Every marketing activity you do online, and increasingly offline as well, is driven by content or supported by it. Emails, display ads, blog posts, sales brochures, pages on your website – these are all little content foot soldiers summoned up by marketers, given orders and marched out. As a marketing leader, you need to know: did the content do the job it was ordered to do?
Content marketing is on the frontlines of this fictional battle. Those poetic blog posts that address customers' needs and pain points, for example, are where more and more businesses meet the customer.
Research carried out by Forrester confirms the role content plays: customers rely solely on content to do their research until the final 30-40% of the purchase journey, when they seek contact with sales. Marketers need to make sense of this first 60-70% of the purchase journey, but frontlines are messy places and this applies to content marketing as well.
Firstly, marketers don't initially even know whom they're engaging with – grade A potential customer or a curious high-school student. Secondly, customers use a maddening number of channels to inform themselves and share content. Lastly, their learning process is anything but linear. We dispensed with the marketing funnel as a model for just this reason; it betrays reality.
So far, efforts to make sense of this activity and measure it depend on the lenses of those doing the measuring, and – because of this – are flawed. This is a silo and strategy problem.
Those who come at the problem from brand advertising are perhaps the most challenged. They optimise for exposure and recall (reach, frequency and message retention, for example), but struggle to understand or influence their impact on behaviour in the purchase path. It's like the general who only counts how many soldiers he throws forward and how many come back – not a very potent role.
Those who come to content marketing from a PR or communications role often exclaim that brands must measure their activities as a publisher would. They're concerned with gathering readers and maybe winning backlinks, but only pay lip service to how this equates to sales. This general wants to see that his soldiers are running around and shooting, but doesn't focus on winning the war.
The maths people from the search world are at least more attuned to the business impact of their efforts. They tie their activities around the all-important conversion – a sale for an e-commerce site, or a lead in the B2B world, for example. For this reason, though, many of them take a very homogenous view of the market: everyone is a potential clicker. Here, the general focuses exclusively on one activity (say the artillery) without trying to comprehend its role in a broader picture.
Lastly, there are those who try to pull together a host of metrics (consumption, sharing and sales metrics, for example) without applying any particular model or methodology to understand how they relate to each other. This frantic general is measuring everything in aggregate and is, as a result, befuddled.
The measurement challenge that content marketing brings to a head for all of these groups is one that can account for complexity, but also provide enough meaning to enable relevant action on the part of the marketing leader.
Some of the most sophisticated examples of the marketers I'd mentioned earlier are making progress here; others cutting turf in this important area include Avinash Kaushik, whose "see-think-do" framework tries to apply multi-channel optimisation based on three key customer modes. Also, the marketing automation companies, with their lead-scoring capabilities, allow marketers to build complex purchase-path logic, even if this logic ends up being too linear most of the time.
To me, the ideal model for measurement would account for multiple audiences with differing values to the business, and different modes or intents. A content marketer who can create experiences that correspond to these, and measure them, will be in a good position to win the war.
Expect these rich challenges, brought to a head by content marketing, to drive some tremendous leaps in marketing metrics in coming years.
Ryan Skinner is a senior analyst for content marketing at Forrester Research