Our 10-Step Content Measurement Maturity Model<\/h2>\n
Our Content Measurement Maturity Model<\/strong> consists of 10 steps spread across four stages\u2014crawl, walk, run, and fly. When companies master measurement and optimization in one stage, they’ll be prepared to graduate to the next.<\/p>\n In the graphic, you’ll notice there’s only one measurement step in the fly stage\u2014multi-touch content attribution<\/strong>\u2014because it’s incredibly hard to do right, and if anyone else tells you different \u2026 well, frankly, they’re lying.<\/p>\n Let’s take a closer look at each stage.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014like signing up for a newsletter or virtual event, using an interactive tool, or requesting a demo.<\/p>\n Here we measure:<\/p>\n 4. Leads Generated<\/strong>. The number of people taking a conversion action that’s important to your brand.<\/p>\n 5. Lead Engagement<\/strong>. Using a marketing automation system like Pardot, you’re able to track how a lead engages with your brand’s content\u2014the emails they open and click through, the pages they visit, the articles they read\u2014and assign an appropriate \u201cscore” for that behavior. Similarly, tools like Contently Docalytics and Adobe allow you to see how a lead engages with \u201cbig rock” downloadable content like research papers.<\/p>\n 6. Share of Voice<\/strong>. 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. In the run stage, we cover the areas that’ll get your CMO and CFO excited\u2014content attribution to revenue.<\/p>\n Our model recommends three complementary approaches that will help capture the full picture of content’s impact on your bottom line.<\/p>\n 7. SEO Value<\/strong>. SEO Value calculates how much your organic search traffic is worth to your brand. It’s a leading indicator of revenue returns<\/a>\u2014we 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.<\/p>\n 8. Lead Value.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Ex: 22,000 x $71 = $1.56M<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 9. Single-Touch Content Attribution<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. In the \u201cFly” section of our maturity model is the final step: Multi-Touch Content Attribution. <\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n We made this the final stage in our model because it’s so difficult to implement\u2014especially inside enterprise organizations with poor data hygiene. It’s the white whale of content measurement\u2014much discussed and desired, but rarely captured, even after a long odyssey.<\/p>\n If you’re still at the crawl or walk stage\u2014you’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.<\/p>\n\n
![\"content](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Updated_MM_Illo_-_Performance.png\")
<\/p>\nCrawl: Strategic to Audience Building<\/h2>\n
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![\"crawl](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/CRAWL_Table.png\")
<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nWalk: Strategic to Lead Generation<\/h2>\n
![\"walk](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/WALK_Table.png\")
<\/p>\nRun: Strategic to Revenue Generation<\/h2>\n
![\"first-touch](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/First_touch.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"run](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/RUN_Table.png\")
<\/p>\nFly: Strategic to Revenue Attribution<\/h2>\n
![\"content](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/measure_content_roi.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/giphy.gif\")
<\/p>\n![\"fly](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/FLY_Table.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"content](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Chart_Q9.png\")
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.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/contently.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/1615338909713.png\")
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