on this trend for a while, and according to our survey, audiences feel similarly: 58 percent of people said they were somewhat or very likely to take a free course from a brand.

Courses are effective because they get marketers to produce series rather than one-off pieces of content. (It’s called the buyer’s journey for a reason.) People don’t make a purchase after reading one blog post. The average B2B executive buyer consumes 17 pieces of content over the course of the sales cycle, according to Sirius Decisions. So marketers can show off their unique expertise with a course. Plus, it makes more sense for someone to fill out a lead form if they’re expecting to receive a new lesson every week from your company.

“Good content should either entertain you or make you better at your job. Great content should do both.”

To see this in action, we recommend checking out HubSpot Academy and Grow With Google. Both educational hubs chunk out courses into short video lessons that are easy to digest. If you’re looking for more insight before you get started, we put together some quick tips and research insights that should help.

Invest in influencer marketing at your own risk

Trust has been a common theme running through this report. It’s arguably most important when it comes to influencer marketing because influencers blur that line between selling and helping. They’re not always held to the same labelling and disclosure standards as brands.

That blurred line may be catching up with influencers. Only 26 percent of respondents trust influencers when they promote a product or service from a brand.

While paid influencers may come across as misleading or transactional, social proof remains an incredibly powerful force in marketing. People value expertise and third-party validation, as long as it comes from the right source. To dig deeper, we asked people to rank five groups based on trustworthiness:

Marketers can’t really tap into friends and family, but to replicate a similar kind of trusted expertise, they do have another option: thought leadership. Last year, Edelman found that 89 percent of people believe thought leadership has enhanced their perceptions of a company, and 49 percent claimed it influenced purchasing decisions.

Savvy thought leadership content, which is more popular in B2B marketing than B2C, tends to have better optics than influencer marketing. And it may be your best bet to solve those trust issues for good.

Strive for a balance of content formats to maximize your reach

In 2015, three words began messing up digital media: pivot to video. Some companies decided to go all in on video because they thought it would please social media algorithms. Others soon followed suit, hoping their content engagement would immediately skyrocket.

As a result, entire editorial teams were let go. We now know that the pivot was hugely problematic. Facebook, in particular, provided inflated video metrics to publishers and advertisers, misleading them into investing more resources into Facebook video. Social platforms inflated video metrics so that companies would pay more to promote their content. Five years out, this serves as a strong reminder that there’s no perfect content format.

Our study backs this up. When we asked people to select the type of content they enjoy the most, results were split. Video led the pack at 30 percent, but visual content (like graphics and memes) and text were close behind, with 28 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Notably, when we filtered the data just for people aged 30-44, text edged out video as most enjoyable.

Therefore, unless you have a very narrow audience, it makes sense to invest in a balanced content output. It also makes sense to conduct research on your audience by interviewing them or using software that captures their preferences. (At Contently, we rely on an internal tool called StoryBook for this.) Find out details like which topics, channels, visuals, and headlines will resonate with them so you can make the most of your content budget.

Plus, content rarely lives in a vacuum. Good stories often incorporate multiple content formats on the same page. On The Content Strategist, for example, we try to break up long blocks of text with video embeds and custom graphics.

This approach helps hold the audience’s attention because we all retain information differently. There are four common learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and reading/writing. Younger people tend to favor visual learning, but research shows that preferred learning styles change as we get older, leaning more toward reading and writing. With this in mind, marketers should aim to accommodate as many potential buyers as possible.

Conclusion

How can brands continue to improve their content programs and drive results? The main takeaway from our report is to focus on trust. The companies that stand out find unique ways to add value to people’s lives. They connect with a distinct voice and emphasize helpful guidance over promotional tactics.

In 2021, as more money pours into content marketing, we expect there to be increased competition for attention. However, as our report lays out, there is a clear blueprint for creating great content and reaching the right audience.

We hope this data helps guide your future plans. Buyers aren’t shy about what they want. Now it’s up to today’s content marketers to give it to them.

The post 2021 Contently Report: What Buyers Want From Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

It’s nearly impossible to prove content marketing ROI if you don’t outline clear goals at the beginning of the year. Sure, you may be able to cherry-pick some numbers in December, throw them into a Powerpoint, and make a tenuous case to your boss. But you’ll be playing a dangerous game for two reasons:

1. The most impactful KPIs aren’t just magically measured by Google Analytics. You need to properly setup your marketing stack (GA, Pardot, Salesforce, SEMRush, Facebook Business Manager, etc.) to track the behaviors that matter most.

2. If you’re not creating and distributing content with a clear purpose, you’re basically banking on a happy accident to keep your job.

So where do you start? To prove ROI, your content goals should ladder up to the things your CEO cares about: new business (revenue generated by new clients), customer retention, and loyalty (getting your existing clients to keep spending more money with you).

This doesn’t mean your content should be full of product plugs. Far from it. It’s much more effective to build trust with your audience through helpful content than to inundate them with sales messages. They’ll be more likely to buy something from you in the long run.

But you do need to tie content to revenue. There are a couple of easy places to start.

If you’re B2B, most of your inbound business comes from demo requests or people looking to talk to sales. Track how many people first visit your site by reading or watching a piece of content before subsequently filling out a demo/sales request. Then see if those leads convert to deals at a higher rate.

If you’re B2C, track whether people who consume your content convert into customers at a higher rate, and if they spend more money. Walmart, for instance, found that people who read their content had 7% larger orders—a big overall KPI for the retailer.

Then, measure the key drivers that attract the right audience to your content. After all, you need to build an audience and inspire people to engage with your content if you want it to have an impact on revenue.

SEO: Measure gains in search traffic and ranking improvements for target keywords. (For instance, we really want to attract people searching for terms like “content strategy” and “content marketing platforms.”)

Newsletter sign-ups and Engagement: Since newsletters are the most consistent way to build an owned audience, growing that list is key. But also track your open rate, click rate, and overall percentage of engaged subscribers.

Social Engagement: How are followers engaging with content across channels? Look to metrics like video views, engagement rate, reach, social referral traffic, and comments.

Backlinks and earned media: The most effective SEO strategy today is to create content with such great original research and reporting that it earns backlinks and press. It’s super valuable to organically introduce your brand to new audiences.

The science here comes from setting achievable goals in each of these categories. The art comes in interpreting the data, figuring out which metrics are most impactful for your business, and teaching your team how to create and distribute content with these goals in mind.

This is far from an exhaustive list—I’m working on a content marketing ROI mega-post that goes into much greater detail. But we’re almost a month into the year. If you haven’t set goals already, you need to get started. Your content marketing program depends on it.

The post The Art and Science of Content Marketing ROI appeared first on Contently.

On March 11, the content team at MD Financial was finalizing their Q2 content plan, built around themes like spring cleaning your finances and home-buying season. Then Prime Minster Trudeau announced Canada’s response to the COVID-19 situation.

“Our world flipped,” said Shawna Dennis, who leads all of marketing for the physician-focused financial services company.

By March 13, the entire marketing team was mobilized around an entirely new content strategy. Within a week, they had launched a hub of COVID-19 resource content. The results have been astounding: 200 percent audience growth, a 38 percent increase in logins by its customers, and a 30 percent uptick in messages to financial advisors.

The story of how they got there is a masterclass in how to adapt an enterprise content strategy on the fly—one that marketers across industries can learn from.

The COVID content strategy

MD Financial’s content strategy shift was led by its director of content, Rachel Kenworthy, but it was supported by the entire organization.

Kenworthy and Dennis set out to fully understand the impact COVID-19 would have on its audience of 130,000 physicians and medical learners in Canada. They tapped into the subject matter experts (SMEs) at the company—from asset management, wealth and financial planning, and field teams—to understand client needs. Some physicians were seeing an 80 percent drop in income; others were working overtime on the frontlines.

MD Financial discovered three core needs: peace of mind about their portfolios during volatility, how MD was going to address their unique financial needs during the pandemic, and an understanding of what government programs were available to them.

The results have been astounding: 200 percent audience growth, a 38 percent increase in logins by its customers, and a 30 percent uptick in messages to financial advisors.

Within six weeks, the content team created 16 fact sheets, 15 articles, 10 market thought leadership blog posts, and 8 videos. They’ve attracted over 53,000 visits to the new COVID content—an impressive feat given that its total addressable audience is only 130,000 people. They also launched the “MD Market Watch” podcast, which was downloaded over 1300 times in those first 6 weeks.

Perhaps most impactful, though, was an interactive tool that gave physicians personalized information on which government assistance programs available to them. Its audience visited the tool over 15,000 times.

“We were flat out saying, ‘We understand that these are the challenges you’re facing right now,'” explained Dennis. “Here are some pieces of content that are going to help you. We’re always here.”

MD Financial’s 3 keys to success

A successful content strategy pivot doesn’t just happen by force of will. It was made possible by years of groundwork and an audience-first approach to marketing. Dennis walked me through the three keys that set them up for success.

1. Establish buy-in from the top

As a former journalist, Dennis believes in the power of content. But the team needed more than her buy-in to execute this content strategy to its full potential. The entire marketing team had to rally to get its COVID content up and running in less than 10 days. The company’s internal SMEs had to be willing to help, and the rest of the senior leadership needed to support the content-first focus.

That collaboration was the result of two years of effort developing the content program. “The strategy help that Contently has provided in getting our content strategy documented, getting the technology in place, all of that has been really valuable for the team,” Dennis said.

Dennis and Kenworthy have also gotten buy-in by setting clear goals and KPIs that demonstrate content’s impact. MD Financial measures content success in three buckets that map to the stages of the funnel:

Site Traffic and Engagement (top): visits, views, and time spent with content, with an emphasis on organic traffic.

Deeper consideration (mid): Driving from content to tools/calculators, newsletter sign-ups, and product pages.

Sales and loyalty (bottom): Leads, sign-ins, customer engagement, and advisor messages.

Showing how top-of-funnel engagement maps to sales and revenue makes it easy for others in the org to see why the entire marketing team needs to throw its weight behind a content strategy shift like this.

“A lot of people get hung up on the vanity metrics because they’re easy to get,” Dennis said, “but it’s very difficult to prove the ROI to the rest of the org when you’re talking about pageviews and engagement rate because they don’t see how that ties into sales.”

2. Pivot quickly and put your audience first

When COVID-19 hit, MD Financial had a full-fledged Q2 content strategy mapped out and ready to go. But when the world changed, they didn’t hesitate. They threw that plan out the window and started from scratch.

“We were running along ready to go with our normal stuff we had planned for Q2 and overnight had to do a 180 and change what our plan was,” Dennis said.

If they’d delayed even a week or two, they not only wouldn’t have seen the same content success, but also wouldn’t have been there for clients in the same way.

“I will always clear the way for content,” Dennis said. “If I have to move budget there to make it happen, if I have to clear things off people’s plates and make content a priority, then that’s what we do.”

3. Involve SMEs early in the process

Collaborating quickly and effectively with SMEs throughout the company had two big benefits. First, it helped them understand what their audience needed quickly.

“We used our SMEs as real partners,” Dennis said. “We worked hand-in-hand with them to create content that was super specific to our clients and what they needed.”

Second, working this way helped MD Financial expedite approvals and publish content quickly. “A lot of times the SME is the last person who reviews, but we found that by engaging them early in the planning process, the whole thing went smoother than it normally would. And from a compliance and legal perspective, the reviews we had to go through took way less time.”

Research backs this up. In our recent state of financial services content research report, we found that including SME and compliance teams early was one of the biggest keys to content success.

“Everything that we do, all of our acquisition campaigns, our advertising, our social activity, everything that we do from a digital perspective, is driven by content,” Dennis said. “It’s the underlying force behind what we’re doing.”

The post Inside MD Financial Management’s Successful COVID-19 Content Strategy appeared first on Contently.

Some marketers expect content revenue to have a linear path. You make content, people click on it, and then—BOOM—they immediately buy something or fill out a demo request form. After all, if our search ads work that way, shouldn’t content work that way too?

It doesn’t, but that’s not a bad thing. Content is all about building trust and loyalty with people so that when they’re ready to buy something, you’re their first choice—driving continuous demand and making the sales process much easier.

This is why we invest so much of our marketing budget in content at Contently. The vast majority of people don’t just read an article like this and request a demo. But they do come back and read something a few days later, then sign up for our newsletter or attend a webinar. When the time is right, they request a demo to learn how we can help.

While content conversion doesn’t follow a linear pathway, you can chart these stages to tie your content to revenue.

The 3 stages of content ROI

I’ve found it’s easiest to tackle content marketing ROI when you chunk it into three stages. The best place to start is at the upper half of the funnel, where you can map how your audience turns into sales-ready leads.

1. Audience growth

At this stage, you’re trying to make a damn good impression on your target audience in hopes of converting them to the next stage. You want to build awareness, trust, and an overall positive brand sentiment through helpful, entertaining content.

Most marketers are comfortable with the key metrics at this stage—they’re the ones Google Analytics shows you default: unique visitors, return visitors, time on site, pages/sessions, and scroll depth. Social metrics—shares, comments, likes—come into play here too.

We’ll talk about how to maximize audience growth in a bit, but some content marketers tend to stop here. That’s a mistake because if you want to drive revenue from your content, you need to inspire people to take an action.

To drive more action, you want a strong SEO strategy that’ll bring in the right type of readers. For instance, we focus on ranking for keywords like “best content marketing platforms,” “how to write a white paper,” “enterprise content marketing,” “content marketing for banks,” and “b2b content marketing funnel.” These keywords are likely to attract people who are good customer fits for Contently.

You also shouldn’t be afraid to use paid distribution to reach more folks who fit your ideal customer profile. It’s a great way to grow the top of your content marketing funnel. It’s getting more effective, too, since paid content distribution costs are down 34 percent since March.

2. Content leads

A lot of marketers call anyone who downloads their e-book or attends a webinar a “lead,” but I find that misleading—particularly to your sales team. Just because someone downloads an e-book doesn’t mean they’re ready for a sales call. It’d be like if you downloaded Tinder and immediately got a passive aggressive voicemail from a wedding planner. These things take time.

I prefer to call these folks a “content conversion” or “content lead.” They’ve taken an action that’ll allow us to build a deeper relationship with them. Trust doesn’t magically build after one article. But if someone starts reading your newsletter every week, or attending hour-long webinars, or takes an educational course you made, that person is much more likely to become your customer in the future.

Your job is to make it as easy as possible for people to convert into content leads. Give them a few different options. For instance, we’ll offer free content resources each week on a blue bar across the top of our blog. Right below it, there’s a sticky button to subscribe to our newsletter.

Once a month, we’ll also target each visitor with a prompt to sign up for our newsletter using Sumo, which converts at almost a 3 percent rate.

We also include a content offer unit on the right rail. We’re a tech company, so we don’t need to sell ads, but we can still put that white space to good use.

If you want a B2C example, Marriott does a great job of using smart UX on its popular travel mag, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, to maximize conversions.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently customer.)

Here, you want to track both the number of content conversions as well as the rate your visitors convert to one of your content offers. Google Analytics conversion goals are a great tool to do this. (Check out Andy Crestodina’s guide for more.) And you need to properly nurturing content leads through a marketing automation platform until they become sales-ready leads.

3. Sales-ready leads

Next, you want to nurture your content leads until they become sales-ready. What is a sales-ready lead? Someone who’s raised their hand and asked to learn more about your product, usually by filling out a form on your website.

At this stage, you want to nurture your content leads with a drip campaign of relevant content. If someone signed up for a webinar on content marketing ROI, follow up with additional articles, case studies, and product videos that cover the topic. Feel free to include a call-to-action to talk to sales. You want to make it easy to convert—but only after you’ve delivered valuable content.

Once those leads hit sales, you can drive a massive amount of additional ROI through a strong sales enablement strategy. That’s the topic of a whole other blog post, which you can read here.

Making your own map

To tie content to revenue, track your conversion rates at each of these three stages and map how content flows downstream until someone becomes a sales-ready lead.

Say we drive 100,000 unique visitors at the audience growth stage. Based on our conversion goals, we know that 1 percent will sign up for a webinar or another content offer, while another 2-3 percent will sign up for our newsletter. This translates to 1,000 webinar sign-ups and 2,000 newsletter sign-ups.

Next, via our marketing automation platform, we look at the rate at which our webinar attendees and newsletter subscribers convert to demo requests. Our model shows that for every 100,000 visitors to our blog, we’ll generate 80 demo requests.

Then, to get all the way to revenue, you just need to understand how much each sales-ready lead is worth to your business. Say that your average deal size is $100,000, and each lead converts to a sale at a 5 percent rate. In that scenario, each demo request adds $5,000 in weighted pipeline, and those 80 demo requests are worth $400,000 to your business.

The compounding returns of the content marketing funnel

The great news about content marketing is that when it’s done well, you’ll see compounding returns over time.

Most marketing is fleeting. Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, getting shared on social, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.

As I wrote last month, this phenomenon is called the compounding returns of content. Even as your monthly investment in content remains flat, the results will compound over time. And if your content marketing funnel is set up correctly, that audience growth will translate into sales.

There’s never been a better time to build your audience. Engagement with branded content is up 16 percent right now, and people are eager for insights and thought leadership that will help them overcome new challenges and do their jobs better.

Help them overcome those challenges while following the guidelines here, and you’ll build a content marketing machine that’ll deliver compounding revenue for years to come.

This article is based off my webinar, How to Make the Case for Content Marketing: Compounding Returns and ROI. Watch it on demand here.

The post How to Map Content Marketing to Revenue, in 3 Steps appeared first on Contently.

I was fresh off running a failed news site—one of those late 2000s editorial ventures that sounded cool in theory, but didn’t actually have a stable business model. Working for a software company brought a bit of a learning curve.

“We need to do some industry-specific e-books to drive leads,” my boss told me.

“Totally,” I’d reply, nodding aggressively. “Let’s drive those leads … to the bank!”

Even if I didn’t totally understand the funnel yet, I did know how to research and write. So, I’d compile as much first and third-party research as possible, interview smart people, and write reports with pun-heavy titles like “Banking on Content.”

Coming from a digital media background, I hated the PDF—a format that’s only optimized for one thing: printing. So, I’d repurpose each e-book into formats that were actually readable. I’d make three or four different blog posts out of excerpts from the report and include CTAs to download the full report. Whenever possible, I’d offer one or two of these excerpts as a guest post to another marketing blog, to widen our audience.

I’d also turn the key findings into infographics, and turn that infographic into 5-6 new social graphics to engage our audiences on Twitter and LinkedIn. Over the long run, these divisible pieces of content drove way more e-book traffic and leads than the original landing page.

It turns out there was a name for what we were doing: the hub and spoke strategy. As we explain in the lead gen section of our content strategy course, it’s a smart strategy to turn your meaty research and reports into smaller pieces of content, tailored to your various distribution channels. These divisible pieces of content are the spokes that drive traffic back to your “hub” content.

So how do you figure out what your spoke content should be? To help, we created this Hub & Spoke content strategy worksheet to complete with your team via a silent brainstorm, followed by a team discussion.

To make this all super meta, this post is actually a “spoke” piece, intended to inspire you to sign up for our lead gen content strategy course. So please do that. It’ll help you drive more leads, and it’ll make me look good.

The post How the Hub and Spoke Strategy Can Help You Drive More Content Leads appeared first on Contently.

In the face of that uncertainty, companies are tightening their belts. A number of people have reached out to me asking for advice on how to protect their budget and make the case for content.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Like many other marketing leaders, I’ve mapped out potential budget cuts in case the economic fallout from COVID-19 is worse than expected. But we’re not cutting content; we’re doubling down on it. Given how the coronavirus has changed our jobs as marketers, there’s a good chance you should too.

The compounding returns of content

The biggest mistake people make with content marketing ROI is taking a short-term view. The vast majority of advertising and marketing is fleeting. Say you spend $500 on paid search ads today. You’ll get 25 clicks, but tomorrow, you’ll have to spend that money all over again to see any additional value.

Spend $500 on a helpful blog post optimized for search, and it’ll drive continuous traffic and leads while building trust with your audience. You’ll spend that $500 up front, but afterwards, high-quality content will continue to deliver results for free.

This is what Tomasz Tunguz calls the compounding returns of content marketing. When you create a high-quality piece of content, it delivers results not only on the first day it’s distributed via an email newsletter or social media, but also gradually over time as the results build on each other.

Take, for instance, this piece on how to write a white paper. We published it back in 2012, when Contently was five people hiding out in the corner of Google’s Chelsea Market office. It’s consistently generated 3,000 pageviews per month for the past 8 years and driven thousands of newsletter subscribers and leads. To get the equivalent results from a search ad for that topic, we’d have to spend millions of dollars.

This dynamic holds true for temporal/timely content as well. While the long-term returns fizzle out faster than with evergreen content, the initial traffic spike is often larger, and you still see compounding returns over time. We’ve seen this with a lot of our coverage of Facebook’s algorithm over the years—a big initial spike, and then a smaller long-term tail as it’s still shared over social and ranks for longer-tail search terms.

Why content marketing is the smartest investment you can make right now

There are a few reasons for this:

1. The demand for high-quality, helpful content has never been greater

I’ve never felt more urgency to create helpful content for our audience. Our customers and readers are facing new challenges—working remotely, adapting their content strategy, spinning up virtual events, communicating thoughtfully and sensitively with their audience.

Your audience is almost certainly looking for new answers too. As a marketer, think of yourself as in the business of public service. In financial services, your audience is urgently looking to you for financial advice. In telemedicine, there are critical questions you can answer for healthcare providers across the country. In B2B tech and services, you can help your audience figure out how to work in a whole new way.

We’re not cutting content; we’re doubling down on it.

There’s also a good chance they’re looking for content that has nothing to do with COVID-19. They’re simply spending a lot of time online right now and want to use it productively. Your content can simply entertain them, teach them a new skill, or help them stay mentally and physically fit.

Nudge, an analytics platform that tracks branded content performance around the web, found that attention time on content is up a whopping 39 percent over the past four weeks, compared with the same time period a year ago. Traffic to business, finance, and education sub-reddits is surging. Comscore has also seen a huge increase in usage across devices.

This is an incredibly important time for marketers to step up to the challenge. As you do, remember this mantra: Always be helpful, always be honest, never be opportunistic.

2. Content is the most logical place to reallocate event marketing and paid media budgets

The top two line items in most marketing budgets—events and paid media—are on hold for the foreseeable future. And since people are taking a wait-and-see approach on purchases across many sectors, advertisers are pulling back on media spend.

The logical move? Play the long game and reallocate those funds towards content, which is designed to build relationships and nurture leads. Once the economic landscape shifts in a couple of months, you’ll be set to hit the ground running and accelerate your business thanks to the connections and trust you’ve built.

The compounding returns of content means the investment you make now will keep delivering for you over time.

3. Content fuels virtual events

With in-person events suddenly canceled, brands are quickly shifting to virtual events. When the focus turns to the screen, strong content becomes more important than ever. Mediocre presentations can’t be propped up by great food, booze, and networking opportunities.

High-performing content published on your blog and social channels can easily be translated into virtual events. It’s a tactic that’s been extremely successful for us. We turned my LinkedIn series on the four elements of great storytelling into a webinar that got over 1,000 sign-ups almost immediately.

If you plan on pulling off successful virtual events in the coming months, it’ll be a lot easier if you can pull from a reservoir of timely content. Having a strong foundation of written, research, and video content allows us to create virtual events much faster. Heck, if this post does well, there’s a good chance we’ll turn it into a webinar too.

Content and connection

One of the best pieces I read recently was from Henk Campher of Hootsuite, who wrote that the best thing brands can do right now is “do good or make people feel good.”

As many of us sit in isolation, our need for connection has never been greater. And nothing makes humans feel more connected than a great story.

Those stories can be about the good you’re doing. GE Report’s breaking news coverage of how it’s helping the fight against COVID-19 has been astounding. Or they simply can make people feel good, and nothing makes people feel good like a heartwarming story. (Which is why I’m currently binge-watching Homeward Bound.)

We all need a sense of duty and purpose right now. And the best thing we can do for ourselves, our companies, and each other is to tell great stories.

The post How to Make the Case for Content Marketing in Uncertain Times 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.

We’re happy to report in that in our 2020 trends webinar last month, we did not do that. Instead, we focused on data and insights that you can easily use to create more effective content. Find all seven trends below—plus a recording of our presentation, for all of you crazy webinar junkies out there.

Watch the full webinar below, and get ahead of the game before the AI-powered robo-marketing holograms come to take your job.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/379083428

1. Invest in multimedia content (the data backs it up)

We’ve been talking about the importance of video and infographics for years, but marketers have been slow to make the investment.

That’s starting to change, and you need to keep up. Video spend on the Contently platform increased nearly 50 percent this year, with a spike over the past six months. And as we revealed in our financial services benchmark report earlier this month, videos and infographics greatly outperform other formats.

But don’t just create any old video. Your 50-year-old CEO’s monotone monologue is going to drive an average view time of about 2.5 seconds. Instead, invest in animated explainers and educational series at the top of the funnel and product videos and case studies for the middle and bottom of the funnel.

2. Embrace deep relationship metrics

When we were first building Contently’s Performance Analytics, we wrote a mantra on our whiteboard wall: People, not Visitors.

The idea was that vanity reach metrics weren’t what mattered. Instead, we needed to measure the relationships our customers were building with people.

Content marketing has gone through an ROI evolution over the past six years, since content marketing first became a thing. Initially, everyone touted reach metrics like followers, impressions, and pageviews. By 2016, there was a deeper focus on engagement metrics like shares, return visitors, and time on site.

In 2018, we witnessed a hard turn towards “transactional” metrics, as CMOs challenged content marketers to prove their value through traditional last-click attribution. (Which is a very limited way to measure the value of content.)

In 2020, marketers will embrace a more sophisticated approach by prioritizing the relationships they’re building with people, and tying those relationships to revenue. They’ll focus on newsletter subscriptions and return visitors as key KPIs, and use Google Analytics’ attribution modeling to track how their audience converts within a 90-day window.

3. Ungate your content

In B2B, there’s one easy tactic that’ll help you build stronger relationships with people: ungate your content.

We wrote about ungating your content at length two weeks ago. When companies gate content, they often unwittingly throw their prospects into the marketing funnel of hell. Here’s how it goes:

Step 1: Marketing gates a valuable report.

Step 2: One hundred people arrive at the landing page for the report. Eighty of them leave immediately because filling out that form will unleash unspeakable hell upon their inbox. The other 20 fill out the form.

Step 3: Marketing gives the contact info for those 20 people to the sales team.

Step 4: Sales harasses the people who downloaded the e-book with passive-aggressive emails and cold calls, even though all they did was download a piece of content.

Step 5: These 20 people who downloaded the report now regret doing so. In fact, they kind of hate the company, making this an incredibly masochistic exercise for everyone involved.

That being said, there are scenarios in which it makes sense to gate your content—webinars, educational courses, exclusive subscription content, and PQL (product qualified lead) projects. But even then, you need to be extremely thoughtful about how you follow up.

In the long run, you’ll gain way more customers by making it easy to access your most valuable content, instead of hiding it behind a lead form and driving people away.

4. Get creative with compliance

The greatest feats of creativity we’ve seen in our time at Contently have come from marketers at highly regulated companies who have to figure out how to work with compliance.

In financial services, healthcare, and other highly regulated industries, a poor working relationship with compliance can kill a content program. But we’ve seen some tactics that help:

In addition, your life will be much easier if you invest in workflow technology that provides audit trails, comprehensive record keeping, flexible workflows, and off-platform approvals. This helps you integrate compliance into the production process without drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and email chains. Contently has a ton of financial services clients, and without these features in our platform, I’m not sure how we’d get anything done.

5. Create data-driven stories

Brands have one key content advantage over media companies: proprietary data and research.

Original research is by far the easiest way to drive social engagement, press, and backlinks. One of our favorite examples is athenahealth’s flu season dashboard. It’s both helpful (to medical professionals and reporters tracking the spread of the flu) and a little terrifying—especially if you live in Pennsylvania, where 8.37% of all primary care visits involve flu-like symptoms.

Athenahealth’s content team did a fantastic job turning the company’s anonymous healthcare data into a dynamic piece of content. Take a closer look, and you’ll likely find some newsworthy data being crunched inside your company, too.

6. Invest in smarter distribution

The biggest mistake a lot of marketers make is failing to invest in the distribution of their content.

If you want to build an audience, paid media is your friend—particularly on Facebook, which remains one of the most cost-effective content distribution channels. It just makes sense. If you’re going to spend $500 to produce a piece of content, why wouldn’t you spend another $500 to ensure that three times as many people see it?

And if the content is really good, paid distribution has a tremendous trickle-down effect. It helps you generate more email subscribers and social followers, and can even drive an SEO boost. We call this the compounding returns of content.

One good place to start: your search budget. The average CPC on Facebook is only $1.72, which is five-to-ten times cheaper than the CPC on Google for equivalent topics and industries.

7. Think like a teacher

We love this quote from business author and professor Adam Grant: “Good communicators make themselves look smart. Great communicators make audiences feel smart.”

The best content marketing teaches an audience something new and helps them make smarter decisions. There’s no better way to build relationships with people.

This can look like Patagonia helping their customers plan the perfect outdoor adventure, or a tech startup in New York helping people create content that doesn’t suck. We call this buyer enablement content.

It may sound easy, but teaching someone something new requires careful communication. A few tips:

1. Meet the audience where they are, on their terms and at their level of knowledge. Aim for simple language. If concepts are complicated, break them down first.

2. Don’t be afraid to rely on a ghostwriter. Being a subject matter expert and an expert writer are two very different things.

3. Create content in a variety of formats, and use visuals whenever possible. Most people are visual learners, which is why effective teachers use whiteboards, PowerPoints, and physical objects in their lessons whenever possible.

Want to take your content marketing to the next level next year? Sign up for our free content marketing course.

The post Content Marketing 2020: 7 Tips for Creating Content Your Audience Actually Likes appeared first on Contently.

Money affects everyone. Finances can dictate what we do, where we live, and how we make decisions. It’s a wide umbrella, spanning everything from consumer banking, investment banking, credit cards, fintech, insurance, and more. The fact that many finance organizations try to reach B2C and B2B audiences simultaneously adds another factor to the equation.

Financial services content is also incredibly complicated. Understanding how to pick the right insurance or save for a mortgage can literally change someone’s life. Companies in this space have a unique opportunity to build meaningful relationships with consumers.

To capitalize on that opportunity, finserv companies allocated an average of $23.3 million for their content marketing budgets in 2019, per Contently research. This number includes content creation, distribution, technology, and talent.

Finserv companies are doing a decent job getting a bang for their buck. However, there’s still room for improvement.

To help marketers be more efficient and effective, Contently created this new report that examines the state of financial services content marketing. The first part compares finance against other industries and highlights content benchmarks. The second part explores tips and strategies marketers can use to stand out from their biggest competitors and create content that performs.

Brands spend large sums of money on content marketing. It’s time they made the most of their investments.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

Report Methodology

Data for this report was compiled in November 2019. The industry benchmark statistics in the first part of the report came from an internal dataset of 86,270 pieces of content across all industries, measured by Contently’s content marketing platform. Of that sample, 25,544 pieces of content came from financial services companies.

Data in the second part of the report came from StoryBook, Contently’s content strategy tool, which measured top-performing topics, formats, social shares, and more for 2,292 pieces of content from financial services companies.

Key Findings

For visual learners, here’s a high-level breakdown of what we found:

Part I: Financial Services Benchmarks

Competition for attention has never been higher in content marketing. Legacy firms are battling against each other while trying to hold off a surge of new fintech competitors and startups. Consumers, meanwhile, want financial guidance; they’re just not sure who to get it from.

According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, financial services ranked last out of 15 industries. On a positive note, trust in the industry is on the rise, increasing 8 percentage points since 2014. This means there’s an opportunity for finserv companies to step up and support their customers. Content is a key tool in those efforts.

Financial services vs. all other industries

Recently, finserv companies have made noticeable progress with content performance. In 2018, audiences spent an average of 1:26 seconds with financial services content. A year later, average attention time jumped to 1:51 seconds, which marks a 29 percent increase

Over that same stretch, though, average engagement rate (the percentage of people who spend at least 15 seconds with a piece of content) and finish rate held stagnant. On one hand, the average finish rate in our data set is impressive in comparison to Chartbeat’s scroll depth benchmarks for all content. Brands are creating longer content, but there’s still room to improve the finish rate.

Financial services companies also took strides compared to brands from other industries. Average attention time for all other industries in our data set only moved from 1:32 seconds in 2018 to 1:34 seconds in 2019. However, the other industries like travel, technology, and healthcare boasted a better average engagement rate (70 percent) and finish rate (60 percent) in 2019. Finish rates in fields like travel and tech may be higher because their topics aren’t as technical as those found in finance.

Consumer Finance vs. Institutional Finance vs. Wealth Management

Next, we examined engagement benchmarks for the three of the biggest subcategories in financial services content: consumer finance, institutional finance, and wealth management.

Consumer finance covers personal money tips and financial literacy, like this Bank of America article about getting the most out of your checking account.

Institutional finance content spans B2B coverage about investment banking and global markets, like this Goldman Sachs report on geopolitical risk.

Wealth management concerns individual portfolios and investing, like this Morgan Stanley profile of a female financial advisor’s philosophy.

To compare the effectiveness of the three subcategories, we looked at average attention time, average finish rate, and average social shares.

Consumer finance, unsurprisingly, dominated the social metrics with an average of 2,046 shares per story. When done right, helpful budgeting and saving tips can go semi-viral because they’re more universal than content from the other subcategories.

However, personal finance advice is also a saturated space. It’s harder to stand out with unique advice since many companies recycle the same topics, headlines, and themes. That may explain why average attention time registers at just 1:18 seconds, almost a minute shorter than the average benchmark for institutional finance.

The success of institutional finance content goes to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be dry or boring. There’s a real need for that expertise. And generating 190 shares, on average, is very respectable for B2B content of any kind. These numbers suggest that companies cornering the institutional finance beat are finding creative ways to tie their analysis to relevant news and trending topics people care about.

Lastly, we see that wealth management has room for improvement, particularly the 38 percent finish rate. Marketers creating content about wealth management may not need to drive a lot of social shares, since it’s tailored for a niche audience. Yet there’s still an opportunity to create more fluent and accessible content that holds people’s attention and builds trust.

With that in mind, let’s move to the second part of the report and explore ways financial services companies can build better trust and drive more engagement.

Part II: 5 Keys to High-Performing Financial Services Content

The benchmark data raised a few big questions. First, what are the most valuable financial services companies doing to differentiate themselves? Second, what tactics can financial services marketing pick up from them, regardless of budget? And third, what recommendations could we offer to help finance marketers improve in areas they weren’t doing so well?

To answer those questions, we used Contently’s Storybook technology to analyze 2,292 pieces of financial services content from Fortune 500 brands. Here are our biggest takeaways.

1. Create social videos and infographics
2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook
3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions
4. Focus on employee education and advocacy
5. Get creative with compliance

1. Create social-friendly videos and infographics

Marketers default to creating written content because it’s easier and cheaper. But brands that rely on churning out generic blog posts are failing to give people what they want: visual content.

Our industry analysis found that videos and infographics outclassed other content formats in terms of average social shares. In fact, video drove eight times as many shares as articles. Infographics, meanwhile, saw twice as many shares as articles. (We’ll get to social distribution trends in the next section.)

(Note: Our dataset excludes LinkedIn shares, because LinkedIn has closed off their API from all third-party analytics tools.)

Most people working in marketing today understand there’s value in video, but many are hesitant to invest in the medium.

When done well, it’s worth it. Visual content is the most effective way to simplify complex technical information, especially for visual learners. One of the most budget-friendly tactics is to produce short explainer videos optimized for social channels. Mint, for example, launched the WTFinance series a few years ago, breaking down major personal finance concepts in 45-second clips that are easy to digest.

If you get the green light for video, the last thing you want to do is stock your YouTube page with clips of two people talking on stage for an hour. To produce videos that resonate with your audience, pay attention to these three areas.

2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook

Reports are Facebook’s demise are largely overblown. It still attracts over 2 billion people every month, and remains the most effective social distribution channel for both B2C and B2B content.

According to Instapage, the average CPC on Facebook for financial services ads is $3.72—more than double the average ($1.72).

However, this pales in comparison to the CPC on Google for top finserv keywords.

Using SEMRush, we found the average CPC for 10 of the most popular content-adjacent search keywords in financial services for comparison:

Here, we see an average CPC of $16.39 for paid search, meaning Facebook is almost five times cheaper. Not only does referral traffic from social posts help organic search rankings, but you’re also likely to drive additional traffic from the “social lift” of people resharing that content on Facebook.

3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions

When done right, content marketing impacts the entire customer journey. To tie content to revenue, your stories should eventually spark an action—filling out a form, opening an account, signing up for a credit card. In other words, your work assists the customer until they’re ready to make a smart decision related to your company.

We used StoryBook to analyze the most shared content by topic. The most engaging topics—such as reducing risk, insurance 101, and tax planning—tie back to buying decisions. Some news content related to mortgages and insurance also finished near the top of the list.

It’s fitting that content about risk and planning resonated enough for people to share. This kind of advice tends to be practical and applicable to a large audience. State Farm, for instance, drove thousands of shares by packaging together “a collection of articles to help your teen be a safe driver.” The series includes insurance advice for students, info on the costs of certain driving violations, and tips for driving in different conditions. State Farm also includes a calculator tool at the bottom of every article to get a quote, creating a clear path to purchase.

Focusing on enablement content helps brands invest in evergreen financial tools like calculators. These tools empower buyers, letting people navigate a complex decision without explicitly selling to them.

For example, Bank of America built a dedicated page to hold 25 user-friendly tools and calculators that cover retirement, investing, college planning, and personal finance. Creating this kind of content typically doesn’t require a lot of money or time. Take a look at the after-tax return calculator above, which only asks users to fill out two fields before giving them a personalized report.

4. Focus on employee education and advocacy

The success of financial content depends on trust. A blog post full of uniquely insightful 401(k) tips can miss the mark if it doesn’t come from the right source.

The National Foundation for Credit Counseling found that only 25 percent of U.S adults would turn to a bank or credit union if they needed financial guidance, a number on the decline in recent years. However, 35 percent of adults would have no problem trusting a financial planner or accountant.

The same study revealed that 76 percent of U.S. adults said they could “benefit from advice and answers to everyday financial questions from a professional.” The data highlights a sizable gap of people who may not receive the answers they need simply because they don’t trust big financial organizations.

When looking at share of voice results from our research, a related trend caught our eye.

State Farm was dominating in terms of social shares, driving 70 percent of all social shares among 10 companies including Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo. Did State Farm have some incredible content marketing secret weapon?

It turns out the answer is yes—although when we started to look around, we saw it wasn’t much of a secret. A lot of their social activity was seeded by company’s insurance agents. For most of the last decade, State Farm has used a tool called Hearsay Social to make it easy for thousands of agents to find and post relevant content on Facebook. This system led to a snowball effect for social sharing.

Marketers love to talk about personalization, but their plans fall flat because of logistics. It’s hard to justify spending a lot of money to create content for a specific audience. That’s how finserv companies end up with general listicles meant for a general audience.

State Farm, meanwhile, incentivized agents to share content by arming them with specific stories that could subtly remind people of the benefits of being insured. According to our research, a short interactive article titled “Frozen Pipe Losses Up in 2018” has generated almost 13,000 Facebook shares.

The article offers clear tips for avoiding frozen pipes and calls out the states with the most frozen pipe water insurance claims. It’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but it’s a helpful piece of content ideal for increasing share of voice.

5. Get creative with compliance

Marketers find few things as grim as compliance. So before we get to the keys of compliance, let’s talk a little bit about death. (Trust me.)

When a famous person passes away, The New York Times can publish a detailed, reported obituary immediately. When Steve Jobs died in 2011, the Times had a 3,500-word article up within an hour. The obituary writers don’t possess other-worldly typing speed; they’re just well prepared. While covering Jobs’s death, for instance, the writing started in 2007. When the time came to let the story go live, all they had to do was give the article a final check.

Mastering the content approval process isn’t as fulfilling as writing an important longform article, but it’s important nonetheless. And with some creative thinking, it doesn’t have to be a headache that gets in the way of your job. You can still publish content at the speed of news.

In highly regulated industries like finance and insurance, you can’t just publish whatever you want, whenever you feel like it. Brands have to deal with oversight groups like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). You can, however, work with your compliance team to find reasonable solutions instead of always treating them like a nuisance.

In financial services, savvy companies tweak their workflows to avoid approval timelines that can last upwards of three months. If you meet with compliance at the start of the project, they’ll at least be aware of what you’re working on and can flag potential issues ahead of time.

An adjusted workflow might look something like this:

Marketers have started to figure out how to build better relationships with compliance teams. If you’re looking for more efficiency, here are a handful of help exercises that can help you increase productivity.

As a final piece of advice, it helps to use some sort technology platform when figuring out compliance. Given that compliance issues often result from a lack of transparency or communication, relying on manual processes doesn’t always work. Technology can handle the logistics, freeing up marketers to focus more on the creative parts of their job. Additionally, it’ll automate certain things like record-keeping, version control, and workflows if you need to review anything down the road.

Conclusion

In 2020, capturing attention is only going to get more competitive in the financial services industry.

The good news is there’s still an opportunity for companies of all sizes to create meaningful content and build long-term relationships with customers. People need financial advice. They crave that expertise. They’re just looking for it to be delivered in a thoughtful way.

The companies that want to stand out and lead the industry need to concentrate on the entire content lifecycle. They have to put as much energy into content distribution, compliance, and sales enablement as they do the creative process. It takes time to build a high-performing content program, but if they put in the work now, their investment will pay off.

If you’re interested in creating high-performing content, click here to set up a free consultation with one of our content experts.

The post Financial Services Content Report: Industry Benchmarks & 5 Keys to Success appeared first on Contently.