Three Ways Marketers Can Provide Better Content Metrics
With all the advances in content marketing in the last few years, there’s still an enormous, unaddressed problem relating to how marketers feel about their efforts.Consider this: 54% of marketers feel they are falling well short of their most important content marketing objectives. Surprisingly, only 15% see measurement as their biggest challenge, with 29% and 25% seeing business results and creation respectively as more pressing concerns. Data may be the marketing buzzword du jour, but understanding its complexity and how it can best deliver business results for content marketing is still a riddle to be solved.
While there are few who would argue that we need to be better at measuring the return on content marketing, it’s important to unpack that idea in some more detail. Here are the most important areas of measurement digital leaders we’ve spoken with want to start seeing more of on their dashboards — and how we can start closing the gap between expectations and reality:
1. Provide more insight about consumers
Measuring clicks, likes and shares is one thing, but it doesn’t give us a real glimpse of the person behind them. Even measuring brand sentiment gets one step closer, but not quite close enough. Social listening often lacks the ability to read nuance, and data can be two-dimensional without the right applications. Marketers will need to employ alternatives to the typical plug-and-play methods to find the meaning behind customers’ behaviors and desires. For instance, with recipe content, are gluten-free consumers showing a preference for snacks and fast meals vs. dishes that require more time and prep? For consumer electronics content, are wearables enthusiasts showing more interest in performance or style? These are the kinds of insights marketers are craving.
