How to Conquer the Content ROI Conundrum
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Do you have tons of great content but don't know how to leverage it? Check out this presentation to get strategies for strengthening your content marketing programs and tracking your content ROI.
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How to Conquer the Content ROI Conundrum
- 1. How to Conquer the Content ROI Conundrum December 2015 Heidi Bullock VP, Demand Generation Marketo
- 2. Content Marketing is a Big Deal Source: CAM foundation
- 3. Content fuels your marketing programs Good content Good performance Sub-optimal content Poor performance
- 4. Content is used across channels and programs to drive initiatives Demand Generation Brand Awareness Customer Retention Sales
- 5. Content is not free
- 6. 1. Protect your budget for content initiatives 2. Create the case for more budget for new content projects 3. Keep or bring on additional resources Why should you care?
- 7. You need to understand content ROI It shouldn’t be a mystery…
- 8. But, measurement is hard
- 9. Overview • 8 Success Secrets • Setting Goals • ROI • Real-life examples • Q&A
- 11. Success Secret #1: Agree on Metrics
- 12. Example – What Metric Matters? Social Referrals Increased time spent on-site Pipeline
- 13. Scenario We created a snazzy new blog! Awesome marketers CEO The blog has 1000 views! So what?
- 14. When Metrics Take Away Credibility Vanity Metrics Sound good and impress people, but don’t measure impact on revenue or profitability. Activity Metrics Measure what you do instead of what results and impact you have.
- 15. When Metrics Take Away Credibility Cost Metrics Frame marketing in terms of cost and spending instead of results and outcomes.
- 16. The best event programs incorporate intentional measurement strategies in advance. Success Secret #2: Set Goals Upfront eBook is launched Measure Initial Program Successes: Blog social shares Watching video Download of eBook Google Analytics Analysis First and Multi-Touch Pipeline associated with content asset Revenue Won Jan Feb Apr May June
- 17. Success Secret #3: Terminology 1.Do not use cost metrics 2.Be consistent 3.Remember who you are talking to Wow, our engagement, likes, and Klout have never looked better! What are they ##$%^ talking about? sales marketing team
- 18. Page 18© 2014 Marketo, Inc. Marketo Proprietary and Confidential Success Secret #4: Design Programs to be Measurable 955 shares (blog) 10.8K downloads 440 new names $35.7K MT pipeline
- 19. 1. Collect the right data to answer your question 2. Add tags to measure 3. Think about setting goals in GA 4. Consider content grouping to see what topics perform the best 5. Look at the landing pages report 6. Look at page views 7. Consider attribution modeling to see where content plays a role If you don’t have MA, you better have GA! Source: http://www.jeffalytics.com/google-analytics-tips-measuring-content/
- 20. Page 20© 2014 Marketo, Inc. Marketo Proprietary and Confidential Success Secret #5: Have defined metrics for clearly evaluating contentEarly 1 •Lift in website traffic, new visitors, social shares, referring domains, form fill outs, comments and site interactions 2 •Subscription to email or RSS, new names, % new names per program 3 •# Leads (right demographics, desired behavior), investment per lead 4 •Engagement score for set of programs per month 1 • # of opportunities 2 •First Touch Ratio 3 •Multi Touch Ratio 4 • Pipeline Late
- 21. Page 21© 2014 Marketo, Inc. Marketo Proprietary and Confidential Success Secret #6: Build data into your review process Which content offer performs the best for this email program?
- 22. Success Secret #7: Keep it simple vs.
- 23. Success Secret 8: Measure, but focus on decisions to improve ROI Source: Infogineering Model
- 24. Setting Your Content Goals
- 25. Do not just jump to content tactics… ebooks blog webinars SlideShare white papers infographics I just love infographics!
- 26. Goals for Content Marketing
- 27. Content Marketing Goal Related Metrics Drive thought leadership Ex: Klout, pr mentions, increase in social (Linkedin, Twitter, FB), web traffic spikes post initiative Increase brand awareness Ex: share of voice (can measure share of traffic), increase in social (Twitter, FB) Lead generation Ex: Increase in key metrics (tofu, mofu, bofu) -> # downloads, # leads, # opps Customer acquisition Ex: # new customers, time to acquire Customer retention / loyalty Ex: NPS, #existing customers, renewals, turnover Set and prioritize your goals
- 28. Asset Stage Programs Measurement 1 month 3 months 6 months Top 10 Reasons to Consider MA Asset Mid - Stage Nurturing – mid stage track Engagement Score >90 6 MT opps 18K MT pipeline Website Form fill outs on website - 1000 10 FT opps, 14 MT opps 30K FT pipeline, 42K MT pipeline PPC Form fill outs - 1500 4 FT opps, 10 MT opps 12K FT pipeline, 30K MT pipeline Retargeting campaigns – lead score >50 Form fill outs - 300 5 MT opps 15K in MT pipeline Enterprise field event follow up Email ctr 2% - 100 form fill outs 4 MT opps 100K in MT pipeline Demand Gen Example Detailed
- 30. Example Downloads Week 1 Month 1 Low *4050 *7290 Medium (10%) 4560 8028 High (15%) 4765 8340 Very early indicator
- 31. Program ROI
- 32. • Which content assets work best for you at TOFU, MOFU, BOFU • What blog post topics have the best engagement? • Which content assets are best performing for a particular vendor (ex: paid email, paid webinar)? • Which assets are good for bringing in qualified leads? • Which assets are good for opportunity creation? • What content works best in nurturing? Example Questions
- 33. Track All Touches Across People Screenshot: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- 34. Downloaded eBook on Analytics Registered for Analytics Webinar Downloaded Analytics Survey Results Attended “Top 10 Marketing Reports” Webinar Engaged with us at Big Tradeshow Connected with Sales Rep First Touch 3 months $100K $100K
- 35. Downloaded eBook on Analytics Registered for Analytics Webinar Downloaded Analytics Survey Results Attended “Top 10 Marketing Reports” Webinar Engaged with us at Big Tradeshow Connected with Sales Rep Multi Touch 3 months $25K $0 $25K $25K $100K $25K
- 36. (FT or MT) Ratio = Pipeline / Investment For Marketo: >10 is Great and <5 is Not so good
- 37. Know what is effective at TOFU vs. MOFU Page FT Revenue MT Revenue Asset A $100,000 $525,000 Asset B $320,000 $903,000 Asset C $425,000 $117,000 More efficient at pushing leads through funnel More efficient at acquiring the right leads
- 38. Example Website – 23K views, 10,283 downloads Email – 2,730 clicked Slideshare – 7,693 views Social impressions – 1,149 New Names - 517 Early Stage Later Stage FT opps – 5 FT pipeline – $130K MT opps – 25 MT pipeline - $1.06M
- 40. Example #1: Blog
- 41. Your Blog
- 42. Blog - Results From average 14 a week to 145/week - 10X growth!
- 43. Blog Piece
- 44. Goals: Brand awareness, lead generation Metric: blog share index and MT pipeline Timing: blog shares (month), MT pipeline (3 months) Questions: • Which post has the highest engagement for the month? • How did it compare on the Index? • How many new names did a particular post bring in? • Did this content help create pipeline? • Which post had the best ROI? Blog Posts
- 45. 1. Create an index 2. Compare to posts from previous year (same month) 3. Compare with posts in current month One Method – Early Measurement 80 = great 70 60 50 = average 40 30 20 = not so great
- 46. Early Stage Assessment How are we doing compared to last year at this time? How are we doing compared to other posts this month?
- 47. Later Stage Assessment Shares Index New Names Pipeline 1.3K shares 60 – for this month 100 50K MT pipeline time
- 48. How was engagement? 1.3K shares How did it compare to other posts (using the Index)? 60 – above average for month 42 – not above average compared to last year How many new names did a particular post bring in? 100 Did this content help create pipeline? 50K MT pipeline Performance
- 49. Comparison Shares Index New Names Pipeline 1K shares 60 24 27K MT 408 shares 40 60 10K MT 806 shares 50 15 80K MT time
- 50. Which post has the highest engagement for the month? Personalized Web Engagement How did it compare to other posts (using the Index)? 60 – highest for the month How many total new names were generated? 400 How much total pipeline? $120K- MT Which post had the best ROI? How Marketing Automation Powers Small Teams - $80K MT Performance
- 51. Example #2: Large Content Initiative
- 53. • Goal: Brand awareness and lead generation • Metric: engagement with C- level, new names, pipeline • Timing: month one, three months out, 1 year • Questions: • Did we create C-level engagement? • Did this topic resonate with our target audience? • Did this post bring in any news names? • Did this content help create pipeline? • What were the top performing channels? • How did the program do overall wrt to pipeline? Large Content Initiative
- 54. Google Analytics
- 55. Early Stage Assessment Early Indicators Metric Comments Rating Engagement 1.3K shares Above our standard index of 50 New Names 2309 $17 / new name – this is reasonable Did it resonate with our target audience (C-level marketers)? % of names – C level 50% were VP or above, good
- 56. Later Stage Assessment Late Indicators Metric Comments Rating FT Pipeline $1.04M 26 FT ratio – good ROI MT Pipeline $2.34M 59 FT ratio – good ROI Closed Won $ (FT) $455K 10x - positive
- 57. Top Performing Channels Revenue Won Webinar - sponsored $350K Email - Marketo database $25K Email - sponsored $22K Social - paid $15K All others $43K Top Performing Channels
- 58. Did we create C-level engagement? Yes – 50% of new names were VP and above Did this topic resonate with our target audience? Yes – 1.3K shares, above our index for the month Did this post bring in any news names? Yes -2,309 Did this content help create pipeline? Yes - $1.04M -FT, $2.34M- MT What were the top performing channels? Webinar How did the program do overall wrt to pipeline? 10x ROI Performance
- 59. Content ROI: The Magic 3 1. Establish Goals and ROI Estimates Up-Front 2. Design Programs to Be Measurable 3. Focus on the Decisions that Improve ROI
- 60. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- ©2006 Marketo, Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
- So, I think it is fair to start by saying, content marketing IS and continues to be a big deal. Per the CAM foundation (communication, advertising, and marketing) --content marketing is the most important trend for 2015 – beating big data, marketing automation and mobile marketing. http://www.camfoundation.com/blog/content-marketing-important-trend-2015/
- And why is that? It is because content marketing is the FUEL for just about everything you do. Many of you on the webinar today are already leveraging content marketing. You have probably seen that good content – meaning content that provides value for your target audience, will help fuel your marketing programs and they are more likely to be successful. Sub-optimal content will definitely lead to poor program performance.
- Effective content – in all forms – is used for marketing initiatives from brand awareness to demand generation to customer retention. And many of you are probably seeing your investments in content marketing go up – this could be from investments in people, outside contractors, or just more time your current team is spending on content.
- And unfortunately content is not free. You really need to think about: Planning. These are the strategic costs associated with establishing business goals, identifying business goals and generating personas. These tend to be one-off costs. Ideation. These are the costs associated with generating a flow of ideas such as mapping buyer journeys and identifying the kinds of assets that will be required. Again, these are largely one-off costs. Production. These are the costs associated with creating the content and the editorial plan. These are recurrent costs that will be incurred on every new content campaign. Distribution. These are the costs associated with generating traffic, leads and sales through the promotion and nurturing of the content. Again, these will be recurrent costs. Measurement. These are the costs associated with the evaluation and optimization of the content. And …………
- Why should you care? It is really important because you need to be able illustrate the value content plays across all your programs. By doing so, you can Protect your budget Protect your resources And hopefully have the ability to secure more budget and resources
- To do that – you need a way to show ROI.
- Yet, let’s face it – it is not always the easiest thing to do. On this slide I am showing data from eMarketer (Pan Communications) and from eConsultancy. In both data sets, measuring the ROI and effect on business pipeline is a challenge and ranked highly. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Create-Engaging-Content-Marketers-Need-Tech/1012668
- So, today let’s change that a bit. I am planning to go over: 8 success secrets – that are just good ways to think about your content marketing in general We’ll discuss goal setting ROI techniques And lastly I am going to run through 2 simple examples from Marketo My objective with today’s presentation is to provide you with real tools and tips you can use right away. These are things I do daily in my job so I hope you find them useful as well.
- Success secret #1 – Agree on the metrics you will use to measure your content marketing. This is really important because often people are not aligned on what metric really matters and when. For example: How do you want to measure content in early stages versus later stages? How do you define a content program success? What is the agreed upon time period to measure? You may find that different people in your organization will want to see different metrics. For instance, your C-level will want to see how your content initiatives tie back to revenue. **Let me provide a simple example …………. -
- These are different metrics you can use – but some are better for early stage and some are better for later stage. For instance, maybe you just launched a new blog post – you could look at the social referrals --- but later it is more ideal to see if there was any pipeline connected to that post. Let me walk you through a scenario:
- Let’s take these awesome marketers that launched a blog. They went to the CEO and post launch talked about the # of views the blog had. Was the CEO impressed? No. The CEO really did not care about views. What went wrong here? The marketers performed well, but they made the mistake of not connecting the marketing results to bottom-line metrics that mattered to the CEO. It is not to say your team shouldn’t track blog views but ALSO identify metrics that your key stakeholders care about and use those.
- Here are some types of metrics to be cautious about: Vanity metrics --- Vanity = twitter followers, total users, facebook fans, blog views total Too often, marketers rely on “feel good” measurements to justify their marketing spend. Instead of pursuing metrics that measure business outcomes and improve marketing performance and profitability, they opt for metrics that sound good and impress people. Some common examples include press release impressions, Facebook “Likes”, and names gathered at tradeshows. You want to avoid Measuring Activity ---- rather focus on measuring Results You also want to avoid focusing on quantity ----hone in on quality metrics instead.
- The worst kinds of metrics to use are “cost metrics” because they frame Marketing as cost center. If you only talk about cost and budgets, then no doubt others will associate your activities with cost. As an example, let’s take a marketer who improved cost per lead by $10. Based on these great results, she went to the CEO to ask for budget. Did the marketer get her budget? No. The CEO decided the ‘reduced lead cost’ meant marketing could deliver the same results with fewer dollars – and so the CEO cut the marketing budget and used the extra funds to hire new sales people. What went wrong here? The marketer performed well, but she made the mistake of not connecting her marketing results to bottom-line metrics that mattered to the CEO. By framing her results in terms of costs, she perpetuated the perception that marketing is a cost center. Within this context, it’s only natural that the CEO would reduce costs and reallocate the extra budget to a “revenue generating” department such as sales. Think about using terms like investment per lead --- instead of cost per lead.
- Success Secret # 2 – Set your goals upfront with key stake holders. Your first step is to quantify your expected outcomes. All too often, marketers plan programs and commit their budgets without establishing a solid set of expectations about what impact they expect the program to have. This is a terrible habit, and is one of the underlying reasons why other executives, especially CFOs, question marketing investments. The solution is to assign up-front goals, benchmarks and KPIs for each marketing program. It is very important before you even start on ANY program to make sure that the team is aligned on objectives and outcomes. The example I am showing here is for a content asset – an ebook: I suggest setting up a meeting with key folks – may be your VP of Marketing, CEO, head of sales, head of product Review the reasons why you think the event has value and how you propose looking at success over time. The timing element is an important one because most likely you will not see closed won deals the day an asset is launched. So here you can see there are goals over time.
- Success Secret #3 – think about the terminology you use
- Once you have identified what the goals look like, you need to figure out how you are going to measure success. Success Secret #4 is to design your programs to be measureable. This is really important because if you do not have a way to measure impact – it will be nearly impossible to report back on your goals. Using Marketing Automation like Marketo, it is very easy to look at metrics like I am showing on this slide. For this Definitive Guide, I can look at early metrics like ‘downloaded’ all the way to pipeline – which ultimately is the most important.
- Now, not everyone listening today as marketing automation and that is OK! You can use other tools like Google Analytics to measure content. Collect the right data to answer your question Add tags to measure Think about setting goals in GA Consider content grouping to see what topics perform the best Look at the landing pages report Look at page views Consider attribution modeling to see where content plays a role
- Success Secret #5 – Define your metrics clearly for early and late
- Success #6 – Build data into your review process
- Success Secret #7 – focus on decisions that improve marketing. A key part of your planning process is to identify up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then build your measurements to capture the right information. This means you should measure things not just because they are measurable – but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability. Like the dashboard in your car, three to five metrics are all you really want. Think about the contrast with a dashboard in a 747 airplane --- there are so many measurements it’s hard to quickly ascertain the most important ones.
- Success Secret #8 – A key part of your planning process is to identify up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then build your measurements to capture the right information. This means you should measure things not just because they are measurable – but rather because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability. Like the dashboard in your car, three to five metrics are all you really want. Think about the contrast with a dashboard in a 747 airplane --- there are so many measurements it’s hard to quickly ascertain the most important ones.
- Let me start with what NOT do. Do not just jump into content tactics. This is a tempting place to begin – infographics are fun! – but you will not obtain the results you ultimately want.
- It is really crucial to understand what your goals are for content marketing. Here is a chart from CMI and marketing profs that breaks down goals by B2B and B2C. For example, for your business - is it to drive brand awareness or customer acquisition? Maybe it’s both – but be very clear on this with your team and key stakeholders. To me, this is one of the most important exercises because it will inform your entire strategy – all the way from how you distribute your content to how you measure!
- Now let’s get even more granular. Here is a chart I made with the respective goals, and then the related metrics. If driving lead gen is your goal – look at # of asset downloads, #of leads and mqls, and # opps associated with the content asset (I will show an example of this late) Hopefully this is a helpful example of what you should put together so feel free to steal this!
- download goals for the DG guide. I looked at the numbers of the last 2 guides and these numbers are an average of the last 2 guides. I added a 10% and 15% to the average numbers to come up with Medium and High goals too.
- Step 1: Important to track all touches
- Feb 28, 2014 on slideshare
- Think about your blog. Do you have a good methodology for collecting names? By adding the sign up for email updates we saw a nice lift.
- From average 14 a week to 145/week - 10X growth!
- Third party Cost decent amount of $$$$ Plan to leverage for about 1 year
- Weighted average in Excel
- Took an average of all the diff scores weighted made the ave score a 50 Look at new ones and look at last year and peers within in current month
- Which post has the highest engagement for the month? How did it compare on the Index? How many new names did a particular post bring in? Did this content help create pipeline?
- Third party Cost decent amount of $$$$ Plan to leverage for about 1 year
- Attached is a breakdown by traffic source. Time period is Q3. Organic search has the best engagement in terms of pages per visit combined with duration, although email referrals do great as an entry point but the content doesn’t seem to resonate much with that audience (given the visit duration). Looking at PPC and referrals it looks like we can improve the ads to better match the content since engagement doesn’t seem great there. Overall traffic isn’t impressive compared to other areas of the site, but it is also very specific types of content for a targeted group so that isn’t a big surprise.
- 2309 new names Investment = $40K $17/new name
- I think marketers struggle to measure content ROI for two reasons. One is because they might not think about measurement upfront and then fail to create the right structure/framework to measure results. Two, there is not alignment on what metrics matter. For example, if you have to show ROI from a white paper to a CMO, you should probably avoid vanity metrics like downloads, opens, likes, etc. – it is better to show the # of opportunities or pipeline that was created. It is very important to agree on what will be measured and have goals around the content piece. First you need to clearly understand and define the goal for the content. (ex: Is the content being used to build brand awareness or drive leads?) Establish goals and ROI estimates upfront – or you will not know if the results met the respective expectations. 2. Make sure you think about HOW you will measure results. Are you measuring reach, engagement, time on your website, likes, shares, or leads and revenue? 3. Make sure everyone agrees on the criteria. You can measure early stage metrics (ex: sharing) and more late stage like leads/revenue but if stakeholders are not on the same page on what the ROI metric is no one will be happy.