STEP 3: Analyze your data

Scoring performance against objectives

Making sense of your data

Data is a fickle friend. Establish methodologies for applying your data in the most constructive way to see real value from it.

The data-driven content marketer's holy grail is a single tool or dashboard that presents data on the performance and results of the entire content ecosystem of their businesses.

One piece of content might do terribly on social but pull in tons of organic traffic. Only five people might have read one report, but they read it for 30mins, interacted with 4 features and happen to be senior decision-makers.

The integrated stack

CRMs and forward-thinking tools are working on presenting the bigger picture through integrations, but there is still a way to go when it comes to connecting the entire Martech stack.

Integrate what you can, but expect, for the time being, to have to combine data from different sources manually to get the fullest picture of how your content strategy is performing.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything

Ronald Coase, British economist

Brace yourself

The most important thing to keep in mind when analyzing data is to be honest with yourself and your colleagues. If you've only just started measuring content performance, you may be in for a fright when the results come in.

Measuring results –even shocking ones– is your first step towards building a content machine that genuinely delivers results for your business. Don't try to twist the data into saying what you want it to say

Content scorecards

One way to evaluate your data against objectives and get a clear view of how each piece is performing is to create objective-specific scorecards. Essentially, this means defining the proportional value of different types of metrics.

For instance, you could decide that one link to your content piece from an established media source is worth 1000 impressions on LinkedIn. You can then calculate the combined 'score' to achieve a single data point for comparison with other pieces.

Awareness

If you're looking to drive awareness of your brand through content, you'll need to combine awareness metrics like the below to get the whole picture of how well this is being accomplished:

New visitors/readers/viewers
Media coverage and links
Content reach on social
Event audiences

Engagement

Understand how well your content is contributing to people's trust and consideration of the brand by looking at how each piece is doing when it comes to things like:

How many repeat visitors you have
How long they spend with your content
Whether they actively share your content
Whether they decide to sign up to your newsletter after reading or watching something
Whether they get in touch with your brand directly - on any channel - after seeing a piece of content
How often they read your newsletter

Conversion

The role online touchpoints play in a conversion varies by industry but is significant in all of them.

To track and demonstrate which pieces of content have been part of a customer's journey, you need to leverage CRM cookies across as much of your content as possible.

Your CRM will then keep track of the customer's touchpoints and show which content pieces have been most influential in the building of interest, trust, and persuasion.

Of course, depending on the nature of your business, you may be able to understand the role of a content piece without this technology setup. For instance, you may have created a tailored report for an audience subset that is used by a salesperson to further conversations with a prospect.

To keep track of these use cases, you need open channels between your team and the people on the front line with prospects. You can then document anecdotal performance alongside the analytical, adding further nuance to your performance insight.