“There are multiple sides to the content story you should be measuring. There’s content performance, which we all get very, very focused on, as we should. But there’s also the process of developing the content. Are we producing it on time,on budget? Are we making the right things? How many review cycles are we chewing up?”—Marcia Trask
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika Heald is joined by Marcia Trask, senior B2B marketing leader, and former SiriusDecisions and Forrester analyst, to discuss ways to measure content marketing results. They explore marketing attribution models and metrics to consider, including the tools and processes that help you prove your success.
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube or read through the highlights below.
Overcoming the Challenges of Measuring Content Marketing Impact
Data management is a critical component of content marketing measurement, and many platforms exist to collect and analyze that data.
“You’ve got technology and data as a fundamental layer. There are people who struggle with: What data should we be tracking? Do we have the right data? Is it dirty? All the data standardization issues, there’s a systems component to that. Are we looking at the right platforms to get the right data that we need? Do we have someone who can assist us, who’s got those technical chops?”—Marcia Trask
Marketers need to think like businesspeople when developing their content strategy. As we discussed with Carmen Hill, story mapping for the buyer’s journey can support this.
“We don’t always think like business people. We think like artists or writers—which is fantastic, that’s what gives us skills at our job—but a lot of times you have to think like a business person. When you’re producing content and building your content plan and executing against it, you’ve got to be thinking:
- How is this helping the business?
- What are the goals and objectives I’m working towards?
- This specific piece of content I’m developing, who is it aimed at?
- What stage in the buyer’s journey?
- Is it a different audience than a potential buyer?
- What do they need to get from it?”
—Marcia Trask
Explaining content’s role in driving business results will help you improve your strategy and secure additional budget to scale your efforts. Check out our previous chat with Chloe Thompson to learn more.
“Those are the questions that management is going to be asking you. They want to know things like: I’m investing X amount of money in content; what am I getting from it? What kind of audiences are we reaching? What kind of actions are we compelling people to take with this content?”—Marcia Trask
The Importance of Aligning Content Goals with Business Objectives
Content planning templates and a defined content strategy ensure every piece of content has a clear goal and aligns with your team’s efforts. Use our free content planning form template and tailor it to your organization’s needs.
“People aren’t discussing those goals at the start of a content engagement because they’re not using an intake form. They’re not having those meetings where they align on a content strategy, put it in writing, and say, here’s what we’ve all agreed to. So then they can go back and point at it.”—Erika Heald
“Agreeing on goals up front is so critical, and that is something that I preached for years as an analyst. I’m now a recovering analyst, but I still strongly believe in it, and the goals have to align to the company goals. And you need to have that be clearly documented. It needs to be overly communicated internally.”—Marcia Trask
“I helped a nonprofit organization that I was working with go through the exercise of having everybody from all the respective departments—everyone who created any kind of content, anyone who was having stories that they’re sharing with their membership—come together, and we did a content strategy for the organization as a whole. Then we did departmental ones that rolled up to it, so people had visibility into what everyone was doing and they made sure that everybody’s individual content creation—and content goals—were all laddering up into the same vision. People had so much they were planning that really needed to intersect with each other, and that wouldn’t have happened if everyone hadn’t gotten together and had a shared planning document.”—Erika Heald
Content governance is a must for organizations of all sizes.
“If you don’t have that governance in place, you’re left scrambling and trying to articulate to somebody that they’re being unrealistic and that their demands are not something that you can just conjure up.”—Erika Heald
Marcia reflects on why a content strategy is so critical for aligning with executives:
“A friend of mine worked in PR, so professional communications, and they had a big press release one day. The company had done something absolutely amazing, so they put out a press release. Well, it was a huge hit. It got picked up by the press that covered that space, and the stock went up $1. The only thing the company CEO took away from that was: Issue a press release stock goes up $1. So he’s telling my friend, I need a press release a day.“—Marcia Trask
Understanding Your Audience: The Key to Telling a Powerful Content Story
Content must reflect the ‘what’s in it for me’ (WIIFM) for the intended reader.
“You’ve got to have that ‘what’s in it for me’ when you’re sharing content if your expectation is that somebody else is going to engage with it, share it, talk about it. Because if it’s all about you and it’s not helpful to them, it’s just not going to be useful. And if the only results you get are likes on something, so what?”—Erika Heald
Likes are a vanity metric that marketers should not focus on.
“You got likes, but you’re not getting clickthroughs—which, from my perspective, since I primarily work with B2B or membership associations—you want to be getting and have people take the action of clicking through and engaging with that content. That’s the reason that you’re sharing the content. So if they’re not resharing it, if they’re not commenting, if they’re not clicking through, that content is not doing its job. “—Erika Heald
Your content should reach more people than immediate prospects or leads.
“When you think about measuring your content, it’s really important to think about your audience, because your audience is going to be more people than you think it is. We are so blinkered by everything’s all about demand. Unless you can prove something brought in a lead, or it identified somebody in a buying group, or it helped create an opportunity, it’s worthless. We need to deliberately pick up those blinders and set them to one side, because think about all the audiences we reach with content.”—Marcia Trask
“Think about who else our content touches. It touches influencers who may never buy from us, but have a big say in what other people do. It touches our internal sales organizations. If you’re an organization that works with third-party channel partners, you’re reaching out and speaking to them. You are looking to the media. You are looking at internal audiences a lot of the time.”—Marcia Trask
“We have so many audiences that we touch, that when we get blinkered into all that matters is what we do for prospects and existing customers, we’re cutting out a whole world of explaining our value. And it’s not just content people who do this.”—Marcia Trask
Beyond Vanity Metrics: Leveraging In-Platform Tools for Meaningful Insights
Your website, Google Analytics, and blog platform provide rich insights on content performance.
“There are some common platforms where you can pull information about content performance. You can look at your website, and you can look at your blog platform. Obviously, those are easy, low-hanging fruit. You’ve got Google Analytics and other analytics tools that go out and measure web traffic and all that fun stuff.”—Marcia Trask
Measure your content performance both from a content consumption and content operations standpoint:
“It you really want to look at the whole content picture, you have to broaden your lens so you can be looking at things like: Are there metrics in my sales enablement or sales asset management platform, where I can track and see are reps using the material that we’ve written for them to use at the right stage of the buyer’s journey? Are partners consuming the content we’re giving them to help with their sales efforts? Are we putting material out for existing customers? Maybe we’ve got an existing customer newsletter, is it being read, are people commenting on it?“—Marcia Trask
“Even something like a project management system; if you’ve got Monday.com or Asana or Basecamp, you can get a lot of information there. There are multiple sides to the content story you should be measuring: There’s content performance, which we all get very, very focused on, as we should. But there’s also the process of developing the content. Are we producing it on time, on budget? Are we making the right things? How many review cycles are we chewing up?”—Marcia Trask
Social media content, for example, is not free to create.
“People frequently have this idea in their head that social media is free. So they will not even account for any of the content distribution, the time and effort it takes to put together the distribution plan and to then actually do that promotional content writing, do the dissemination of the content. And they completely miss the distribution costs, unless there’s a paid ad component. Or worse yet, they don’t budget anything for the content distribution. So then it goes nowhere and it does nothing.”—Erika Heald
“Roughly 70% of content in a B2B environment is basically wasted investment because it’s not getting to the right people that it should go to, or it wasn’t written with the right audience in mind.”—Marcia Trask
The Limitations of Attribution Models and the Promise of Touch Analysis
Tracking limitations and privacy settings have made it more challenging to understand what content people consume before making a purchase.
“A lot of people are basically saying that attribution is dead because of how many of the different social platforms don’t pass any information. And then, of course, you also have privacy settings that are default for Mac users and Apple users that are not passing your data; they make it very easy to say, don’t track me. Attribution is something where we have to measure it a lot closer to the source, using our first party data, using things that we have more control over.“—Erika Heald
Last-touch attribution can overinflate the importance of content people consume right before making a purchase. However, a lot of other content is necessary for getting people to that last touch. And creating more last-touch content won’t lead to a proportionate increase in sales.
“We are getting totally hung up on stuff like last-click attribution, which makes me so, so angry. That last piece of content before somebody registers for a demo, there are so many pieces of content before it. And creating more of those pieces that are just like that last little push that gets somebody over the hump isn’t gonna necessarily do anything for you.”—Erika Heald
Marcia explains why most attribution models are flawed, and why a weighted multi-touch attribution approach is the best option.
“I think attribution models are the work of the devil, and that’s a big statement. But hear me out: Attribution models are an attempt to by all of us well-meaning marketers, for us to take something that is a multi-person, long, non-linear, somewhat organic buying journey path, and we are forcing it into some kind of a linear mathematical model where we can say, oh, x and y equals blah, which means I should invest this much in this tactic, because it has the biggest return.”—Marcia Trask
“You can make your attribution model say whatever you want. And that’s the fundamental problem with all of them. If you’re biased on first touch, all you’re really looking at are things like what’s my thought leadership content doing? What’s my PR doing? You’re neglecting everything else in the buyer’s journey.“—Marcia Trask
“In terms of attribution models that I’ve seen work, I’ve seen one work decently, and that was when I got a chance to meet with the head of data analytics at Salesforce when I was in my analyst role. They had built a very sophisticated, very good multi touch attribution model that was weighted with common sense. It was not perfect, because there is no such thing as a perfect attribution model, but it was good and it was solid, and it used common sense things. If somebody’s engaging at an executive dinner, like they RSVPed and they showed up and they stayed and had a conversation, we’re going to rank that a lot higher than somebody opening an email. And again, it still wasn’t perfect, and they reviewed it like every six months to make sure they were still okay with all the ratings on the different tactics.“—Marcia Trask
Gather a representative sample of your ideal buyers to understand how content informs their journey.
“What we do with touch analysis is you fix those two points [when a deal is closed and when something becomes an officially recognized lead or opportunity], and then you look at your data and say I want a representative sample of what I consider a good deal. That’s subjective, and that’s meant to be subjective. Maybe it’s a deal that closed really fast. Maybe it’s a deal that bought the exact set of products or the offering mix that you’re recommending for people. Maybe it’s one of those big whales that came through.“—Marcia Trask
“Now I’m going to go back and just for those accounts, I’m going to look at what content, what offers, were consumed leading up to becoming an opportunity. And then from an opportunity to this closed/won. It’s incredibly eye opening, because you start to look at: Are there patterns? Did a key member of a buying group engage early in the cycle? What kind of content were they engaging with? Maybe once it became an opportunity, they started consuming video or demos of the product and this is something to replicate. The information you can get out of this kind of analysis [is incredibly valuable].”—Marcia Trask
“Once you’ve spent the time doing that analysis of that ideal type of process, then you can ask AI to go in and look at all of your data and find things that are trending in that right direction.“—Erika Heald
Listen to the full recording for more insights, including:
- Why doubling down on last-touch content like webinars won’t boost sales (24:48)
- How important lead scoring is in attribution and sales pipeline velocity (33:28)
- How email responses can inform your content strategy (37:71)
- Why UTMs are essential for supporting attribution efforts (42:12)
- How to convince business leaders to stop focusing on vanity metrics (49:54)
