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Experts on Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROIHow to Focus Only on the Things That Matter and Stop Wasting Time

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211 Experts on Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROI

INTRODUCTION Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROI

There’s nothing easy about building high-performance marketing content. Unfortunately, hard

work does not always make good, impactful content. Many marketing teams work long hours to

churn out volumes of perfectly mediocre content, and worst of all, they have no real idea how

their content affects the audience or helps the business.

Building high-performance content depends on consistently generating high-value ideas,

planning well and budgeting, managing an efficient and creative workflow, making sure the

content reaches the right audiences at the right times, and measuring its performance. Sounds

like a perfect world, right? Yet many do this consistently, and they do it well.

With the generous support of Aprimo, we decided to dig into the secrets of successful content

marketing. We asked seven experts questions about how they manage each stage of the

content lifecycle: ideate, plan, budget, create, distribute, and analyze. This eBook organizes their

responses into chapters corresponding to these stages of the lifecycle.

It’s clear that at the end of the day, successful content marketers know what their content

is worth and how much it should cost. They also know how to optimize and distribute it to

maximize their return and how to measure its audience and business impact.

I for one found their insights refreshing and a good reminder that the cost of mediocre content

far outweighs the extra investment needed to get the most out of your content lifecycle.

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Managing content has become increasingly complex across an explosion of new

consumer channels. But it’s also become increasingly essential as consumers place more

importance on customer experiences than ever before.

Accenture found that two-thirds of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from

a retailer that sends them relevant and personalized promotions, and remembers their

previous purchases. And conversely, a PwC study found that nearly 1 in 3 consumers will

walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.

Delivering content that resonates, however, requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work,

including:

Regards,

Ed Breault

CMO, Aprimo

Aprimo Aprimo provides technology

solutions for content, operations, and

performance that enable enterprises

to optimize their brand experiences

and the resources they use to deliver

them. Our platform gives enterprises

the advantage by streamlining

and governing all the behind-the-

scenes activities – from ideation to

distribution – involved in delivering

exceptional brand experiences.

FOREWORD

• Ideation

• Planning

• Budgeting

• Creation

• Distribution

• Analysis

But without maximizing the time you spend on each of these stages of the content

lifecycle, your enterprise can’t be sure it’s content is going to produce the ROI you

desire.

In this book, 11 content experts weigh in on strategies and solutions for optimizing

each stage of the content lifecycle. They will share insights and takeaways to help

your enterprise overcome challenges to ensure you create the content you need for

impactful customer experiences.

https://www.aprimo.com/

CHAPTER 1

Ideate: How do you create and prioritize the strongest content ideas? 7

CHAPTER 2

Plan: How can you create a better, more agile content plan, and what

would you gain as a result? 20

CHAPTER 3

Budget: What are the best ways to develop a budget that maximizes ROI? 36

CHAPTER 4

Create: How do you manage your team to avoid bottlenecks and

mistakes and eliminate costly delays and duplication? 48

CHAPTER 5

Distribute: What are the best ways to ensure that your content is delivered

to the right places at the right times? 63

CHAPTER 6

Analyze: What’s the best way to use the data from the complete content

lifecycle to measure performance and opportunities and reduce waste? 77

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MEET OUR EXPERTS

ANDREA FRYREAR President and Lead Trainer,

AgileSherpas

ANDREW DAVIS Keynote Speaker and Best-Selling

Author, Monumental Shift

SHANE BARKER Digital Strategist & Influencer

Marketing Consultant, Shane

Barker Consulting

CHRISTOPH TRAPPE Chief Content Officer, Stamats

Communications, Inc.

CARLA JOHNSON Speaker. Author. Storyteller,

Carla Johnson

ROBERT ROSE Chief Troublemaker,

The Content

Advisory

MATT HEINZ President, Heinz Marketing

Inc

LAUREN BOWDENFreelance Marketing

Communications Consultant,

Lauren Bowden Consulting

MEET OUR EXPERTS

NAMITA MEDIRATTAGlobal CMI Director, Content

Excellence, Unilever

BERENICE MANNSenior Marketing Manager,

Arm Ltd

NOZ URBINAFounder & Omnichannel

Content Strategist, Urbina

Consulting


Building high-performance marketing content depends on

consistently generating high-value content ideas. However,

coming up with good ideas is not always so easy, and doing it

consistently over time is even more difficult. Ideation is often

the least understood part of the entire content development

process. We looked at the ideation phase of content

development by asking our experts the following question:

“How do you create and prioritize the strongest content ideas?”

Several key takeaways came out of these discussions:

1) Don’t worry about and get boxed in by format at this stage.

Focus on content first.

2) Let people be free to ideate in their own way. Give it time,

don’t force them to collaborate, and remove distractions.

3) Measure success by testing ideas or testing content after it’s

in the market. Here’s what the experts had to say about

creating and prioritizing content.

IDEATECHAPTER 1

7

IDEATE

ANALYZE PLAN

BUDGET

CREATE

DISTRIBUTE

8

Robert Rose is the author of three best-

selling books on content marketing. As

founder of The Content Advisory, the

consulting and education group of The

Content Marketing Institute, Rose has

worked with more than 500 companies over

the past five years, including global brands

such as Capital One, NASA, McCormick

Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and the

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Robert Rose, Chief Troublemaker,

The Content Advisory

t


“To effectively ideate, sometimes a creative team must give itself time to share ideas with no expectation of output.”

Marketing communications professionals are classically taught to

think about form before content. You need a brochure, a blog, or

an email. Great! Now let’s fill that full of content. But the greatest

success in the ideation stage comes from reversing that process.

There are so many channels and so many formats the content can

take that it’s really important to begin with the content. That means

beginning with the story and its value. When you start structuring

and telling that story, the form becomes clearer. This approach

releases you from being caught in the constraints of the form.

Channel and format come later in the planning stage.

Ideation is not always efficient. To ideate effectively, sometimes

a creative team must give itself time to share ideas with no

expectation of output. Organizations rarely encourage content

teams to think about all the new and cool and interesting content

they could create unimpeded by an output requirement. If you

can develop the practice of giving yourself and the team time to

brainstorm, with no expectation of being efficient, you actually

become more efficient. Allowing ourselves to be creative and invest

in time where there is no expected efficiency enables us to schedule

things that are designed to be executed in an efficient manner.

https://twitter.com/Robert_Rose

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robrose/

https://www.contentadvisory.net


Carla Johnson is a world-renowned

storyteller, an entertaining speaker, and a

prolific author. Consistently named one

of the top influencers in B2B, and digital

and content marketing, she regularly

challenges conventional thinking.

The author of eight books, Johnson

travels the world teaching anyone (and

everyone) how to cultivate idea-driven

teams that breed unstoppable creativity

and game-changing innovation.

Carla Johnson , Author. Speaker.

Storyteller, Carla Johnson

“It’s important to recognize that not all ideation is or should be collaborative.”

Content begins with an idea, and the best place to start

creating ideas is with an objective. If you don’t know

what you are trying to accomplish, you have no basis for

creating ideas or knowing which ideas are most valuable.

Once you know the objective, the challenge is coming

up with creative, inspired ideas. There’s a tendency for

marketers to get in a room and brainstorm, but too often

what’s produced is the same ideas—not much that’s new,

interesting, or innovative. What they miss is true inspiration

in their ideation.

Not all ideation is or should be collaborative; it needs to

be balanced. Often in a group situation, people who are

extroverted or have strong personalities tend to dominate.

What’s missing, then, is input from those who take more

time and think more carefully. People who take longer

to formulate ideas are not thinking less creatively. Great

ideas often need time to set and marinate. Instead of

https://www.twitter.com/carlajohnson

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlajohnson

https://www.carlajohnson.co/blog

https://www.carlajohnson.co


brainstorming, it’s more like slow-storming and the ability to really think

things through and look at opportunities that might be tangential to what

comes immediately to mind.

Also, don’t box ideas in with format too early in the process. When you

immediately jump to format, you miss the bigger story, and with that bigger

story comes more creativity. As soon as you start boxing it into a format, you

are judging whether or not something is right or wrong based on form rather

than content. Marketers often do this because they are tactically oriented.

Ultimately, the team members are doing a good job of ideation if they are

delivering a quantity of ideas that are relevant to the objective they need to

accomplish. When the team members are getting it, they’re coming up with

more good ideas more often.



The best inspiration for great ideas, whether it’s marketing, products, or business

models, comes from everyday life. It comes from outside of a person’s industry

and outside of their normal habits. Good ideas come from being able to look at the

world from a different point of view, connecting that back to the organization, and

applying that inspiration to the work you do.


An early convert to the ways of

Agile marketing, Andrea Fryrear

is now the world’s leading expert

on translating Agile principles and

practices for marketing. She holds

numerous Agile certifications,

including Certified Professional

in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) and

Certified Agile Leader (CAL-1). She

is also a sought-after speaker who

shares her findings (and failures)

from stages around the world.


“The effectiveness of your ideation process manifests itself in performance metrics that tell how the content affects the audience and how it moves them.”

Andrea Fryrear, President and

Lead Trainer, AgileSherpas

When it comes to ideation, creative people need space to be creative and to

come up with those great ideas. You can’t have people just living from deadline

to deadline or putting out fires all day long. They need relief from unnecessary

meetings and freedom from repetitive data collection and analysis so they can

get into a room together and explore ideas. They need permission to see this

creative activity as work. Seeing it as work is an important starting point in building

an effective ideation process.

The entire downstream content creation process is streamlined when the right

people get together at the beginning, during this ideation phase, so everyone has

that shared understanding of what the idea is and how it’s going to be realized.

That can minimize unnecessary iterations once the work actually begins.

Early audience feedback can also help with ideation. This involves taking an idea

that may not be fulling fleshed out and testing a version of it to see how the

audience responds. This is helpful because some ideas that sound really good in

the brainstorming meeting turn out to be total duds. Figuring that out early gives

everyone the opportunity to actually iterate and build on the original idea. You

might be putting a lot of stuff out there, and you feel successful because you’re

spinning the wheels, but you may not actually be seeing impact.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/afryrear

http://www.AgileSherpas.com/resources

http://www.AgileSherpas.com

https://twitter.com/andreafryrear


An author and award-winning blogger,

Matt Heinz is president of Heinz

Marketing, to which he brings more

than 20 years of marketing, business

development, and sales experience.

He prioritizes measurable results,

greater sales, revenue growth, product

success, and customer loyalty. Heinz is

a dynamic, engaging speaker and repeat

winner of Top 50 Most Influential People

in Sales Lead Management and Top 50

Sales & Marketing Influencers.

Matt Heinz, President,

Heinz Marketing Inc


“Successful ideation is not just a productive brainstorming meeting. It is an ongoing process that steadily delivers valuable ideas over time.”

A successful ideation process should deliver a steady stream of good

ideas that are focused on and relate to the target audience. Successful

ideation is not just a productive brainstorming meeting. It is an ongoing

process that steadily delivers valuable ideas over time.

Getting people into a room together can be a good way to stimulate

ideas, but that approach will not result in equal participation from

everyone. Such meetings can be made more productive by asking

people in advance to think about something. Even people unable

to attend the meeting may contribute something worthwhile. Also,

it’s important to recognize that ideation is not just about volume.

Someone may have only one idea, but that one topic might be highly

valuable. Therefore, do not put quotas on the ideation process, but do

try to keep it focused on the right types of ideas along the way.

What are the right types of ideas? That depends on your audience and

what actions you want from them. The best content is rooted in a

strong understanding of who your audience is, what they care about,

and what stage of their journey you are engaging. Good content

creates new insight that helps your audience understand something

they haven’t thought about before.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattheinz/

http://www.heinzmarketing.com/blog

http://www.heinzmarketing.com

https://twitter.com/HeinzMarketing


Shane Barker is a digital-marketing

consultant who specializes in influencer

marketing, product launches, sales

funnels, targeted traffic, and website

conversions. He has consulted with

Fortune 500 companies, influencers

with digital products, and a number of

A-List celebrities.

Shane Barker, Digital Strategist &

Influencer Marketing Consultant,

Shane Barker Consulting

“An important part of successful ideation is looking at your own successes.”

A strong content idea is not strong just because you think it is. Good,

strong ideas need to prove themselves. That is why an ideation process

needs to generate ideas but also consider factors like the performance

of similar ideas. This involves looking at similar stories and performance

analytics around those to see what can be learned, how that relates to

what you are trying to do, and how you can improve on it.

You can also develop ideas around keywords that you know perform

well with your target audience. These might be 10 or 20 keywords

provided by a client, or solid performing keywords based on research and

performance metrics. You can also combine the keyword strategy with

research on related content pieces to determine what ideas have the

best chance of performing well.

Of course, not every idea will take off and become viral. If you are getting

good traffic on some pieces, that’s fine, but you want to watch for those

few pieces that really outperform the others. Then you can look at those

to see why they took off and where the traffic came from. An important

part of successful ideation is looking at your own successes, going back

to the team to evaluate what performed well, understanding why it was

successful, and developing additional ideas around that. It’s also good to

have all hands on deck for that part of the ideation process.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanebarker/

https://shanebarker.com/blog/

https://www.shanebarker.com/

https://twitter.com/shane_barker

Noz Urbina is a globally recognised content

strategist and modeller. He’s well known

as a pioneer in content strategy, content

marketing, customer journey mapping,

and adaptive content modelling to support

personalised, contextually relevant content

for omnichannel experiences. He is also

co-author of the book “Content Strategy:

Connecting the dots between business,

brand, and benefits” and founder of the

event and community www.OmnichannelX.

digital.

t


Noz Urbina, Founder & Omnichannel

Content Strategist, Urbina Consulting

“It is within this framework of a customer journey—its flesh and blood reality—that the best and most productive ideation occurs.”

Effective ideation requires standing in the shoes of the customer

and understanding the emotional arc that is central to the

customer’s journey. The customer’s journey in life is not a journey

to buy your product. The customer’s journey is not the same thing

as a sales funnel or a customer lifecycle. The customer may go on

multiple journeys to solve a problem or achieve an end result.

To understand your customers’ key journeys, you must know what

the customers need to do in their lives, what tasks and jobs they

need to accomplish, and what their priorities are. It’s an extension

of persona building, but rather than building only a fixed picture of a

buying archetype, you are building one or more movies of what the

customers are doing in the market. Understanding the emotional

content of their journeys is critically important to later prioritizing

improvements, actions, and process updates to support the journey.

Where in each journey are those emotional hotspots?

It is within this framework of a customer journey—its flesh and blood

reality—that the best and most productive ideation occurs. There are

tools that help in mapping journeys and capturing ideas that align

https://twitter.com/nozurbina

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bnozurbina/

http://www.urbinaconsulting.com/

http://urbinaconsulting.com/blog/




your business value to value for your customers along their emotional arc,

which includes where in a journey they are most receptive or most upset.

Customer journey ideation is a creative process built around understanding

and serving customer needs. The days of going into a room all suited up

and thinking up what you imagine are good content ideas are over. That’s

not how modern marketers should work. The modern marketer is driven

by analysis and research. People who come to a customer journey ideation

session need to be informed by data as well as their own experience. They

need to go through search logs, analytics, campaign reports, and third-party

research, and they need to come to the customer journey ideation session

fresh with the latest market understanding.

Another important piece of the ideation phase is that you are not thinking

about resources, constraints, or plans at this point. You are completely

focused on the best thing for the customer, answering their questions, and

addressing their needs about what the customer needs at each step, on any

channel or in any format.

Berenice is a physicist and programme

manager turned marketer, with a career

spanning R&D, production, product

development, technology transfer

and marketing. She has spent over 15

years leading marketing strategy and

implementation in the high-tech sector,

specialising in B2B and technology. She

currently leads outbound marketing in

the Architecture and Technology Group

at Arm. She blogs on tech and enjoys

reviewing theatre and restaurants.


“At this stage, it’s about key messages: what do you want people to think, feel, say, and do when they see your messaging.”

Berenice Mann, Senior Marketing

Manager, Arm LtdCreating good ideas begins with understanding who the audience is and

what your purpose is for writing to them. Those are the keys. If you don’t

know why you’re writing, how can you know what to write? Many people

don’t seem to think about those two key factors right from the beginning.

In B2B technology marketing, figuring that out can become more

complicated. You might have several audiences who have very different

needs, or different types of people with different roles. It also involves

thinking about which part of the funnel you are trying to influence and

what you want to do there. Are you trying to inspire or entertain or

convince someone? Are you in the awareness part of the funnel, the

consideration part of the funnel, or the decision-making part of the

funnel? As you break down the audience this way, you will need to create

ideas that service them in these areas. All those things come into play,

and then you can start thinking about what will appeal to this audience

and what you want to say to them.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/berenice-mann-a98196/

https://proactiveblogger.wordpress.com/

https://twitter.com/BereniceMann



Manager, Arm Ltd

At this stage, it’s about key messages and what you want people to think,

feel, say, and do when they see your messaging. Format is not important at

this point. It’s about integrated campaigns and the ideas that address those

audience objectives across the entire campaign.

Ideas come from people, and it’s important to take the time to really think

through the ideas in the context of your campaign and big objectives. As

marketers, we often don’t spend enough time doing this. Someone comes

up with an idea, and the group agrees it’s good and they decide to go

forward. But they haven’t thought about the wider audience, how it’s going to

fit into the user journey, what they want people to do, or what the audience

needs at that point in their journey. Too often marketing teams come up

with really great ideas, but they haven’t thought enough about how that fits

into a marketing plan. The ultimate measure of success in the ideation stage

is whether those ideas actually deliver the audience results you are looking

for, whether that’s lead generation, awareness, discussion, or some other

marketing goal.


KEY POINTS

Don’t worry about and get boxed in by format at this stage. Focus on content first.

l Status Quo: Content marketers are classically taught to think about form before content. This is a mistake.

l Cost of Status Quo: If you box ideas in with format too early in the process, you miss the bigger story. You can produce lots of content and spin the wheels, but you’re not seeing impact.

l New Approach: A creative team needs time to share ideas with no expectation of efficiency or output. The best inspiration for great ideas comes from everyday life.

Let people be free to ideate in their own way. Give it time, don’t force them to collaborate, and remove distractions.

l Status Quo: A semi-random group of people show up at an ad-hoc brainstorming meeting without specific business objectives or goals.

l Cost of Status Quo: Quicker thinking, more gregarious personalities dominate the process, leaving out those who process more slowly or think more deeply. This shortchanges the ideation process.

l New Approach: Not all ideation is collaborative or done in a group setting. Set out business objectives, and give it time. Doing this actually makes the team more efficient. It enables the team to ideate things that can then be created and executed efficiently.

Measure success by testing ideas or testing content after it is in the market.

l Status Quo: Too often ideas are chosen in brainstorming sessions without external validation.

l Cost of Status Quo: You feel successful building lots of “great” content that fails to perform, forcing you to churn out even more ideas more quickly.

l New Approach: Good ideation is about outcome, not output. Look at business goals and previous performance successes, and test incomplete ideas to get early audience feedback.


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2011 Experts on Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROI 20

Ideation produces ideas and stories, but the planning

stage is really the first step to turning those ideas

into content assets. Planning is a critical stage in

the content lifecycle because poor planning can

undermine all subsequent phases of the cycle. To

find out what needs to be in a good content plan,

we asked the following question:

How can you create a better, more agile content

plan, and what would you gain as a result?

In answering this question, several key themes

became apparent: 1) have a schedule, but don’t rush

the process and default to format too early in the

process; 2) agree on what to measure for success as

part of your planning; 3) build flexibility into the plan.

Here’s what the experts had to say.

PLANCHAPTER 2

IDEATE

ANALYZE PLAN

BUDGET

CREATE

DISTRIBUTE















“Planning involves thinking about what you want to accomplish before you make decisions about forma. You first have tos really understand what audience you are targeting and what you want them to do.”

A plan enables you to select the best ideas that serve

the objective and provide focus on those best ideas.

Without the focus that a plan provides, people’s attention

becomes scattered, which causes work to progress more

slowly. By choosing one, two, or at most three of the best

ideas and focusing on those for a short period of time to

execute them really well, you can be more agile in making

necessary adjustments as you go through the process. In

an agile process, you create and adjust, create and adjust,

create and adjust. That process often results in something

very different from where it started, but it’s a much better

final product.

Planning also involves thinking more about format, which

requires really understanding what audience you are

targeting and what you want them to do. Again, this goes

back to your original objectives. There’s a linear decision

process about getting to format, but many marketers jump

to the format before they understand what they’re trying

to accomplish. Once they understand audiences and








audience priorities, that dictates format. Defaulting to format too early in the

process results in teams doing what they’ve always done because that’s what

they know.

Another important part of planning is deciding what to measure to determine

if the content is working. There are many things you can measure. The

metrics you select depend on what part of the funnel and customer journey

that content is targeting. As you think about what you are measuring, you

also need to maintain that agile mindset of creating and adjusting.

Unfortunately, 70% of all content that’s created for sales is never even

used. A big part of that is because marketers default to the formats they’ve

always used. Developing inspired content that serves the objectives requires

spending more time up front getting the ideas and planning right. Doing that

ensures the content you do create is better quality and someone will actually

use it.

If you expect everything to always be perfect, you’ll never take creative risks. You

can try little, really creative things, and if they fail right out of the box, you can

adjust. You can’t know if something is done well unless you test things. If you only

execute what you know is done properly, you create mediocre work.

23











t


“When you come out of the planning process, you should have a bill of materials for assets that are going to be produced and budgeted.”



Planning should be a content needs alignment process. For many

companies to do that well, they need to de-silo their content

planning. The content lifecycle in most organizations is siloed in

groups such as corporate communications, demand generation,

brand marketing, email marketing, and website, and there may

be different groups covering these functions in different regions.

These operations are typically siloed, which means they do planning

in their own silos. It isn’t until the creation stage that they realize

they’ve re-created the same content four times.

De-siloing needs to be part of the planning stage. It requires

introducing information sharing, transparency, and insight into

what everybody’s doing in a rolled-up fashion so that the planning

process also becomes an alignment process. That is how you avoid

creating multiple iterations of content items.

Some organizations are concerned this will slow down the process

because you’re actually suggesting more meetings to get everyone

aligned. Yes, this does slow down the planning process, but every







step that follows is exponentially faster. It’s the classic measure twice and cut

once. Planning is where you figure out channels, outputs, and formats. You’re

going to do an interview with a customer? Fantastic! Let’s get a camera

crew and audio crew there and schedule 10 minutes with a photographer.

Let’s make sure the writer is there and ask about the case study. Let’s make

sure everybody’s objectives around that idea are met so that we reduce the

duplicated effort later on.

By the time you reach the planning stage, you know the story you want to

tell. The de-siloed planning process specifies how you are going to tell the

story, and when you come out of that planning process, you should have a

bill of materials for assets that are going to be produced and budgeted. When

you go into the budgeting process, you’re not budgeting for random acts of

content. You’re budgeting for larger tent pole projects that are going to live in

multiple places.

“De-siloing… does slow down the planning process, but every step that follows is exponentially faster. It’s the classic measure twice and cut once.















“Agile teams plan more frequently than traditional teams. They’re just creating shorter, more lightweight and flexible plans.”



There’s often a misconception that agility and planning are antithetical.

But in fact, agile teams plan more frequently than traditional teams.

They’re just creating shorter, more lightweight and flexible plans that are

designed to respond to an iterative inspect and adapt process. When

planning for agility, you’re really looking for a minimum viable campaign.

What’s the smallest slice that you can put out that still provides you the

outcomes you’re looking for as a marketing team but also delivers value

to your audience? You need to put out the minimum that hits those

targets and then see what happens. See what the audience response data

tells you. Then you can build on the things that are successful. This way

you learn faster with less risk, and there are opportunities to double down

on the things that are really working well.

This not only enables building on success but gives you the flexibility

to adapt to changing marketing needs. For example, some product

feature you didn’t expect may turn out to be everyone’s favorite, and

that’s the big selling point. You need to be able to pivot and change your

messaging around that.








The worst case scenario is a massive, big-bang campaign that is ridiculed

on social media or on the late-night talk shows. The teams kept it all to

themselves. After spending 6 or 12 months making this massive campaign, they

put it out with a big fanfare, and it turned out to be a massive miscalculation.

It becomes a huge cost to the brand, plus the actual financial costs that went

into a campaign that was an utter disaster. It’s painfully quantifiable.

Agile planning reduces that risk. However, it must also include what you are

going to measure. How are you going to know that this is something worth

investing more time and resources in? How do you know what to abandon

because it’s a failed experiment? When you’re setting up a new project, include

key metrics in the project plan. What are you measuring, and what are you

expecting? What are the pivot or persevere triggers that you need to watch?

“Agile planning reduces that risk. However, it must also include what you are going to measure.”









A-List celebrities.

“Making sure everyone agrees on project objectives and the KPIs you will use to measure them is essential in the planning phase.”




One key function of a plan is to make sure everyone on your team

and the client’s team has the same understanding of what’s being

delivered and what they expect to get from it.

The planning phase needs to settle essential questions: What are you

looking for? What are the overall goals? You need to look at those

objectives and make sure they’re reasonable, that everyone has

proper expectation around them.

You don’t want to be in a situation when you are in downstream

phases of executing the plan that you are not meeting expectations

because the client’s goals were unrealistic.

Related to that is another critical part of the plan: defining the KPIs

you are using to measure its performance. And these KPIs must align

with the client expectations.









For example, if you as the content company say you’re working toward

getting more brand mentions and more people talking about the client

online, and the client expects are expecting the campaign will deliver

more sales, there’s a possible disconnect.

These kinds of disconnects are not uncommon in influencer marketing.

When the campaign wraps up, the content group looks at one thing and

thinks it was a success only to find the client was looking at something

else completely and decides the whole project was a failure and a waste

of money.

Making sure everyone agrees on project objectives and the KPIs you will

use to measure them is essential in the planning phase. Then you have

all the pieces of the puzzle you need to develop the initial content pieces

and make assessments and adjustments as you go.

“Making sure everyone agrees on project objectives and the KPIs you will use to measure them is essential in the planning phase.”

2911 Experts on Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROI 2911 Experts on Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROI

Christoph Trappe leads content and

digital transformation in B2B publishing

and content marketing for an established

communications firm. He is a career

storyteller who has worked as a journalist,

change agent, and content marketing

executive. He has spoken at conferences

globally, blogs, and has written two

books. His teams’ digital initiatives have

been recognized globally.

“The plan should allow for making sure you get the most out of your content development efforts.”

Christoph Trappe, Chief Content

Officer, Stamats Communications, Inc.There are three really important parts of the planning phase:

1. Building a realistic schedule: It’s important to have a calendar

and move it forward. Otherwise, you risk never getting to the

publishing stage. The operational schedule specifies the time

required to develop and deliver content items. An important

influence on schedule is the approval process. Every additional

person slows down the process, so you must account for this

when planning schedules. Some approval processes are more

complex than others, depending on the industry and its regulatory

environment. The goal is to minimize the approval process.

2.Defining performance metrics: The plan must include

performance metrics for published content. Many people want to

see content campaigns turn into dollars as soon as the content

hits, but that’s not how content marketing works. Initially you

want to know if the content is being viewed, and page views

are a good indicator of that. That metric is less important in a

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https://authenticstorytelling.net/

https://www.christophtrappe.com

https://twitter.com/ctrappe



Officer, Stamats Communications, Inc.

deeper assessment of campaign performance, but it tells you quickly

if content is reaching people. Time spent with content is also useful,

especially in a lead generation campaign. The important thing to

remember about performance metrics is that content requires time

to gain traction. You need to give it time to ramp up. There are ways

to accelerate this ramp-up time, such as through syndication, but that

means additional expense.

3.Planning to maximize your return on effort: The plan should allow

for making sure you get the most out of your content development

efforts. For example, if a filmed interview can be turned into a YouTube

video and related articles, blog posts, and other pieces, this enables

you to gain more content performance from the original interview

effort. A content plan should consider maximizing return on effort.

“Every additional person slows down the process, so you must account for this when planning schedules... The goal is to minimize the approval process.”

Freelance marketing and

communications professional with

15+ years of B2B in-house and

agency experience in the financial

services and technology industries.

Previously Senior Solution and Content

Marketing Manager and Corporate

Communications Manager at Wolters

Kluwer - Financial Services Solutions,

and PR account manager at Weber

Shandwick and Metia.


Lauren Bowden, Freelance Marketing

Communications Consultant/Chief

FinTech Content Creator at The

Comms Crowd, Lauren Bowden

Consulting

“The planning discussion is not just about the sales objectives, although that’s a huge part of it; it’s about what’s realistic in terms of what can actually be delivered by the company.”

Selling enterprise software into the financial sector requires long

sales cycles—typically 18 months—and it involves lots of decision

makers. Although the sales process around regulatory drivers can

be is somewhat formulaic, deadline changes by the regulator can

disrupt marketing plans. A lot of marketing content is thought

leadership related to regulatory initiatives. Regulations can have

a big impact on the industry, and they do not always adhere to a

product marketing schedule. Even when regulators set deadlines

for certain rules to take effect, those deadlines often pass before

banks work out implementation details.

In this business environment, ideation becomes a crucial part

of the planning process. Also, making a plan requires internal

buy-in from all the key stakeholders. They have to be involved in

the conversation to define the biggest potential wins and focus

points. This involves input from sales teams, product leads, market

experts, and both internal and field marketing teams.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-bowden/

https://www.laurenbowdenconsulting.com/

https://twitter.com/commscrowd?lang=en






Consulting

The planning discussion is not just about the sales objectives, although that’s

a huge part of it; it’s about what’s realistic in terms of what can be delivered

by the company. It involves looking at what has worked well in the past,

and it begins with knowing what outcomes you expect from the content

marketing tactics you will be using through the year. You may have multiple

campaigns, and each of those campaign plans needs to cover the market

drivers, solution description, key messages, target market, key competitors,

challenges, localization plans, and schedule. In financial services, you also

have to factor in regulatory drivers so that you can prepare customers for

changes and technology solutions that support them. And if the schedule for

a regulatory driver changes, you need to have the agility to fill in with more

market-driven content.

Part of the plan will also include how you will measure the effectiveness of

your tactics, which can be difficult in a complex sales cycle involving many

decision makers. These measurements need to be based on the outcome

you’re expecting from each tactical campaign and how that leads back to the

wider strategy.












digital.

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“You have to approach planning holistically, and it has to begin with the questions the customer wants answered.”



In the ideation phase, you focus on a key customer journey and the

questions customers need to have answered at each step along the

way. In the planning phase, you are mapping out the vessels you

will use to answer those questions. Just as in ideation, the identified

customer needs guide the planning. In the ideation phase, you are

analysing specifically what the customer needs to know at particular

points in the journey. In the planning phase, you are asking how to

best provide that information to the customer.

For many marketers, there is a misalignment between ideation and

planning. In the planning phase, they might decide they need to

publish a newsletter every month. If that’s their mentality, their goal

becomes to publish a newsletter every month. But that’s not really

their goal. Their actual reason for being is to facilitate and accelerate

the relationship-building process with prospects and the brand.

When customers have a question during the journey, they want

an answer, not a newsletter. The customers don’t care about your

vessel. They care about having the knowledge in their heads.








That is why you have to approach planning holistically, and it has to begin

with the questions the customer wants answered. Now what should the

vessels be? How should you package answers to those questions? What

formats and channels should you choose? Consider this example: You know

from your customer journey ideation that customers get really scared right

before signing a mortgage or a letter of intent to buy your server. That’s

where the delays and objections appear. So you are going to target your

content to that point in the journey. The question then becomes how.

Video? Newsletters? Emailers? SMS? Chatbot? Print? Interactive kiosk? Trade

show booth? A combination of the above? And how do you make sure it

gets surfaced at the right moment? And how much depth will address the

concern without being overwhelming? Now you’re building a plan.

The planning process also needs to consider how you will measure

performance. Again, it comes back to the customer journey. When you

map out the customer journey, break the journey down into key stages. The

transition point between stages should be triggered by a measurable call to

action. These calls to action might be transition from one content piece to

another, a registration, a channel switch, or even a human contact. Those

measurable actions become your performance metrics.


KEY POINTS

Have a schedule, but don’t rush the process and default to format too early in the process.

l Status Quo: Planning is too time consuming, so content teams rush to the creation phase. They default to format too early in the process.

l Cost of Status Quo: Content creators create what they’ve always done because that’s what they know. Content is misaligned with performance expectations and fails to deliver on KPIs.

l New Approach: Slow down the planning process and make sure there is cross-team and cross-silo involvement. This takes longer, but every step that follows is exponentially faster. It’s the classic measure twice and cut once.

Planning includes agreeing on what to measure for success.

l Status Quo: Planning fails to define metrics and KPIs that align to content and business goals.

l Cost of Status Quo: Later in the content cycle, there is a lack of insight into how content is performing and why, which limits one’s ability to make smart decisions about plan adjustments.

l New Approach: During the planning phase, make sure everyone agrees on project objectives and specific KPIs you will use to measure them.

Build flexibility into the plan.

l Status Quo: Organizations invest in huge monolithic campaigns that take a long time to build and are slow in delivering measurable results.

l Cost of Status Quo: Failure of large, inflexible plans hurts business and damages the brand.

l New Approach: Take an agile approach to content planning. Agile teams plan more frequently. They create shorter, more lightweight, and flexible plans that are designed to respond to an iterative inspect-and-adapt process. Plan for a minimum viable campaign.


A good content plan is the foundation for a content

budgeting process, but there are many things to

consider when building and allocating budgets.

These include what the plan is going to do for you

and how you can adjust spending to meet changing

needs. We explored the budgeting process in greater

detail by asking our experts the following question:

What are the best ways to develop a budget that

maximizes ROI?

In discussions of the budgeting process, several

key ideas became clear: 1) It’s important to know

the worth of your content; 2) you need to clearly

understand your content objectives and what you

expect to get from them; 3) you need to be willing

and able to pull funding from things that aren’t

working and move it to things that are. Here’s what

the experts had to say.

BUDGETCHAPTER 3

IDEATE

ANALYZE PLAN

BUDGET

CREATE

DISTRIBUTE















“Working back from impact enables you to think not only about how much something costs, but also what it is worth.”


Heinz Marketing Inc

A proper budget will be built relative to expected outcome. When

you are thinking about your content marketing strategy overall,

you have to map what you’re doing in content to the revenue

impact that content is going to have. Working back from impact

enables you to think not only about how much something

costs, but also what it is worth. Determining what it is worth also

relates to an appropriate budget allocation. You’re not necessarily

determining what channels you will be using at this point, but you

are deciding what you’re willing to spend to achieve an outcome.

Working back from expected outcomes in this way is a good

approach to creating a content budget, not only for deciding what

you need in the way of budget, but also because it helps justify the

spend to a manager or CFO.

Then as the plan moves forward, you have metrics that can help

you see if you are achieving the outcomes you are looking for. It

can be difficult to measure content effectiveness because most

content is not a direct response in which you see immediate







Heinz Marketing Inc

action. Identifying influence and attribution to specific content is also difficult.

However, if you understand what that next step should be to move an

audience toward the outcome you are looking for, you can measure that.

Measurement is an important part of budget allocation adjustments as you

execute your plan. If you see that something is working, you need to have

the flexibility to double down on it. You should be asking yourself how much

more you can do to sustain those results.

On the other side of the equation, you also have to be willing to look at

things that aren’t working and pull the plug. Any good manager or CFO will

want to see responsibility on both sides of the spending equation. There’s an

opportunity cost to not cutting budget on things that are failing. There’s also

an opportunity cost to not increasing funding on things that are working and

can scale.















“Your budget depends on what you already have and your priorities for what you want to accomplish.”

When developing a budget and working to maximize your

return, you first have to understand your objectives. Are

you looking to generate brand or product awareness? Do

you want people to subscribe to your content? Are you

seeking conversions, or working to improve retention?

You must understand your objectives and then allocate

budget that way. Look at what kind of content you have,

and determine if it serves those objectives. Look at where

you need to fill holes to make sure you’re creating an

experience across the entire customer journey. Your

budget depends on what you already have and your

priorities for what you want to accomplish.

Then as the program moves forward, focus your spend

on things that are working. Sometimes that is a difficult

decision for marketers. Sometimes programs just need

more time to gain traction. You can’t start a content

marketing program and expect to see something in the

first few months. There are areas where you need to invest








and understand that up front. If you’ve invested or if things consistently fail to

deliver, you do need to adjust your spend.

Determining if something is working goes back to your objectives, where

you are in the customer journey, and what you want to have happen. Initial

engagement indicators are not always a sign of overall performance. Still,

they can be early indicators that build up to important results like conversions

and pointers to quality lead generation. If you wait until you get six months

down the road for the important metrics to kick in, you may end up wasting

a lot of time and money. You want to optimize your spend. Keep in mind that

part of the return goes beyond performance metrics. It’s also the learning

you gain that can help you build successful subsequent content.

“Determining if something is working goes all the way back to your objectives.”


Andrew Davis is a best-selling author and

keynote speaker. He has built and sold a

digital marketing agency, produced for

NBC, and worked for The Muppets. Today,

he teaches business leaders how to grow

their businesses, transform their cities, and

leave their legacy.

Andrew Davis, Keynote Speaker and

Best-Selling Author, Monumental Shift

“One problem most marketers face when it comes to budgeting is the willingness to stop the things that aren’t working and reallocate that budget in a timely way to things that might work better.”

A large part of budgeting involves deciding how to divide up the

marketing budget pie. For many organizations, the marketing pie

isn’t getting much bigger. It’s just being sliced more and more

ways. Content marketers can’t always expect to get more money

from somewhere else. They have to be willing to look at the

content, formats and channels, media, and bought advertising, and

they need to reallocate budgets toward things that will be more

effective.

This also applies to budgeting time. If you’re sending out an email

newsletter every week that takes you 10 hours to produce but

you’re not generating revenue from it, maybe you should stop

doing a newsletter and reallocate that time toward content that

might be more effective.

One problem most marketers face when it comes to budgeting is

the willingness to stop the things that aren’t working and reallocate

that budget in a timely way to things that might work better. You

need to be flexible enough to evaluate those things and be willing

to reallocate budgets in a way that makes more sense.

https://twitter.com/DrewDavisHere

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewdavishere/

https://www.akadrewdavis.com

https://www.akadrewdavis.com/blog/

42

t







worked with more than 500 companies

over the past five years, including global

brands such as Capital One, NASA,

McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard,

Microsoft, and the Bill & Melinda Gates

Foundation.

“More and more companies are building greater flexibility into the budgeting systems where content teams become ‘owned media’ teams.”



Good planning makes it possible to budget content as a portfolio of assets.

You can also build separate creation and production budgets, which gives you

flexibility in creating different form factors from the same core content assets.

This is where that de-siloed planning process really pays off. It gives you

transparency and insight into content consistency and cost optimization. You can

move away from the practice of every group hiring its own agency to create its

own materials (some of which may be redundant). De-siloed planning allows you

to reduce the number of agencies or outside and internal resources involved in

the creation process. It also gives you greater consistency and insight into costing.

You will be able to better see which agencies excel in different parts of the content

lifecycle, including creative and production, transforming content to different

formats, putting it into different languages, distributing it, and managing it.

Every company budgets in its own way. For instance, traditionally promotional

budgets have been owned by the brand team or media team, and if a content

group wanted to promote a piece, they had to beg funds from one of these other

teams. More and more, though, companies are building greater flexibility into the

budgeting systems where content teams become “owned media” teams. This gives

content teams that are running owned media properties more agility in the way

they respond quickly to market needs and timely event.
















“Having a detailed plan with touch points mapped out for different points in the buyer’s journey makes budgeting a much more efficient process.”





Consulting

Effective budgeting requires adhering to the original strategy of

each campaign and always keeping overall objectives in mind.

Having a detailed plan with touch points mapped out for different

points in the buyer’s journey makes budgeting a much more

efficient process. Budgeting needs to consider many factors that

relate to specific buyers and their journeys, and it needs to take

into account a global strategy that repurposes content for multiple

regions and campaigns to maximize ROI.

Budgeting also requires having a clear idea of the goals you need

to achieve in each campaign—goals that have been communicated

to and accepted by stakeholders. This does not mean planning out

and budgeting for every last detail of every content piece with no

room for flexibility over the year. Even the most robust plan and

organized team will have unexpected opportunities that are too

good to pass up over the year. That’s why it’s always important to

have at least a 10 percent contingency fund built into the budget.









Consulting

Another value of a strong plan is that it helps you manage supplier costs. With

a well-thought-out plan, many items can be budgeted for upfront, suppliers

notified in advance about what work you have planned over the year, and

packages negotiated accordingly. Good relationships with external suppliers

are extremely important in managing these costs. Every industry has third

parties trying to persuade you to spend your marketing dollars with them.

Every purchase has to be rigorously justified. Spending money on a tactic

that may seem like the right fit in theory but fails to meet the mark in practice

can undermine a whole campaign. Teamwork and communication with

internal stakeholders and external networks of peers who have worked with

suppliers is essential to making wise vendor choices. Ongoing relationships

with trusted suppliers is key, but it is also crucial to explore the marketplace

for suppliers who can help you execute new tactics. This should be done

on an ongoing basis over the year to ensure the supplier has a solid grasp of

the marketplace well ahead of key fulfilment deadlines. This kind of market

scanning is particularly important for in-house marketing teams so they can

keep abreast of new techniques and methods.

Finally, you need to continuously monitor campaign performance through

metrics like cost per lead and funnel analysis, as well as qualitative analysis, to

develop the ROI insight you need to validate your budget.












digital.

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“Budgeting against personas or market segments…enables you to budget based on revenue-related outcomes.”



One great way to develop a budget that maximizes return on your

content marketing investment is to budget against personas or

market segments rather than budgeting for channels or formats.

To do this, you divide up the audience and correlate behaviors

against content interactions. For example, does your audience

convert or register for more trials than un-engaged contacts in your

contact base? And what do those increases in engagement mean

in revenues? This enables you to budget based on revenue-related

outcomes.

Another important budgeting strategy is to budget in phases. First

budget for content that is developed in a cross-deliverable format

way. Then budget for content assembly and formatting for channels.

This means that before it hits layout and delivery, the content is

optimized, validated, and considered for effectiveness holistically

across the customer experience. This approach results in less

rework, less reviewing the same words needlessly across teams

and formats, and less mess when corrections need to cascade








across multiple deliverables. Some worry that this front-loading approach

feels “slower,” but it saves significant waste and risk downstream, making the

content cycle more profitable as a whole.

One advantage to budgeting in this way is that if you can calculate the

impact of content on revenues by analyzing the behaviors of the segment

of your customer base that engages with your content—that is, your content

audience versus all customers—then you’re able to easily calculate what

the impact would be if you were able to a) increase the overall audience

size or b) reach more of your total customer base with engaging content.

The numbers can point to many things. Maybe your audience engages with

content but your platforms aren’t sticky. Maybe only proactive customers

become part of your content audience and you need to invest in social

amplification or influencer marketing. In each case, you can calculate the

potential new activity versus the uptick that you can expect considering

how your engaged content audience behaves versus customers who don’t

engage with much content.

Budgeting is where you assign value to the content you are going to create.

Content is a marketing tool, and you measure its effectiveness depending on

what job you are trying to accomplish in the first place.


KEY POINTS

It’s important to know the worth of your content. l Status Quo: Most marketers do not know what a piece of content is worth in terms of its actual outcome value to the business. l Cost of Status Quo: Not knowing what content is worth makes content budgeting pure guesswork. l New Approach: Working back from impact enables you to think not only about how much something costs, but also what it is worth. You are able to decide what to spend to achieve an outcome.

You need to clearly understand your content objectives and what you expect to get from them.

l Status Quo: Many market plans fail to set clear, measurable objects for content.

l Cost of Status Quo: Without measurable objectives, it is not possible to attach value to those objectives. This results in budgets that provide little guidance on what is an appropriate spend for a specific content piece or project.

l New Approach: Budget to outcomes. Mapping content to the revenue impact that content will have enables accurate budgeting.

You need to be willing and able to pull funding from things that aren’t working and move it to things that are.

lStatus Quo: Most marketers develop inflexible budgets that make it difficult to stop things that aren’t working and reallocate budget in a timely time way to things that will work better.

l Cost of Status Quo: Inflexible budgets result in increased opportunity cost. There’s an opportunity cost to not cutting off budget on things that aren’t working. There’s also an opportunity cost to not increasing funding on things that are working and can scale.

l New Approach: Build budgets based on outcome value. This gives marketing the flexibility to make informed decisions to adjust spend in ways that improve content performance.


With ideas, a content plan, and a budget, you are

ready to create. But the creative process is often

plagued by bottlenecks, uneven delivery, and the

production of content that delivers disappointing

results. What’s the problem? To find out, we asked

our experts the following question:

How do you manage your team to avoid

bottlenecks and mistakes and eliminate costly

delays and duplication?

Several themes emerged in discussions about the

creation process: 1) Too often teams jump from idea

to create without adequate planning, which can

result in churn in the creation process; 2) Leveraging

technology can help use content assets more

efficiently and reduce duplicate efforts; 3) If you

understand success metrics, you can use them to

inform the creation process.

CREATECHAPTER 4

IDEATE

ANALYZE PLAN

BUDGET

CREATE

DISTRIBUTE












t

“A good indicator that your process is working well is the amount of content produced based on plan versus ad hoc requests.”



The ideal approach to content development is to begin with

ideation and then plan, budget, and create. But what often happens

is a process something like this: create, plan, ideate, budget, and

analyze. One can easily see how this happens. It typically begins

with a content group being asked to create something, and in many

organizations, the content team is viewed as an on-demand vending

machine for content. When they get a request, they find a plan to

fit that request, and then they ideate ways to put content into that

plan. Then it’s all the content they can fit into the plan that makes

the budget. It is like a backward assembly line that often churns out

mediocre content.

The ideal process of ideation before planning, budgeting, and

creation makes for a much better creative process. It becomes a

process in which you are creating something that has been ideated

well, planned out properly, budgeted appropriately, and is ready for

you to put the creative effort you need to deliver a quality product.

A good indicator that your process is working well is the amount of

content produced based on plan versus ad hoc requests. If only 20%







of your output is based on plan and the rest is coming from ad hoc requests,

you are not working efficiently. On the other hand, if 80% of your output is

plan output, you’re doing pretty well.

There is often a lot of collaboration and review that has to happen during the

create phase. Any technology that communicates the hard lines in the sand

of ideation, planning, and budgeting to others involved in the creation phase

keep the creative phase focused and enables more flexibility around creative

options within those hard guidelines.

Part of having an effective process is having someone responsible for the

overall effort. Someone steering this process correctly is an important

success factor.

Technology alone does not guarantee success through this kind of communication

and collaboration. People have to comply and work together to make the process

work properly. That doesn’t happen because of technology; the technology is

effective because of the people.















“You can’t effectively deal with a bottleneck if you don’t have the workflow visualized so that you know where it really is.”



When you reach the create phase, it’s impossible to eliminate bottlenecks

completely. The theory of constraints tells us that every system is going

to have at least one bottleneck, and there’s nothing you can do about

it. That’s why visibility is so crucial at this point in the cycle. You need

to be able to see where the bottleneck is and then optimize the rest of

the system around it. Too often organizations see a process that seems

to be getting stuck in one general area, so they throw more people

or more money at it. But that’s actually not going to give them the

process optimization they’re looking for. You can’t effectively deal with

a bottleneck if you don’t have the workflow visualized so that you know

where it really is.

Visibility into the creative workflow and output also helps avoid duplicate

efforts. An agile process can help with this through sprint review meetings

where everyone shows and tells what they did over the past few weeks.

You can attend those meetings with other teams to see what they are

doing. If you see something that is 80% of what you’ve been trying to

do, you can build on that. A formalized process can avoid duplication of

work and save time. It also helps to have a central repository like a digital








asset management system. Review meetings in which everyone sees all the

great work other teams are doing fall flat if it’s hard to get your hands on

those materials. If you become frustrated spending a lot of time looking for

something, you might easily decide just to make it yourself, even if it takes

longer. A centralized repository improves efficiency and avoids duplication.

The ultimate goal of an efficient, smoothly running creative process is that

you can maintain a predictable, sustainable pace of quality output. You don’t

want people working all the time and getting burned out to the point of

being unproductive or quitting. This damages your process in the long run. It

goes back to process visualization and being able to see a smooth workflow

from ideation out to publication and analysis. You should not have most of

the workflow stuck in one phase at any point in time. You must watch the

process and continuously optimize it.








leave their legacy.



“A successful creative process releases content that is timely and that delivers on audience objectives.”

A successful creative process releases content that is timely

and that delivers on audience objectives, whether that’s

driving traffic, generating leads, or meeting other marketing

objectives. If deadlines are being missed or the content

contains mistakes, it’s time to regroup and figure out what

the real issues are. The content you’re creating must actually

add value to the business. The cost of bad content can

sometimes be difficult to pin down. The content might be

driving traffic, but it may turn out to be the wrong kind of

traffic, or low-quality traffic that never converts. These kinds

of performance metrics provide valuable feedback that

strengthens the creative process.
















“The creative team needs to review both its failures and its successes and learn from them.”


Officer, Stamats Communications, Inc.To be successful, the creative process must deliver good content on

schedule. Numerous technologies can minimize the bottlenecks that

are part of the creative workflow. It’s important not to get bogged

down with technology to the point at which using it slows you down.

Consider cost versus the value technology delivers to your process. The

right technology can set individual deadlines and enforce them through

automated reminders, which can make the entire creative cycle flow

more smoothly.

Another way to streamline the creative workflow is to use strategies that

optimize time utilization. For example, companies that want to leverage

their internal experts in a content marketing strategy should never

allow those experts to write their own content. It will take them a long

time to produce one piece, and that piece most likely will not be well

written. A better use of everyone’s time is to have a content marketing

specialist interview the expert and write up the piece. This uses less of the

expert’s time and generates better written content, and it’s likely you can

repurpose the interview material into multiple content items.






Christoph Trappe, Chief Content Officer,

Stamats Communications, Inc.

The creative process also needs to reliably deliver good content. Deciding

what is “good” ultimately comes back to measuring the effectiveness of the

content, and that depends on metrics related to the content objectives. You

may find that only a small percentage of your content would be considered

outstanding in the way it is picked up and read or viewed. This may be

because of something unique about how that content was created and just

the luck of being in the right place at the right time. The creative team needs

to review both its failures and its successes and learn from them.















“Sometimes bottlenecks arise because people focus on their own siloed goals at the expense of larger campaign or business goals.”

A key part of streamlining the creation process is cross-

team collaboration. The reality is that different groups

such as digital, social, and content work in their own

silos. Sometimes bottlenecks arise because people

focus on their own siloed goals at the expense of larger

campaign or business goals. Representatives from these

different groups need to develop a shared understanding

of the overall plan you’re trying to accomplish across the

marketing organization. That ability to have cross-silo,

cross-functional team collaboration and conversations

is important. If everybody understands what the bigger

priority is, they understand how they need to manage their

own requests and bring the bigger goal into their group.

Much of technology can give people line of sight into

progress and show where things are getting stuck, and

with whom. That visibility can help you make adjustments

to the team or process. For instance, if there’s a subject








“Visibility can help you make adjustments to the team or process.”

matter expert approver who’s committed to another project, even though the

person understands the importance of your project, there are only so many

hours in the day. How do we adjust to ensure that everything continues to

move forward?

This technology can also indicate that a team or process is not working well.

For instance, if it takes longer than it should to create content, or if there are

more revision cycles than should be the case, something in the process is

not working. It could be that the goal was not clearly understood or that early

groundwork around ideation and planning were not well executed. Sometimes

people rush through these stages so they can get started on creating the

content. If you front-load your time so that everyone understands audience

objectives and the plan for achieving them, everything else that happens after

that is clearer, more efficient, and more cost-effective.

Namita is the Global CMI Director,

Content, Unilever. She has lived and

worked across various countries and

categories, and has received recognition

for her work on brand turnaround. She is

the recipient of several prestigious awards

including the Esomar Global Methodology

Award, the Global Brand Congress Award

for Outstanding Contribution to Market

Research, as well as the MRS Award for

Social Listening using Big Data. She is

the chair of the Warc Awards 2019 on

Content Strategy. She leads a global team

of professionals in the area of Content

Excellence at Unilever.


“You have to build testing and analysis into the content creation process.”

Namita Mediratta, Global CMI Director,

Content Excellence, Unilever

In consumer products marketing, consumer feedback data is

important at every stage of the content development cycle. Having

active feedback during the create phase is essential. To do this, you

need to start looking at unfinished work and getting feedback at that

stage. That’s when it’s easiest to make changes and avoid errors.

To do this, you have to build testing and analysis into the content

creation process. This involves testing with consumers, and it involves

looking at past work and building your internal knowledge base about

what is working and about the craftsmanship of creating content

from a consumer perspective. Having that knowledge base available

across the organization enables content development teams to move

forward without having to reinvent the wheel.

Managing the creative phase is really about feeding into the early

stages of the process with consumer feedback and using those meta-

learnings and knowledge bases that you have so that people are

getting it right the first time. It enables them to build content that is

https://www.linkedin.com/in/namita-mediratta-534133a




based on proven craftsmanship, and at the same time experiment with what

is genuinely new so that they can get as much as possible out of those fresh

pieces of creative.

Consumer and marketing insights technology is important to the create

phase. It enables you to integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence

directly into your creative discipline so that you have a fully integrated

process that brings together meta-learning and market insight. That guides

marketers in the right direction during the create phase. It allows marketers

to view their output through many lenses so that if something is missing the

mark, they will see it quickly.












digital.

t


“First, creation teams need to be able to mine their own content. Second, they should be creating small reusable blocks to be able to leverage them easily once they’ve found them.”



The challenge in creating content for an omnichannel strategy is

making sure that the many different ways you answer questions

customers ask through their journey is done efficiently across all

channels, and it consistently aligns with business goals.

First, creation teams need to be able to mine their own content.

It’s a step that many businesses fail to take. Content teams rotate

in and out of projects. Companies work with different agencies,

or someone with an agency suddenly no longer works there.

Many companies have no idea what content they actually have,

and indexing all that can be a time-consuming maintenance task.

Corpus analysis tools can be a tremendous help in content mining.

For example, in practice you may have many digital assets. Some

may be in your knowledge base, some in your externet, some on

your web CMS, some on your internet, and some in your digital

asset management system. A corpus analysis system can reach

into all those repositories, do text mining, and apply AI-based

natural language processing, and it can find things and tag them

automatically for future reference. However it’s done, it’s essential





https://www.laurenceanthony.net/research/20130827_linguistic_research_paper/linguistic_research_paper_final.pdf




to have that ability to find existing content so you are not wasting resources

re-creating them.

Second, it’s important for a content marketing strategy needs to create

Lego®-like content that has the answers to all the customer questions.

This means managing component or modular content rather than have all

your content locked in large, monolithic finished pieces. This means, for

example, managing “tips” or “best practices” as discrete blocks vs managing

only a complete “7 tips for holiday makers” article. Reusable blocks give you

the flexibility to assemble your content into different content deliverables

depending on what journey you’re trying to facilitate for the user and what

marketing needs you must address at a particular point in time. Ideally,

you will manage and create content at the Lego component stage so that

you can mine it later and pull out what you need to quickly assemble the

packages and deliverables you require.

You can tell how efficient your content creation process is by measuring how

much leverage you are getting out of your existing asset base. In other words,

how many times to do you reuse existing content blocks across deliverables,

formats, and channels? If your leverage is very low, content creators may be

spending a lot of time re-creating materials unnecessarily, or they may be

going rogue with inconsistent messages delivered through different channels.

If that happens, you are not properly managing your content or messaging.


KEY POINTS

Too often teams jump from idea to create without adequate planning. This can result in churn in

the creation process.

l Status Quo: Content teams get a request, find a plan that fits, and ideate ways to put content into that plan; their budget is driven by all the content they can fit into the plan. This process is backward.

l Cost of Status Quo: Content teams work all the time, getting burned out to the point of being unproductive, all to churn out as much mediocre content as possible.

l New Approach: Begin with ideas, build a detailed plan, and build an outcome value budget before starting creation. This makes the create process more efficient and the content more successful..

Leveraging technology can use content assets more efficiently and reduce duplicate efforts.

l Status Quo: Many content teams are unaware of or unable to find existing content assets, so they re-create them.

l Cost of Status Quo: This results in expensive duplication of creative effort and message drift.

l New Approach: Creative processes need to leverage technology that provides access to existing content assets wherever they exist in the organization, and that provides visibility into cross-team and cross-silo creative efforts.

Understand success metrics, and use them to inform the creation process.

l Status Quo: Planning fails to define content KPIs, or creative teams don’t understand them.

l Cost of Status Quo: Content teams don’t receive audience feedback, which causes them to continue to produce mediocre content.

l New Approach: Performance KPIs need to be defined in the planning phase, creative teams need to understand what they are and design content with those performance objectives in mind, and actual performance data needs to come back to the creative team so they can make informed adjustments to content assets.


CHAPTER 5

Creating great content can be a wasted effort if

it is poorly distributed. The content fails to find its

intended audience, it lands at the wrong time, and it

fails to fulfill its business goals, which can be a costly

failure. We explored how organizations can ensure

their content is distributed better by asking our

experts the following question:

What are the best ways to ensure that your content

is delivered to the right places at the right times?

In discussing content distribution, several themes

emerged: 1) the importance of using keywords to

manage search optimization; 2) the importance

of determining the right channels for reaching the

target audience with your content; 3) being able

to evaluate if those who are engaging with your

content are the people you want to reach. Here’s

what the experts had to say.

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“Search optimization is important, but there is a difference between enabling people to find your content and aggressively putting it in front of their eyes.”


Heinz Marketing Inc

Effective distribution comes down to understanding your target

audience. Who are they? Where, how, and when do they access

content? What kinds of content are they consuming? A C-level

executive is probably not going to read a 20-page white paper. If

you take a white paper, eliminate all the copy, and just leave in the

graphics, the visuals, and the captions, you have something that

a C-level might actually flip through. Content distribution isn’t just

how many impressions you get or how many emails you send out

to promote. Distribution relates back to the audience, what they

care about, and what they’re willing to do.

Search optimization is important, but there is a difference between

enabling people to find your content and aggressively putting it

in front of their eyes. There are ways you can use keywords and

tag content to have it be more discoverable and to increase its

ranking. But content marketing today has a higher bar: if you

feel bad interrupting your prospects to put the content in front

of them, the content isn’t good enough. You should be creating

content that your prospects might be willing to pay for. It’s not just

the content that is valuable enough to use to interrupt your target







Heinz Marketing Inc

audience. You need to go from being interruptive to being irresistible with your content. When people see your content in their inbox, they should be excited to open it.

Digital asset management technology plays an important role in optimizing your distribution strategy. Part of it is getting the right message in front of the right prospect at the right time. A digital asset management solution ensures that content goes out at the right times to support all the different points of evidence and triggered events and buying signals that need to happen. Lots of if-then statements can happen on the back end to make that possible.

.

Not getting distribution right is an opportunity cost. If you know the economics of your funnel, you can reverse-engineer the opportunity costs of missing someone. So for every one of our target prospects that doesn’t engage with this content, we just lost $40, so you could do the backward math on that. And maybe that opportunity cost translates into a potential $4,000 sale down the line. Now you can decide if it’s worth spending a small percentage of that $4,000 to more aggressively try to get your audience to engage with the content. It helps you see the cost of missed opportunity, but it also helps you decide whether to throw more money at the problem or cut your losses.

If you think about the currency of marketing today, it’s not about having bigger lists

or having more people fill out forms. It’s about sustained attention. If you can get and

keep the attention of your prospects, you’ve found gold. Not every prospect is going

to be ready to buy right away. But when they are ready to buy and ready to engage,

you want to have that warm conversation already underway









A-List celebrities.




“Some channels and communities perform better than others for the same content, and you want to go for the most exposure to the right kind of audience.”

Distribution of content is a big piece of the puzzle that many people

miss. They just created this great product they’re going to put it out

there, and they think the whole world’s going to love it. But if nobody

sees it, who cares?

There are many strategies for getting your content in front of the right

audience. One involves keywords and indexing. Content today needs

a keyword strategy to strengthen search performance and sharing.

This includes researching keywords, monitoring performance,

and sticking with keywords that generate more traffic. These can

be specific to the topic or channel. You also need to check your

competitors to see how their pages are performing and make

adjustments to improve your standing relative to them. It really comes

down to competition.

Another area that is important to distribution includes channels and

communities. Some channels and communities perform better

than others for the same content, and you want to go for the most

exposure to the right kind of audience.









You can also develop your own communities. There is great value in

having communities that you own. You can pitch your content to other

communities or Facebook and LinkedIn, but rules limit what you can do.

When you can have your own communities in LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora,

Slack, and others, you own those communities, which gives you more

control over the content you offer. It also enables you to build a more

valuable target audience that delivers the right kind of traffic.

Having 10,000 of the right people is better than having half a million people

coming to your site but only 1% being of interest to you.

The effectiveness of these strategies depends on testing. Once you see

something that really works, that’s where you want to spend more time.















“Successful distribution comes back to the planning phase and knowing who the content is for and how they want to consume it.”



Failure to effectively get content in front of the right audiences at the

right times is like screaming into the void. You’re making a lot of stuff,

but it’s not helping anybody, and it’s not doing what you need it to do.

You may be seeing a lot of leads, but none of them convert. You may be

reaching a lot of people, but they’re not the right people.

Successful distribution comes back to the planning phase and knowing

who the content is for and how they want to consume it. Audiences now

have high expectations about receiving information that is personally

relevant to where they are in the buying journey and optimized for the

channels where they prefer consuming it. The old fire hose approach of

putting everything out on every channel just doesn’t work anymore.

For example, effective content marketing often employs user stories.

Doing that well requires content creators to think about who they’re

targeting and what that person’s going to be able to do after they

consume a particular piece of content. The key idea is who you are

serving with this piece of content and what benefit they are actually going

to derive from it.








Then the content needs to be optimized, tagged, and indexed so that it

reaches the target audience. This is where a centralized content repository,

such as a digital asset management system, becomes incredibly valuable.

When it comes time to access persona A at stage four of the buying journey,

you can quickly access content already targeted to those people. You have

content collected that’s been designed for particular channels and media.

Effective distribution also requires looking at data to determine if it is being

consumed and if it is having an effect. For example, if the content is about

how to bake a cake, you might expect the target audience to go out and buy

ingredients needed to bake a cake. You need to know what your content is

empowering people to do, and ideally there’s a capability for tracking that

behavior.








leave their legacy.



“Most people who are successful with content distribution and promotion focus more on where they are delivering it and less on when.”

When distributing content, keep in mind that every channel

has its own half-life. For example, if you post something on

LinkedIn, it takes all week for that content to be consumed by

most of the people who will ever see it. On Twitter that might

happen in 15 seconds.

One big mistake marketers make when distributing content is

the everywhere approach: they get it out there on every social

platform and buy ads for a day or a week, and its useful life is

brief. Most people who are successful with content distribution

and promotion focus more on where they are delivering it

and less on when. They might start by emailing the content

to customers and clients. Then they wait and watch how it’s

consumed, and they make sure it’s valuable and that it works

for the people they know. Then they do one social channel at

a time. They might buy ads only when they see momentum on

social media. And then finally they do PR.

In the “release everywhere” model, you’re maximizing exposure

for a brief period of time. Somebody might see a tweet in the








morning, a post on Facebook in the afternoon, and a LinkedIn post later the same day and

not click any of those. But if they get that email from a known source, they’ll click on it.

They’ll see the Twitter post three days later, they’ll click on it and consume the content. And

four days later, they’ll see it on LinkedIn, and now it has 7,000 views on LinkedIn because

of the momentum you’ve built. People are much more likely to consume the content

because it has social validation.

How you manage this distribution strategy varies by brand, channel, and even content

type. Rather than putting something out one day on every channel, it might take you six

weeks to go through the entire cycle for one piece of content. What you get out of that is

a much richer and deeper content consumption experience on the audience side. You also

increase the lifespan of the content, which reduces the pressure on you to be constantly

creating content because yesterday you had a spike and now something new is needed.

Marketers often measure the wrong things. Search and discovery are important to

ensuring that your content is discoverable, which is a necessity. But today that’s just table

stakes. Your content needs to be discoverable, but it’s far more important to ensure that

you’re actually adding value for the content consumer and that it’s actually moving them

toward the sale. At the end of the day, if your content’s not generating revenue, there’s

a problem. It’s easy to think your content is successful if you’re using vanity metrics. You

must be able to actually qualify the people who are consuming the content as valuable to

the organization. If they are not, you need to reposition, rewrite, re-create, or rethink the

content, probably from the strategic level down.













Lauren Bowden Freelance Marketing Communications Consultant/Chief FinTech Content Creator at The Comms Crowd, Lauren Bowden Consulting

“Martech, whether it’s CRM, marketing automation or content management systems, becomes useful in making sure content is getting into the hands of key audiences.”

Content distribution—and making sure you’re hitting the right

audiences—can be a challenge, especially in a long sales cycle that

involves multiple stakeholders participating in a group decision

process. When you look back on the wins in this kind of sales

cycle, it’s difficult to pinpoint the influence specific content pieces

had on that sale. You’re not going to turn around to a salesperson

after an 18-month-long sales process and tell her the real reason

she got that deal was because of a particular video or white paper.

That’s not going to happen.

Marketing Technology (aka MarTech), whether it’s CRM, marketing

automation or content management systems, become useful in

making sure content is getting into the hands of key audiences.

In the case of CRM, you can see what’s been opened, and you

have click-through rates, open rates, and other data that is crucial

to measuring content engagement to validate your distribution

strategy. That data becomes useful in building up a picture of what

is happening during a sales cycle. We’ve done a retrospective






analysis of a sale to look back at how many people in an organization actually

did look at our content. When you see 12 different people from the same

firm all clicking on multiple pieces of content during that cycle, or if the

same person clicks on multiple pieces of content, you know you’re on the

right track. In our business, every sale is different. Every sale involves different

job titles, different teams working together, different ways of approaching

challenges. This retrospective analysis provides decent insight, but it doesn’t

translate into a formulaic approach to content distribution.

Another important input is qualitative feedback from sales people who are in

touch with customers. Did the customer see the content, and was it helpful?

This kind of anecdotal evidence from the sales team is crucial for evaluating

your content strategy and how you are reaching stakeholders in the decision

process.

Another important part of distribution is being able to make adjustments if

the messages are either not reaching their targets or simply not working.

With long sales cycles and long campaigns that are well thought out at the

planning stage, there are many opportunities to steer a campaign back on

track if something is not working. Sometimes you have to make adjustments,

try different things, and then stay in constant communication with campaign

stakeholders to be sure you are on the best path.

Berenice is a physicist and programme

manager turned marketer, with a career

spanning R&D, production, product

development, technology transfer

and marketing. She has spent over 15

years leading marketing strategy and

implementation in the high-tech sector,

specialising in B2B and technology. She

currently leads outbound marketing in

the Architecture and Technology Group

at Arm. She blogs on tech and enjoys

reviewing theatre and restaurants.


“You need to know which channels suit your audience and your business and how to reach your audience through those channels. Base your decisions on evidence, not assumptions.”


Manager, Arm LtdWhen it comes to content distribution, there is no one-size-fits-all

solution. It varies with the business. You need to know which channels

suit your audience and your business and how to reach your audience

through those channels to get the results you are looking for. It’s all

about understanding which channels are best for you.

In some ways, B2C marketing is easier than B2B marketing because you

are able to speak directly to the consumer, who is often the buyer. B2B

marketing is often more difficult because there may be many people you

have to influence before you ever get a decision and the sales cycles are

usually longer. A further issue is you’re trying to reach people within an

organization who don’t want to make a wrong decision, because their

job depends on getting it right. Finding those channels to reach the right

people is often quite a challenge for businesses. It involves knowing

where the audiences you need to reach go and what channels they use.

It also involves testing and experimenting, but if your audience doesn’t

tweet, you may not want to put things on Twitter.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/berenice-mann-a98196/

https://proactiveblogger.wordpress.com/

https://twitter.com/BereniceMann



Manager, Arm Ltd

In B2B marketing, it’s a long sales cycle that involves raising awareness,

educating target audiences about why it’s good for them, and getting them

to start thinking about the decisions they need to make until they reach that

decision point.

You can use a number of strategies to ensure that your content is reaching

the key audiences at the right time. Digital channels offer great opportunities

and keyword research and search optimization are essential. Valuable

content can be gated and you can build in measurements that allow you to

statistically break down the types of people using your content. There are

both paid and unpaid exposure and you can experiment to find out which

works best for your campaign. They often involve higher cost, so it comes

down to maximizing the return on your investment and how much you are

willing to spend and working within your budget. The better the results, the

more you can prove that it works and evidence brings the confidence in

knowing which channels to pursue and which to drop. Making evidence-

based decisions wherever possible is critical to success.


KEY POINTS

You need to use keywords to manage search optimization..

l Status Quo: Marketing teams focus on targeted channels while neglecting search optimization.

l Cost of Status Quo: Content underperforms in generic searches and does not propagate as widely as it could.

l New Approach: A keyword strategy strengthens search performance and sharing. This needs to include researching keywords, monitoring performance, and sticking with keywords that generate more traffic.

You need to determine the right channels for reaching the target audience with your content.

l Status Quo: Marketers often use an everywhere approach when distributing content, getting it out there on every social platform and buying ads for a day or a week, but soon after that content’s life ends.

l Cost of Status Quo: The cost of not getting distribution right is a lost opportunity. If you know the economics of your funnel, you can see the opportunity costs of missing a person or an audience.

l New Approach: Use channels to aggressively put content in front of your target audience. If you feel bad interrupting your prospects to put the content in front of them, the content isn’t good enough. Digital asset management solutions help make sure content goes out at the right times in the right channels to support all the different points of evidence and triggered events and buying signals that need to happen.

You need to be able to evaluate if those who are engaging with your content are the people you want to reach.

l Status Quo: Marketers often measure things that do not tell them who is engaging or what the impact is.

l Cost of Status Quo: Failure to know if you are reaching the people you need to reach can give you a false sense of success (high level of engagement with the wrong audience) and an inaccurate indication of content performance.

l New Approach: Adopt processes that qualify the people you are engaging and use metrics that measure their behavior after each engagement. This enables you to accurately assess and adjust content for better performance.


At the end of the day, do you know how well your

content marketing program and campaigns are

doing, whether they are performing as expected,

or even if they are paying for themselves? This has

always been one of the most challenging questions

for content marketers to answer. We took a closer

look at what the experts have to say about analyzing

content performance by asking the following

question:

What’s the best way to use the data from

the complete content lifecycle to measure

performance and opportunities and reduce waste?

The analysis discussions revealed several key ideas,

including: 1) It’s important to measure why the

audience is engaging with your content and not just

if they are engaging; 2) it’s worthwhile to measure

what people do after they engage with your

content; 3) it’s valuable to measure the relationship

between the content lifecycle and sales. Here’s what

the experts had to say.

ANALYZECHAPTER 6

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tRobert Rose is the author of three best-










“Most content marketers measure exactly the wrong things.”



Measurement is critical, and the cost of not measuring the right

things is ignorance. For example, you can create an amazing piece

of content that suffers because it was poorly promoted. You can

also have a horrible piece of content do okay because it was part

of an amazing promotional campaign. Your insight, then, is that

the horrible content is something you should do again, and this

really great piece that suffered from a bad marketing campaign is

something you shouldn’t do. That’s measuring how well the content

was promoted and syndicated and distributed rather than how it

moved the audience, and when you measure the wrong thing like

that, you build a negative feedback loop.

Most content marketers measure exactly the wrong things. They

mostly try to measure the quality and quantity of content they’re

producing and how efficient or effective the higher quality content

is. Content marketers should be measuring the content’s impact on

the behavior change of the audience that is consuming the content.







The challenge with content is that it’s not a widget. It’s not like an ad, a

brochure, or a piece of collateral where you can safely predict the cost on each

subsequent widget. Content is different because there is a quality level we have

to apply that is an unknowable number until we actually start creating it.

How much does a feature film cost? It depends on the story, what it is saying,

and the value of the content. Media companies answer that by measuring how

many tickets they sell. Content marketers need to do the same thing. They

need to measure what the audience does. So, in creating a measurement

program for content, the first thing to ask is what the goal is. What is the impact

on the audience you are trying to achieve?

That could be many things. Let’s say, for example, you have a digital blog meant

to build your first-party data that you will then expose to your personalized

catalog or targeted ads. Let’s say you look at the conversion rates of

anonymous people exposed to your catalog versus the conversion rate for your

own first-party audience members. The gap between the two is the value of the

audience impact. Any content that increases that gap in a positive way—making

the first-party audience members more valuable—is a direct measure of the

value and effectiveness of that content.















“Being able to identify and measure the correlation between content engagement and revenue is not easy, but it is essential.”


Heinz Marketing IncThe most important measurements for the content cycle are

those that show the impact that content is having on revenue.

You can’t buy a beer with a click or an impression. Although

content engagement is important, what happens after that content

engagement is most important. Being able to identify and measure

the correlation between content engagement and revenue events

is not easy, but it is essential.

The further up the funnel you go, the more difficult this becomes

because the more steps there are between where that prospect

is and them closing. But you can reverse-engineer your funnel

to figure this out. You can calculate that every time you get a

prospect to a particular stage, that prospect is worth X dollars. For

example, if you’re selling something that costs $10,000 and your

conversion rate on the opportunities to close deals is 25%, it’s

worth $2,500 to get someone into an opportunity. Then you can

do that backward math and try to understand what it costs to get







Heinz Marketing Inc

someone to that point through your various channels and paths. Now you’re

able to decide which paths are most efficient, which ones seem to be working

the best, and which of those paths may not be generating the most prospects,

but the best prospects.

You can see if a content marketing team is measuring the wrong things by

simply looking at what it is measuring. If it’s clicks and likes and retweets

and content engagement, that’s a good first step, but what’s most important

is what happens after that. You should be able to see some velocity and

the prospects taking action. If they engage with something and don’t do

something new, if they engage with content and that doesn’t change

their behavior or mindset, you have to question whether that content was

worthwhile. At that point it doesn’t matter how many retweets the content had

or how viral it went. Did it add value to the customers? If you’re not measuring

that, you don’t really know how it’s performing or how to improve it.









A-List celebrities.




“If you are going to improve the content, it’s important to understand what problem to address.”

When measuring content, the number-one thing to look at is

conversions. If you have a million people on the site and a 0.2%

conversion rate, who cares about all those site visits?

Conversion rates are key, and it comes down to A: how many people

are you bringing in? and B: how many of those people are downloading

something, getting on the newsletter, filling something out for you, or

doing something to take that next step? And out of those, how many

leads are you getting, how many appointments are you setting up, and

how many of those are turning into sales? You have to develop your

basic set of KPIs.

Keep in mind several things as you measure content performance:

lBe sure you are measuring the content and not a broken

process tied to the content. For example, if you have a sales

team that has a terrible time closing deals and a content strategy

generating tons of leads, it could be the content strategy is

flawed and is not generating the right kind of leads. Or it could

be the sales team is poorly trained. If you are going to improve

the content, you need to understand what problem to address.









lLook beyond single pieces of content. When analyzing content,

consider that some content influences the consumption of other

content, and some content items are just repackaged versions of

other content items, optimized for a different channel. Analyzing

these things gives insight into how you can build on what you have

out there, how you can add to it, and how you can shift emphasis

to something that is working better than something else. There may

be other ways you can reach people, and there are different ways

that people take in content. Once you feel like you’ve exhausted the

possibilities and you see through the numbers that there is some good

traction, you may decide to push it a little further.

lNot all content takes off right away. You have to A/B test things. You

might have one campaign that starts strong and other campaigns you

have to iterate five times to find the right target audience and the right

message. You have to give the content time to work and not pull the

plug too early.


“In content today, everything is about measurement. This data becomes a guide for how to develop additional content.”


Officer, Stamats Communications, Inc.

Using data to measure content performance is challenging because life is

nonlinear. You can be going about your day and a friend calls you out of the blue

to tell you about a meeting she just had in which a person’s name came up. After

the call, you search that person’s name, and an article the person wrote comes up.

The article has nothing do with what your friend was talking about, but it’s interesting,

and you spend a few minutes reading it. Maybe you recommend it to someone else

you know was looking for that information. It’s difficult to track these things.

But in content today, everything is about measurement. Are people reading it? Do

those consuming the content prefer certain topics, and do they prefer articles of a

certain tone? And really, the most important thing, does the content convert readers,

causing them to take an action? How many people click on the Call Now button? How

many people email? This data becomes a guide for how to develop additional content.

Anecdotal evidence is important too, when the right person shares it. If an

executive asks if the content campaign is working and a business manager says

we have a lot of new customers who mention the content, that counts. It might

not carry as much weight coming from a marketing consultant, though. Then if on

top of that you can show a 50% increase in site traffic, those things taken together

become very powerful.






















leave their legacy.

“Only one metric counts: the amount of revenue your content creates.”



Measurement is the biggest content marketing challenge. The

essential problem is that content marketers do not actually tie

their content marketing efforts to revenue. It doesn’t have to

be complicated. For each part of the content lifecycle, you

should be able to ascertain a dollar value for the consumer

who consumes it. And if you’re not able to do that, you’re

probably reporting on the wrong metric. It’s great to measure

a lot of things, but content marketers should only report

on one metric: how much revenue this piece of content or

this content campaign or this part of the content lifecycle

contributed to the bottom line.

Not until then are you able to determine the return on a

content investment. Deciding if the content was worth it is a

great question to ask, but most content marketers fail to get to

the first step: making that revenue connection.

It does not need to be a complex calculation. For example,

if you can say that someone who subscribes to your email

newsletter is worth $53 on average to your bottom line, the








cost of creating the newsletter and building subscribers becomes a pretty

simple equation to determine if you should keep doing it. This can be a

recursive calculation, meaning that as you go through the content lifecycle,

if you can determine that a prospect who consumes these four pieces of

content is now worth X dollars, all of a sudden you have a really good case

for that lifecycle.

Too often CMOs in board meetings tout how many followers they have on

Facebook and how many likes they get for their posts, only to hear a CEO or

a board member say, but how many of those people buy our product? And

they don’t have the answer. Only one metric counts: the amount of revenue

your content creates. Whatever things you need to measure to get to that

number are the right things to measure. The cost of not making that content-

revenue connection is marketing churn, the loss of staff because you can’t

justify the efforts for the cost, and ultimately damage to the business.

Freelance marketing and communications professional with 15+ years of B2B in-house and agency experience in the financial services and technology industries. Previously Senior Solution and Content Marketing Manager and Corporate Communications Manager at Wolters Kluwer - Financial Services Solutions, and PR account manager at Weber Shandwick and Metia.

“Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign can only happen if you have defined expectations during the planning stage.”


Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign can only

happen if you have defined expectations during the planning stage.

It goes back to those conversations with all the stakeholders and

getting their buy-in because when you come back to them and

share campaign results, they will look at whether those outcomes

are in line with their expectations, and analysis becomes the

main way to see if it’s working or not. All of this becomes easier

when the planning is done well. Marketing objectives you define

in the planning process become your baseline. If results are in

line with what you expected when you wrote the campaign plan,

that’s great. If not, you can use that to make adjustments in the

ideation and planning phase for the next iteration. How it performs

becomes the basis of making adjustments and moving when the

market moves.

To do this well, it’s important to have high-quality querying and

data visualization technology, especially when there are many

target audiences and decision makers involved in the sales cycle.










Consulting

You may have multiple campaigns running at any given time. You want to

have that intuitive data insight that allows you to drill into the data and test

hypotheses, for instance seeing how the campaign has performed with one

audience compared to another, or seeing if a campaign is working better in

one country than another. You can then compare that with past campaigns

and maybe make regional campaign adjustments, such as refining messages

or distribution strategies, or retarget different audience groups in certain

areas.

When collecting and analyzing performance data, it’s important to include

qualitative inputs along with the digital metrics in your analysis. Numbers are

critically important, but you need to talk to people, too.

Namita is the Global CMI Director,

Content, Unilever. She has lived and

worked across various countries and

categories, and has received recognition

for her work on brand turnaround. She is

the recipient of several prestigious awards

including the Esomar Global Methodology

Award, the Global Brand Congress Award

for Outstanding Contribution to Market

Research, as well as the MRS Award for

Social Listening using Big Data. She is

the chair of the Warc Awards 2019 on

Content Strategy. She leads a global team

of professionals in the area of Content

Excellence at Unilever.


“The real power of this data is bringing it all together so you can start looking at campaign assessment in totality.”



In multichannel consumer product marketing, you need to

be able to look at all the data inputs in an integrated way.

What you’re trying to do is to get to the core of what makes

something work, or what is not working. It’s beyond just

whether something is meeting expectations. You need to

know why it is or is not. To understand this, you get clues

from a variety of data sources. You can look at how people

respond to one piece, or how one thing changes behavior,

but you have to see this across channels, and it has to

include less direct data inputs like social listening. This kind

of analysis requires integrating a lot of data from different

sources, and it is an iterative process. It is a discovery

process.

During the planning phase, you are defining key metrics.

Then during the create phase, you are using consumer

feedback metrics and your knowledge base to guide

creative. After a piece airs, you are tracking to see if it

https://www.linkedin.com/in/namita-mediratta-534133a




has the expected impact. You are using metrics to close the loop on the

content cycle, and this is where you can piece together the elements of a

multichannel campaign. If you are not tying these things together, you end

up with isolated behavioral data, or claim data, or survey responses, or in-

market metrics. The real power of this data is bringing it all together so you

can start looking at campaign assessment in totality. You need to look at

campaign assessment across an integration of variables.

The goal is to have this integrated perspective and analysis for action.

You need to look at how creative was received, what happened to sales,

and what happened to brand metrics. You need to look at hard and soft

metrics together. It’s a big data challenge that requires examining various

data sources and applying advanced technologies that include artificial

intelligence and machine learning. In the end, though, it is an analysis for

what you’re going to do differently, or similarly, the next time. There’s no

point in having a metric if you’re not going to do anything with it.


KEY POINTS

Measure why the audience is engaging with your content, not just if they are engaging.

l Status Quo: Most content marketers have some measure of audience engagement, such as pages views or clicks, but they do not know why people engage.

l Cost of Status Quo: Failure to understand why people engage limits your ability to improve engagement.

l New Approach: Content marketers need to measure what causes the target audience to engage with their content. This involves an ongoing test-measure-adapt process that continuously feeds the content lifecycle.

Measure what people do after they engage with your content.

l Status Quo: Content marketers often measure clicks, likes, retweets, and content engagement, but what’s most important is what happens after that.

l Cost of Status Quo: If your content does not change audience behavior or mindset, you have to question whether that content was worthwhile.

l New Approach: Plan and create content so that it includes measurable calls to action so that you can track what the audience does and develop behavioral metrics.

Measure the relationship between the content lifecycle and sales.

l Status Quo: Most content marketers try to measure the quality and quantity of content they’re producing and how efficient or effective the higher quality content is. These are exactly the wrong things.

l Cost of Status Quo: The cost of not measuring the right things is ignorance, no visibility into how content is performing or how to improve it, marketing churn, loss of staff because you can’t justify content efforts for the cost, and ultimately damage to the business.

l New Approach: Content marketers need to measure the content’s impact on the behavior change of the audience that is consuming the content, and they need to show the impact that content is having on revenue. Only one metric ultimately counts: the amount of revenue your content creates.incomplete ideas to get early audience feedback.

By activating Aprimo’s Digital Asset Management solution, Philips achieved its digital transformation to adapt to ever-changing customer touch points and personally engage with its customer base.

Philips is a globally recognized brand that serves the healthcare, lighting, and consumer lifestyle markets. With approximately 122,000 employees, Philips is active in the sales and service outlets of more than 100 countries.

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