Content Marketing - Tracking Success

Whether you’re creating a content marketing strategy for your own business or a client, the primary questions still remains - What’s the Return on Investment (ROI)? For all the efforts you’ve put in your content marketing strategy, the ROI needs to be positive.

What constitutes ROI varies from business to business. However, every successful content marketing strategy needs to answer at least one of the three crucial questions listed below:

• Has it driven sales for the business?
• Has it saved costs for the company?
• Has it helped in making customers lives easier, thus increasing retention?

To sum it up, a growth in sales, decrease in costs, and customer retention are the three key areas which determine the success of a content marketing strategy. Let’s look at each of these points in more detail:

Measuring and Tracking Sales

Measuring and tracking sales is the part which answers whether your business actually made any money. The results of your content marketing strategy must need to answer questions such as:

• Did you make any sales through your e-commerce section?
• How many visitors came though organic or inorganic search and bought your product or service?

You can measure all of this by looking at you sales metrics in your own CRM and Google analytics.

Measuring and Tracking Cost Savings

Cost savings is basically your actual profit: (Converted Leads – Total Cost per Lead). While calculating the total costs per lead, you need to factor in the money you spent paying employees or freelancers in creating the content for you. This also includes all the overheads such as the rent, insurance, utilities, design costs, hosting fees, subscriptions, and software costs.

Measuring and Tracking Customer Retention

By customer retention, we not only mean the new leads coming in but also the average life of the existing customers. Your goals must be to keep all customers longer and happier. You can measure this via your CRM to track what kinds of content are being consumed by your customers and measure whether that content has helped in retention and renewal of subscriptions.

Content Marketing - Challenges

Developing the perfect content marketing strategy for your business is not easy. You have to accurately identify your target customers and understand their problems. You have to define your media channels and build editorial style guides. You have to make sure that your story will resonate with your audience without misleading them.

However, even after you’ve managed to bring all the pieces of your strategy together, three crucial challenges still remain −

• Creating engaging content
• Creating enough content
• Finding the budget to create the content

Let’s look at some of the ways in which you can solve these problems:

Research, Research, and Research

The first rule of creating engaging content that’s right for your audience is by way of research.

• Don’t assume that you know exactly what kind of content your customers will like or need.
• Do some market research to find out what your competitors are doing.
• Gather feedback from your customers.
• Look at data and analytics of your website’s traffic.
• Test your webpages and email campaigns.

The bottom line is to not regard yourself as an expert but a learner of the art of content marketing.

Resist Content Overkill

As in life, where you will not always make the correct decisions; not every content piece you create will do well either. Your webpages might see fantastic traffic but your blog might not be getting as many subscribers as you hoped it would.

• Don’t panic and start spamming your blog with one article after another.
• Instead, spend time on producing quality content that is a clear reflection of your brand message and story.

The trick is not to produce a ton of random content but well-researched content that will offer lasting value to your customers.

Define Your Content Budget

Once you understand what kinds of content you will create, find out how much of it is one-time content such as a webpage and how much of it is ongoing content such as blog articles.

This will give you a fair idea of how much you need to spend on creating content. Then you can decide whether you want to build an in-house content team or want to rope in freelancers. However, make sure you hire the right persons. For instance, someone with a journalistic background will be able to write you the best blogposts, while a copywriter will pen down the perfect call to action content for your webpages.

Content Marketing - Basic Tools

Content Marketing tools come in different shapes and sizes. What will work for you is totally dependent on your business requirements and the scope of your content marketing strategy. The tools listed below cover the three central aspects of content creation, management, and optimization.

Content Creation and Publishing Tools

These tools will help you create a website from scratch, build your blog, and send emails to your subscribers and publish almost any kind of content. Known as content management tools, these range from the simple and free ones such as Wordpress and Drupal to the paid ones such as Sitecore and Tridion.

Conversion and Data Capture Tools

What these tools do is allow you to build online registration forms and surveys for your key landing pages. They capture data of customers visiting these landing pages, which can be integrated with sales tools like Salesforce.com. Examples include Wufoo, Equola, Manticore, etc.

Content Optimization Tools

These are tools that help you to deliver specific content to targeted customers. Once users come to your website and identify themselves, these tools push content which are relevant to these users.

For instance, let’s say you own a travel website and a user comes and identifies himself as a tourist looking for cars in the city, now these tools will filter your content and provide the user only the relevant information, while hiding the irrelevant ones. Examples of such tools include Google Website Optimizer, Adobe Omniture, Autonomy Optimost, etc.

Social Media Management and Listening Tools

These tools are excellent for managing and tracking the content for your social channels such as Facebook ad Twitter. One of the most frequently used tools is Hootsuite, which allows you to centrally schedule your social media posts. For Twitter, you can use Tweetdeck and for further analysis, you can grab tools like Radian6 and Sysomos.

Content Marketing - Style Guide

A content marketing style guide is a document which standardizes your content creation guidelines. From the colors of your brand, the key phrases you use for call to action buttons to the spelling and punctuation usages, everything is documented and standardized by a style guide.

A style guide is a necessary document for the success of your content marketing strategy as well as to maintain quality of the content across your website. A style guide can list step-by-step rules for:

• A designer’s checklist - This will remind designers of your brand colors, correct image properties and copyright issues, icon selection, etc.
• A writer’s checklist - This will remind writers of the use of voice, spelling, punctuation, unique words, and phrases approved by the company. It will also advise writes on legal fact checking and proofreading methods.

Content Marketing - Editorial Calendar

Content marketing is a long-term strategy and an editorial calendar helps you plan your strategy in an organized fashion. The calendar will contain details such as −

• List of the kinds of content you have or need to create, including the dates when they will be created and published
• The names of the content editors/producers and other stakeholders who are responsible for the project
• The media channel that you will use to market your content
• Metadata such as your primary target audience, SEO keywords, call to action, etc.

How to Build an Editorial Calendar

While you can use a simple tool such as an Excel or Google sheet to create an editorial calendar, you can also use web-based software offered by companies such as HubSpot, Skyword, etc.

Content Marketing - Media Channels

By media channels, we mean the platform you decide to use in order to market your content. This is an important step of your overall content marketing strategy because the channel also determines what content you must create. For instance, if the channel is a blog, then the content you can create are feature stories, product announcements, etc. Similarly, if it’s your website’s Facebook Page, then the content can be images, status messages, weblinks, etc.

There are three major strategies that you must consider while defining your media channels:

Analysis of Your Situation

The first thing to do is to understand what existing channels do you have and which new ones you need or want.

• Do you already have a Facebook Page for your website?
• Do you need to develop a separate blog?
• Will it help in telling your story effectively to your customers?

The information about your customers and the story you want to tell are both crucial in deciding what media channels you want. It also depends on your budget and bandwidth.

Your Channel Objectives

Now that you have a fair idea of your situation, you need to map the objectives of your channels. For instance, depending on the story you want to tell and your content marketing goals, you might decide that a blog would be the best channel. So your channel’s primary objective would be to get more subscribers to your blog, which will generate leads for your sales.

Content Plan for Your Channel

This is the part where you bring together your channel objectives and your content plan. Taking the above example, the primary objective of your blog is to get more subscribers, which brings in more leads. To achieve this, you might decide to write a couple of articles and club them together as an ebook, which you can then provide for free to new subscribers. However, before you decide the right content for your channel, you also need to consider the different personas of your customers.

Content Marketing - Content Creation

Marketing gurus and pundits have often repeated the line that it’s the company that tells a better story wins and not the company which is bigger in size. This truism is even more relevant today with the growth of new forms of online media, which have empowered consumers like never before.

However, the question still remains largely unanswered. How do you tell a better story? Do you create a 10x10 feet poster, listing out the features of your product, and stick it on every billboard in town or do you create a swanky television advertisement? Which is the option that will give you more business and more revenue? Well, to be honest, building a good story and creating great content requires much more than that. It requires you to answer the 3Ws: who, what, and why.

To create a great story around your business, you need to clearly answer the following:

Why are You Creating the Content?

Defining your content goals is the first step.

• Why do you want to create a specific type of content?
• What is it that you want to accomplish?
• Does the content strategy match your overall business goals?

These are important questions that need to be answered.

Who are Your Customers?

It goes without saying that identifying your customers is the most important step of content marketing. You can refer to Part 2 of this tutorial to learn how to identify your customers. The bottom line is to list out the problems and preferences of your audience and figure out what kinds of content will they like best. Also, you need to answer the important question - what is the unique thing that you have to offer to you customers?

What do You Want Your Content to Achieve?

You must ask yourself - how will my content help my customers? Will it help them to arrange a travel, buy a house, or train for an examination? You need to clearly define and understand how your content will affect the lives of your customers?

Content Marketing - Target Customer

Identifying your target audience is the easy part. What is more challenging for a business is to understand the pain points of its customers. Once you grasp the problems of your consumers and understand their requirements, you would be able to come up with perfect solutions to cater to those particular requirements.

When you want to create a content marketing strategy, finding out about your audiences and their needs is the most important task. But how do you make sure that you have penned down the real problems of your customers and not just imagined them? You can do this by following the four steps mentioned below:

List Your Primary Customers

To accurately list your primary customers, give them specific names and identities. For instance, if you run a travel company, your audiences might fall under: experienced travelers, occasional travelers, tourists visiting a city, local residents touring the city, etc.

Collect Information about Your Customers

You can collect information about your major customers in a number of ways such as:

• Conduct a survey of customers visiting your site
• Ask your customer service for the questions customers are asking
• Read the emails and feedback of customers on your Contact or Help page

Identify the Characteristics of Your Primary Customers

Identifying the characteristics of your primary customers means learning about your customers’ experiences. For example, experienced travelers might know about airport codes and e-tickets but occasional travelers might not. Such well-rounded information helps you to build content that caters to each and every customer’s needs.

Create Personas

The best way to visualize and understand a customer‘s needs is to create personas. While creating personas, give specific details to a customer, for instance:

• Assign a name - John
• Age - 45 years old
• Profession - Senior IT manager
• Web tasks - Reads technology news daily, books travel tickets, buys things on weekends, etc.

Content Marketing - Overview

Content marketing is known by many names such as inbound marketing, corporate journalism, branded media, native advertising, and customer publishing to name a few. However, the basic idea behind the strategy remains the same, i.e., to create and distribute content that engages and attracts a targeted audience, while encouraging them to take action which is profitable to a business.

What is the Use of Content Marketing?

The growth of the World Wide Web, social networks, and mobile technologies has changed the relationship between consumers and businesses. Average consumers today don’t buy a product just by passively watching its advertisement on a billboard. They research on Google to compare similar products, read the product’s review online by experts, and even ask their friends on social networks, before spending their money.

As a result, businesses need to rethink their traditional marketing strategies and channels if they want to earn the trust of their customers and influence their buying decisions. This is where content marketing plays an important role. It helps businesses to attract potential consumers’ attention towards their products by highlighting and promoting their key features.

Content Marketing Strategy

Before you create a content marketing strategy for your business, you need to define the goals first. What are you trying to achieve with your content? Is it more subscribers to your blog? Or is it traffic acquisition? Or maybe, you want certain sales pages of your website to convert? Whatever they are, you need to clearly list the goals before you even begin laying down the strategy.

That being said, there are certain overarching elements to a content marketing strategy which are the same, regardless of your goals. They are listed in brief below, as we will look into them in detail later in this tutorial:

• Understanding your customers
• Building your brand message or story
• Defining the content you want to create
• Measuring the success of your content marketing efforts

A/B Testing – SEO

SEO is a method to display your website at the top of the page, when a search is performed for those relevant items. It includes the information that your website offers to the visitors and why webpage content is relevant to come at the top in a search result. Many potential customers feel that A/B Testing or Multivariate Testing will have an effect on their search engine rankings.

There are four ways that ensure you to run A/B Tests without worrying about losing the potential SEO Value.

Don’t Cloak

Cloaking is called when you show one version of your webpage to Googlebot agent and other version to your website visitors. Google says that you shouldn’t cloak and is very strict with this. It can even lead to your website being excluded from the search results or demoted in SEO ranking. You have to ensure that you don’t divide your visitors among the different versions of your A/B Test based on a user agent. Google doesn’t care if their bot sees one version or another, it just cares that its bot has the same user experience as that of a random visitor.

Use ‘rel=canonical’

When you have A/B Tests with multiple URL’s, you can add ‘rel=canonical’ to the webpage to indicate to Google, which URL you want to index. Google suggests to use canonical element and it’s a noindex tag as it is more in line with its intention. You are only indicating about which content is original. In this way Google can group and index pages accordingly.

Note − If it is not possible to use canonical, then you have to ensure that there is a noindex tag in HTML or HTTP Header, if not you should ensure it at least has a robots.txt.

Use 302 redirects and not 301’s

Google recommends to use the temporary direction method − a 302 over the permanent 301 redirect. As in any A/B Test, it is not a permanent relocation, but just a temporary one. It is always advisable to use 302 redirect as it is a notice of a temporary redirect. So if you’re using a redirect for A/B Testing, make sure you use a 302 header.

Most important point to consider for SEO is that you have to make it clear to search engines that they shouldn’t remove your original URL from their index and just put it temporarily on the hold. When the spiders come back for their next indexation, they will check again, if the redirect is still applicable, and if not, the old URL will be restored again.

Don’t run experiments for a longer period of time

Please note that when your A/B Test is completed, you should remove the variations as soon as possible and make changes to your webpage and start using the winning conversion. You have to ensure that you remove all the elements of the tests − like alternative URLs and test scripts.

If you run the test for a longer period, Google takes this as a way to fool search engines. This can happen when you are showing a test variant to a large number of visitors for a longer period of time.

A/B Testing – Multivariate

Like A/B Testing, Multivariate Testing is based on the same mechanism, but it compares higher number of variables, and provides more information about how these variables behave. In A/B Testing, you split the traffic of a page between different versions of the design. Multivariate Testing is used to measure the effectiveness of each design.

Example

Let us say there is a webpage that has received enough traffic to run the test. Now the data from each variation is compared to check the most successful variation, but it also includes the elements, which have the maximum positive or negative impact on a visitor's interaction.

Advantages of using Multivariate

Multivariate Testing is an effective tool to help you target as well as redesign the elements of your page and show the areas that will have the most impact. Multivariate method is useful for creating landing page campaigns.

Example

Data about the impact of a certain element's design can be applied to future campaigns, even if the context of the element has changed.

Limitations

Limitations of Multivariate testing is the traffic needed to complete the test. As all the experiments are fully factorial, too many changing elements at once can quickly add up to a very large number of possible combinations that must be tested. Even a site with fairly high traffic might have trouble completing a test with more than 25 combinations in a feasible amount of time.

Difference between Multivariate and A/B Testing

A/B Testing also known as Split Testing is a method of website optimization, where you compare the conversion rates of two versions of a page namely, A and B. All visitors are divided into one version or the other. Once the visitors visit either of these versions (A or B), they click on various buttons or even sign-up for the newsletter. This allows you to determine which version of the page is more effective.

A/B Testing – Tools

There are various tools that can be used to generate hypothesis and to run the variations, these include −

• Visual Website optimizer (VWO)
• Google Content Experiments
• Optimizely

All these tools are capable to run A/B Tests and to find the winner, but to perform post analysis these tools should be integrated with Google Analytics.

A/B Testing – Google Analytics

Google Analytics has two options for analyzing the data −

• Universal Analytics
• Classic Google Analytics

New Universal Analytics feature allow you to use 20 concurrent A/B Tests sending data to Google Analytics, however the Classic version allows only up to five.

Integrating Optimizely with Google Universal Analytics

To integrate Optimizely in to Universal Google Analytics, first select the ON button on its side panel. Then you must have an available Custom to populate with Optimizely experiment data. Then the tracking code must be placed at the bottom of the <head> section of your pages. Google Analytics integration will not function properly unless the Optimizely snippet is above this Analytics snippet.

Configuration Steps

Optimizely uses Universal Google Analytics' "Custom Dimensions" to tag your visitors with the experiments and variations to which they've been added. Configuring Optimizely to begin sending this information to Universal Analytics requires four steps −

Step 1

Add the following JavaScript code to your site wherever the Universal Analytics code exists after the ga('create'...) function fires and before the Universal Analytics ga('send','pageview') function fires and the tracking call is made (see details in the next section) −

// Optimizely Universal Analytics Integration
window.optimizely = window.optimizely || [];
window.optimizely.push("activateUniversalAnalytics");

Step 2

In the Optimizely Editor, go to Options → Integrations then click on the Universal Analytics checkbox to enable the integration.

Step 3

Select the custom dimension you would like Optimizely to use. You have to ensure that the Custom Dimension should not be in use already by any other part of your site, or by another currently-running Optimizely experiment.

Step 4

Select a Custom Tracker if you are using a custom event tracker other than the default. This will change Optimizely's integration call to use the custom tracker rather than the default.

Example

Let us say your website is using the following call −

ga('tracker3.send', 'pageview');

In this case you will be entering tracker3 in specifying a custom tracker field, and Optimizely would integrate with tracker3 instead of the default tracker.

Creating a Custom Report using Google Analytics

First step is to log into your Universal Analytics account and click the Customization tab at the top. You should see a Custom Reports list.

Next is to set up a Custom Report for each experiment that you have integrated Universal Analytics with.

• Click on the New Custom Report → Enter the report title and add the metric groups you wish to view in the report.
• To filter this report for only your Optimizely experiment, choose the Custom Dimension you set up previously as one of the Dimension Drilldowns.
• Add this dimension in the Filters section and use a Regex match on the experiment ID for the experiment you want to filter.
• Click on Save.

A/B Testing – Analyze Results

Once the experiment is completed, next step is to analyze the results. A/B Testing tool will present the data from the experiment and will tell you the difference between how the different variations on a web page performs, and also if there is a significant difference between variations, using the help of mathematical methods and statistics.

Example

If the images on a web page has reduced the bounce rate, you can decide whether it has a good conversion or not, once you upload more images on a web page. If you see no change in the bounce rate because of this, go back to the previous step and create a new hypothesis/variation to perform a new test.

Tools like VWO and Optimizely are used to run tests, but Google Analytics is best suited to run post-test analysis. This analysis is used to decide the way going forward. A/B Testing tools tell about the outcome of a test result, but there is a need to perform post analysis as well. To do post analysis you need to integrate each test with Google Analytics.

Both VWO and Optimizely provides built-in Google Analytics integration capability. The data for each test from both these tools should be sent to Google Analytics. By doing this, it enhances your analysis capabilities and ensures testing data. There is a possibility that your testing tool might be recording the data incorrectly, and if you have no other source for your test data, you can never be sure whether to trust it or not.

A/B Testing – Run Experiment

It involves presenting all variations of your website or an application to the visitors and their actions are monitored for each variation. Visitor interaction for each variation is measured and compared to determine how this variation performs.

As discussed in the previous chapter, there are various tools that can be used to generate hypothesis and to run the variations −

• Visual Website optimizer (VWO)
• Google Content Experiments
• Optimizely

Visual Website Optimizer

There are various A/B Testing tools that allows marketing professionals to create multiple variations of their web pages by using a point-and-click editor. It doesn’t require any HTML knowledge and you can check which version produces the maximum conversion rate or sales.

Executing VWO split testing software is very simple as you just need to copy paste the code snippet in your website and you can easily make it available to visitors. Visual Website Optimizer also provides an option of multivariate testing and contains other number of tools to perform behavioral targeting, heat maps, usability testing, etc.

There are multiple features in VWO that ensures all your conversion rate optimization activities are covered by this tool. Many enterprises and small scale online stores are using A/B Testing VWO software for landing page optimization and for increasing their website sales and improving conversion rates as well.

Company also provides a 30 days’ trial that can be downloaded free from − https://vwo.com/.

Some of the key features of VWO are as follows −

• Testing and Experimentation
• Visual Editor
• Analysis and Reporting
• Heat maps and Click maps
• Platforms and Integrations

How it works?

Optimizely running on your webpage collects data of site visitors, conversion rate and runs them on Stats Engine to determine, which variation is a winner and which one is a loser. Once these stats are compared with target goals and set metrics, it will help you to make decisions about the variation to be applied on the website.

Google Content Experiments

It allows you to create up to five variations of a web page and then load all these pages to Google Analytics to perform A/B Testing.

To start with Google Analytics, you need to have a Google Analytics account and a tracking code to be installed on your website. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up using the following tool − http://www.google.com/analytics/

Adding tracking code directly to a website

To complete this process, you must have access to your website source code, you should also be comfortable editing HTML (or have a webmaster/developer, who can help you with this), also you should have a Google Analytics account and property already set up.

To set up tracking code into your webpage

• Find the tracking code snippet and sign in to your Google Analytics account, and select the Admin tab at the top.
• Go to the ACCOUNT and PROPERTY tab, select the property you’re working with. Click on Tracking Info → Tracking Code. Image of where you find your tracking code in your Analytics account → Click to expand this image and see where these options appear in the interface.
• Find your tracking code snippet. It's in a box with several lines of JavaScript in it. Everything in this box is your tracking code snippet. It starts with <script> and ends with </script>.
• The tracking code contains a unique ID that corresponds to each Google Analytics property. Don’t mix up tracking code snippets from different properties, and don’t reuse the same tracking code snippet on multiple domains.
• Copy the snippet and paste into every web page you want to track. Paste it immediately before the closing </head> tag.
• If you use templates to dynamically generate pages for your site, you can paste the tracking code snippet into its own file, then include it in your page header.

Verify if the tracking code is working

You can verify if the tracking code is working, check real time reports, you can also monitor user activity as it happens. If you see data in these reports, it means that your tracking code is currently collecting the data.

Content Experiments

Content Experiments is one of the quickest method to test web pages - landing pages, homepage, category pages and it requires fewer code implementations. It can be used to create A/B Tests inside Google Analytics.

Some of the most common features of Content Experiments are −

• You need to use original page script to run tests, the standard Google Analytics tracking code will be used to measure goals and variations.
• Target goals that are defined on Google Analytics can be used as the experiment goal, including AdSense revenue.
• The Google Analytics segment builder can be used to segment results based on any segmentation criteria.
• It allows you to set tests that automatically expires after 3 months to prevent leaving tests running, if they are unlikely to have a statistically significant winner.

How to use Content Experiments to create A/B Tests?

Go to the Behavior section and click on the Experiments link. It will also show you a table with all the existing experiments. Click on the “Create experiment” option at the top of this table.

Enter → Name of the experiment, objective of the experiment, percentage of site traffic to take part, any mail notification for important changes, for distributing the traffic to all variations, set up time that experiment will run and also threshold values.

You can add URLs of original page and all the variations that you want to create and click on the next button. Select the implementation method and click on the next button → Click on validation (If you have one code implemented it will validate. If there is no code, it will show an error message) → Start Experiment.

Once this experiment is run, you will see the following options −

• Conversion Rate
• Stop Experiment
• Re-validate
• Disable Variation
• Segmentation − It allows you to see how each variation has performed for each segment of visitors on your webpage.