Tracking Marketing Effectiveness: 3 Critical Content Metrics

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Tracking Marketing Effectiveness: 3 Critical Content Metrics From the Capturing and Acting on Metrics learning series

description

This short ebook will list 3 metrics marketers can track to understand whether or not their content marketing materials are working.

Transcript of Tracking Marketing Effectiveness: 3 Critical Content Metrics

Page 1: Tracking Marketing Effectiveness: 3 Critical Content Metrics

Tracking Marketing Effectiveness:3 Critical Content Metrics

From the Capturing and Acting on Metrics learning series

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TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction

Chapter 1 - Why Metrics Matter

Chapter 2 - Tracking Your Content

Chapter 3 - Metric 1: Engagement

Chapter 4 - Metric 2: Leads Generated

Chapter 5 - Metric 3: Sales & Conversions

About Docalytics

Tracking Marketing Effectiveness:3 Critical Content Metrics

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INTRODUCTION

Read on to find out which metrics your marketing team should be tracking to make every single message count...

42%of marketers use gut instinct instead of analytics to make

marketing decisions 1

Marketing data often include information on views and downloads that can be used to draw some conclusions and make the next decision. In order to truly understand an audience, a marketer needs to demand more: more insight into how a prospect is interacting with their content and more understanding of how content should be tailored to engage at the deepest level.

In this ebook, you will learn about the metrics that most marketers are tracking, and the metrics that all marketers should be tracking. From cold lead to sale, marketing has a hand in every message.

Today more than ever, marketers make campaign decisions for their marketing content based on data.

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WHY METRICS MATTER

Whether your marketing department’s main goal is lead generation, thought leadership, brand awareness or retention, the bottom line is always the same. Create content that catches the eye of your prospective clients and make sure it’s seen, and the only way to know your content is seen is by having metrics to back your work. Metrics matter because it’s how marketers justify the cost of every marketing campaign, and ultimately, prove their worth to a business.

166%

of organizations most important objective for

marketing analytics is to act on data to improve

marketing performance 2

31% of B2B marketers cite lack of reliable data to drivedecisions as a barrier to their marketing success 3

Fifty years ago, marketing was defined by relationships, focus groups, and attempts to choose strategies that would sell more product. Fast forward to today and still, marketers often create campaigns without a clear understanding of what their audience is looking for. But marketers don’t have to shoot in the dark anymore - we’re in the midst of a marketing revolution, and some marketers don’t even know it.

Marketing is increasingly moving toward a quantitative approach. Teams create content based on numbers that identify how many times a piece of content is seen and how much time a potential customer spends on your website. This quantitative approach enables marketers to make more calculated, data-based decisions. Today, it’s metrics that should drive marketers campaigns and content roadmaps.

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TRACKING YOUR CONTENT

Vanity metrics4 are those that help marketers gain understanding into how prospects interact with the content they receive from a business. As the name explains, these metrics only skim the surface of the data that is available to marketers today. Such metrics include the number of prospects that visit your content’s landing page, how many submit the form and the amount of content downloaded.

There are three metrics that can give better understanding and visibility to your marketing team, called actionable metrics. Actionable metrics go beyond the surface of marketing metrics and give marketing professionals deep insight into how prospective clients interact with their content. These metrics will be discussed further in the following chapters of this ebook.

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Vanity metrics allow marketers to make some assumptions about their future clients, but they still leave marketers mostly in the dark. To a marketing professional who only has access to vanity metrics, a large number of downloads means a popular content topic that they should expand upon. But, this marketer has no idea whether their readers are abandoning the content after five seconds or reading it all the way through. Most marketers stop at vanity metrics because they feel it’s enough to understand their prospects, but this is a mistake. Tracking what the prospect does next is a key to understanding how engaged they are with your business - and now, marketers have the ability to dig deeper.

If you didn’t already, now you know that metrics matter to marketers - but how do you decide which to track? This can be a complicated question without a one-size-fits-all answer. Every business has a special formula of metrics that they should track; metrics that are specific to their company, industry and marketing strategy. There are two kinds of metrics that should be considered and understood by each marketing team: vanity metrics & actionable metrics.

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METRIC 1:ENGAGEMENT

Here are some pointers for marketers who are looking to cultivate a deep understanding of their audience with more thorough metrics:

Calculate engagement over time - Engagement doesn’t just mean that a prospect downloads content and just like that, they’re engaged. Prospects have to be tracked over multiple days, whether they return to your website (and download additional pieces of content) tomorrow or in three months. There are multiple points of entry into content as well, inbound (when they come to you) and outbound (when you go to them). Both ways should be tracked.

Track social sharing - Another indicator that shows how much prospects love your content is social sharing. The fact that they’re passing it on to others means they’re willing to stand by you - at least your message, and maybe your product too. And when they share, you will be able to track engagement from the new leads that click through as well. Ideally, social prospects aren’t clicking directly to a form and abandoning the page. It’s also imperative to decide which platforms are most important to your business and track shares on all of them. Does your target audience thrive on Facebook and Twitter? Encourage shares there. Or, are they a LinkedIn crowd? Encourage shares there. You get the picture.

Go beyond the surface - Ideally, all marketers would be able to see where readers are spending their time inside of the content. This is more than assuming the topic is important because of a download - it’s knowing which pages they spend twice the time on, where the reader highlights, what they copy and paste to share or keep for later.

These powerful, actionable metrics provide your sales team deeper insight into each and every lead - so they can tailor their conversations and talk about what matters right off the bat. Additionally, engagement metrics help marketers drive their overall content marketing strategy and the insights above, used correctly, could drastically change a team’s content roadmap.

3There are many ways to track the basics, gather contact information in forms and calculate the number of downloads. Marketers use those numbers to determine the effectiveness of each topic, but what they’re missing is true engagement data. The best marketers dig deeper, because content downloaded is really just the jumping off point.

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METRIC 2:LEADS GENERATED

Regardless of whether it’s your marketing team’s main objective, we can all agree that marketing should generate leads. That’s the point of creating content, to draw in prospective clients, right? Hopefully, your marketing team is tracking those leads, but how?

Is it a manual process where sales reps enter the lead source into their CRM? That approach is very common and for many businesses, it works just fine. But there’s really no way to tell whether the reps even know where leads come from, or if they’re entering it into your lead tracking tool correctly. The new era of marketing believes that it shouldn’t be up to sales to enter lead sources, instead, leads should be scored by marketing and passed to sales.

Lead scoring is an important advancement that savvy marketers should learn about and work to implement. It allows marketing and sales to focus on the higher-interest, more sales-ready leads first and not waste time pre-qualifying leads or digging through cold leads that may or may not be engaged. Marketers should set up a process, ideally, something automated, where captured engagement metrics are used to assign a value to each lead - this could be as simple as a 1-10 ranking. Then, with a quick glance, sales understands who to follow up with first.

Next is process integration. Your marketing team might integrate their processes manually by tracking user engagement, coming up with your own system to score leads, then passing warmer leads to your sales team. A system like this takes time, but if you have it, it can be effective - and with your marketing team recording where leads are coming from, you will get a better understanding of your content effectiveness. Otherwise, for those marketing teams that are strapped for time, like many are, you may want to consider purchasing the tools necessary to track engagement and pass leads to your CRM or marketing automation solution.

We’ve discussed digging deeper into prospect engagement, and understanding content lead generation. The next actionable metric discusses the reason marketers do it all - conversion from prospect to sale.

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METRIC 3:SALES & CONVERSIONS5

There are two considerations for marketers to keep in mind when tracking conversions from prospect to sale: the hard sales numbers that came directly from a piece of content; and the less recognized effect - content preparing sales to sell better, have more (and more quality) conversations, allowing sales to fill the pipeline faster, hit their quotas and beyond.

First, let’s tackle the one that (should be) easy - hard sales numbers. If your marketing team takes the right steps to track engagement, score leads and follow the prospect from lead to sale, adding up a number that represents how many dollars came from a marketing prospect should be pretty simple. It’s also important to attach a dollar amount to each piece of content produced and each campaign run to compare cost to dollars won and understand return on investment.

The second part of this conversation can be more difficult to track. We know the right content brings in leads, and but the right content should also help sales teams sell more effectively. Not only can a company train their sales reps with carefully researched content, but the same conversations that marketers have with prospects via their content should be addressed again by sales.

There’s no one-size-fits-all method to assign value to this aspect of the content, but some ideas include assigning dollars saved by avoiding external training or calculating hours recovered by sales teams making fewer blind cold calls and having more valuable conversations. Figure out what works for your business and wrap it into your content ROI calculations.

Marketers today are doing more - moving beyond vanity metrics and working to truly understand each member of their audience. By understanding actionable metrics, marketers will be able to further engage prospects, create the right content, generate the right leads, and ultimately close more sales.

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ABOUT DOCALYTICS

Docalytics empowers businesses to produce better content, get more sales-ready prospects, and prioritize sales outreach.

Fore more information visit www.docalytics.com

SOURCES:1 - MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report2,3 - MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report4 - Vanity and Actionable metrics were first championed by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. Find out more at www.theleanstartup.com

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Docalytics’ powerful cross-platform technology allows customers to track user interaction with documents and sales collateral such as whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, presentations, sell sheets and other documents.

For the first time, your marketing and sales teams can track exactly how prospective customers engage with your content, while more efficiently capturing lead data as a prospective customer engages with the document vs. having to capture everything upfront before a visitor can determine the relevancy of the content.