by Fronetics | Jul 6, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing
Businesses report these 3 content marketing challenges are the largest they face. Here’s how to track your progress in overcoming them.
Is content marketing working well for your business? If not, you are not alone. Though it is one of the most effective ways to grow your business, content marketing has been challenging B2B and B2C organizations since its inception.
You may think it should be simple: Write, post, get more customers. But content marketing is much more complex, demanding more time, thought, and careful strategy than churning out a few blog posts.
First and foremost, what you produce must engage readers. This is, however, one of the biggest content marketing challenges facing both B2B and B2C marketers.
In fact, the 2017 State of Inbound Report found that content creation is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of content marketing challenges that businesses face. Here are 3 marketing challenges and ways to track your progress in overcoming them.
3 content marketing challenges
1. Generating traffic and leads
Echoing their priorities, marketers today find generating traffic and leads to be their biggest challenge. In fact, 61% of those surveyed listed it as their number one challenge. ‘Content is king’ has become a marketing mantra, but how can you turn your content into actual leads that turn into sales?
Tying revenue directly to publishing and distributing content can be difficult. Thinking about social media content within the context of your entire sales funnel can make it easier to determine effectiveness. Content is typically used to attract leads, to encourage readers to subscribe to your blog, or to have prospects submit contact info to get higher-value content. Continued engagement nurtures leads and moves them further down the sales funnel.
Track this: The cost to get a lead. You can then determine the percentage of leads that move on to become qualified leads, the percentage of qualified leads that then become opportunities, and the percentage of opportunities that are ultimately won. At the end of the day, you’ll be able to calculate the revenue generated from leads that entered the funnel from your content marketing efforts.
2. Proving the ROI of marketing activities
Coming in at a close second, 43% of marketers felt that proving their ROI from content marketing activities was their biggest challenge.
Whether launching a product or a new social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: Not all metrics are created equal. Content marketing ROI is harder to confirm than checking a few quick numbers.
Lean-startup pioneer Eric Reis said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measuring your ROI will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
ROI can help you determine whether it was worth spending your resources in a particular way. This is extremely useful on platforms like blogs and social media, where things are constantly changing. Using ROI as a litmus test, you can keep experimenting and making sure you’re using these tools effectively.
Track this: Use tools like HubSpot, Hootsuite, and built-in analytics platforms like Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insight, and YouTube Analytics to track detailed information about engagement with your content.
3. Budget
Organizations that have a documented content marketing strategy are more likely to be successful than those that don’t. But setting aside the funds to develop and implement these strategies can be tricky.
The State of Inbound Report found that 30% of marketers struggle to secure a budget for their marketing efforts. Content marketing competes with other marketing campaigns (outbound, native, etc.) for funding. The Content Marketing Institute’s latest trends report states that, on average, 29% of B2B brands’ total marketing budget is spent on content marketing, leaving a majority of funding going toward other efforts.
Content marketing is here to stay. In fact, it’s at its best when it’s integrated with your other marketing efforts, becoming a part of your entire marketing strategy.
Track this: Content marketing serves every marketing channel. Experiment with overlapping marketing budgets to increase your efforts for whitepapers, sales collateral, social media posts, and to make sure your advertisements and visual messaging are in sync. Content serves every marketing channel, so you’re wasting time claiming you don’t have the budget.
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by Fronetics | Jun 7, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Social Media
Building brand awareness is one of the key benefits of content marketing, but it’s notoriously difficult to measure. Until now.
Content marketing is a long-term solution through which a business establishes a relationship with and earns the trust of target customers. It’s called building brand awareness. Drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business ultimately generates leads that turn into sales, after all, which is the end marketing objective.
Let’s be honest: This doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s often difficult to quantify (as opposed to a vanity metric, such as website visits). But that’s not a reason to throw in the towel. There are ways to measure the work that you’re putting into your content marketing program. And, more specifically, there are ways to measure brand awareness.
4 metrics that indicate you’re building brand awareness
1) Social media reach
The reach of your social content has a direct impact on your brand awareness. The larger the reach, the larger the potential audience.
Twitter originally had an internal tool that tracked how many times a tweet had been shared, but stopped supporting this data back in 2015. So where do you go to track your social media reach?
Sharedcount is a free online tool that allows you to track the number of times a piece of content has been shared on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. Sharedcount is an easy way to get basic information about your social reach, so you can spend less time tracking tweets and more time producing your content.
2) Brand mentions
There’s a great deal of value to be gained from monitoring discussions about your brand online. Tracking brand mentions can lead to honest feedback and objective insight from potential leads.
There are several options you can use to track brand mentions. We prefer the ease of Google Alerts, which allows you to easily set up a custom alert, or Hootsuite, where you can track brand mentions, as well as specific keywords and phrases, across all of your social media feeds.
3) Blog shares
By adding a share bar to your blog posts, you make it easy for readers to share your blog content on social networks, spreading awareness about your content and your brand through the amplifying effect of social media.
These share bars are easy to set up and even easier to monitor. By measuring your average number of shares per blog, you can track what content your users are drawn to and what pieces fall flat.
4) Search volume
One of the main sources of traffic for most websites is through simple searches. If people are searching for your company or products, that’s a pretty solid indication that they are aware of your brand.
Using online tools, such as Google Adwords or Moz, you can track the searches for your products, blogs, social media platforms, and any other variation that you find useful. These tools are free, easy to use, and perfect for determining if your company is popping up when customers are searching.
Content marketing takes time, but there are hints along the way that your efforts are working. Using these tools to measure brand awareness offers clues that customers are finding your company in their search efforts. If the needle is not moving in a positive direction, always adjust your strategy to until you find what works for your business.
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by Fronetics | May 31, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Social Media
Analyzing the right metrics is crucial to determining whether you are achieving content marketing ROI.
We all want to see the fruits of our labors. Whether launching a product or a new social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: Not all metrics are created equal. Content marketing ROI is harder to confirm than checking a few quick numbers.
A spike in homepage hits may be the result of your marketing efforts, or it may be because of ghost spam. (Or, both.) Regardless, more visits do not necessarily correlate to increased revenue — just more visits. Even so, 83% of B2B enterprise companies (over 1,000 employees) use web traffic as their main metric for measuring content marketing ROI.
The number of email subscribers is another common success metric. But, again, having 100,000 email subscribers means nothing if only 0.001% are opening them. You actually could be losing money in terms of resources allocated if the emails aren’t helping drive sales. That’s why it is crucial to focus on your company’s return on investment (ROI). You could waste hours reviewing a hundred different analytics that tell you nothing about how revenue was affected by a particular effort.
Know where to allocate resources
Lean-startup pioneer Eric Reis said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measure the things that will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
ROI can help you determine whether it was worth spending your resources in a particular way. This is extremely useful on platforms like blogs and social media, where things are constantly changing. Using ROI as a litmus test, you can keep experimenting and making sure you’re using these tools effectively.
According to our Social Media Use Report, 81% of respondents wanted a tracking and measuring tool to prove their ROI. Your resources are limited, so it’s crucial to evaluate your efforts with meaningful numbers that illustrate their affect on your bottom line.
So what are they best metrics to use? Here are three of our favorite tools.
3 tools for measuring content marketing ROI
1) Built-in Social Media Analytics Tools
Most social media platforms have their very own built-in tools that give you detailed information about engagement with your content. Even better, most of these tools are free. Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insight, and YouTube Analytics are just a few examples of tools you can use to measure exposure and engagement with your followers. This priceless information will help you gain a better understanding of your followers and the content they are drawn to.
2) Hootsuite
Hootsuite promotes smarter, data-driven social media marketing decisions backed by real-time analytics that allow you to spot trends as they develop and drill down for insights on how your social content is performing. It takes all your top social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn) and combines them into one application for full-scope results.
3) HubSpot
Measuring ROI through HubSpot is both accurate and convenient. HubSpot sends you weekly updates on your campaign performance and allows you to pull any reports of your own. Standard analysis includes: visits, leads, percentage changes, submissions, bounce rate, downloads, and much, much more. HubSpot Marketing Analytics can identify blog articles, landing pages, emails, and social media posts that perform well in terms of specific keywords.
Calculating ROI might take some time — both in the few extra minutes to do the math and the amount of time that needs to pass before all the data is available — but that number will be invaluable to you.
Let us help you get started. We’ve created a monthly marketing reporting template just for you. This template tracks your marketing metrics and generates graphs you can use in reporting and presentations. Click the button below to get the template (an Excel document) now.
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by Fronetics | Nov 5, 2015 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
We all want to see the fruits of our labors. Whether launching a product or a new social media campaign, we look for instantaneous numbers that will affirm we made the right choices. But here’s the problem: not all metrics are created equal.
So-called vanity metrics are measurements that have no bearing on your bottom line but can give you an inflated sense of success. Generally, they are easy to calculate but are influenced by too many factors—and are too vulnerable to random external events—to be reliable.
Website visits and number of subscribers are two classic examples. A spike in homepage hits may be the result of your marketing efforts, or it may be because of ghost spam. (Or, both.) Regardless, more visits do not necessarily correlate to increased revenue—just more visits. In the same vein, having 100,000 email subscribers means nothing if only 1% are opening them. You actually could be losing money in terms of resources allocated if the emails aren’t helping drive sales.
That’s why it is crucial to focus on return on investment instead of vanity metrics. You could waste hours reviewing a hundred different analytics that tell you nothing about how revenue was affected by a particular effort. Or, worse, you could use vanity metrics to justify decisions that don’t achieve their ROI.
As a simplified example: say you spend $100 on a banner ad for a new product on an industry conference website, and your analytics report that 100 people clicked through. This sounds like success! But don’t celebrate just yet. When you dig past the vanity metric, you find an extremely high bounce rate. That means most of those click-throughs left your site immediately, neither engaging with your brand nor moving any closer to becoming a customer. In fact, you find that only one click-through converts. Was it worth paying $100 for this one customer? Probably not.
But say you ran another $100 banner ad on an industry publication website, one that targets a younger audience than you think your product fits. Only 20 visitors clicked-through, which sounds less successful than the other ad. But when you follow those 20 click-throughs down the sales funnel, you see that 15 ended up purchasing $1500 worth of product. Already, the ad has paid for itself 15 times over. You’ve also learned that perhaps a younger audience is more suited to this product. The ROI proves the vanity metric was quite misleading in this case.
Lean-startup pioneer Eric Reis, who coined the term vanity metrics, said, “The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions.” In other words, measure the things that will tell you if an effort was profitable so you know where to put your time and money.
While vanity metrics tell you nothing about your bottom line, ROI can help you determine whether it was worth spending your resources in a particular way. This is extremely useful on platforms like blogs and social media, where things are constantly changing. Using ROI as a litmus test, you can keep experimenting and making sure you’re using these tools effectively. Tracking a vanity metric like number of followers, which is likely to build over time regardless, gives you no indication of which experiments were successful and which weren’t.
Your resources are limited, so it’s crucial to evaluate your efforts with meaningful numbers that illustrate their effect on your bottom line. Calculating ROI might take some time—both in the few extra minutes to do the math and the amount of time that needs to pass before all the data is available—but that number will be infinitely more valuable to you than any vanity metric on your Google Analytics report.
What metrics do you report to your team?
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When it comes to marketing we work with our clients to create and execute strategies that drive success and elevate their brand position within the industry. Unlike other firms, we align marketing programs with business objectives and, through a data driven approach, are able to deliver results with a targeted ROI. Our team is comprised of strategists, marketing professionals, writers, designers, and experts in social media. Together we leverage our experience to increase brand awareness, position our clients as thought leaders, drive meaningful engagement with prospects and customers, and help businesses grow. Learn more
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by Fronetics | Sep 9, 2015 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing
In the age of big data, everything in marketing is measureable – and that’s not necessarily a good thing. As Dimitri Maex of Ogilvy Consulting puts it, “marketers are drowning in numbers because they are focused on what they can measure rather on what they should measure.” Unfocused efforts to evaluate the success of your marketing activities can lead to a host of problems. Central to these problems, though, is the failure to measure and report activities in a way that clearly demonstrates the link between marketing and your company’s bottom line. Check out our infographic that details four marketing metrics guaranteed to resonate with your CEO (and our guide to the 6 marketing metics your boss really cares about).
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When it comes to marketing we work with our clients to create and execute strategies that drive success and elevate their brand position within the industry. Unlike other firms, we align marketing programs with business objectives and, through a data driven approach, are able to deliver results with a targeted ROI. Our team is comprised of strategists, marketing professionals, writers, designers, and experts in social media. Together we leverage our experience to increase brand awareness, position our clients as thought leaders, drive meaningful engagement with prospects and customers, and help businesses grow.
