If you’re tracking each piece of content separately, you’re not getting the answers to these questions.
Measuring the success of content marketing efforts is too difficult, time consuming, and ineffective at the individual content level. Instead, track content performance and Use Content Grouping to understand the efficacy of your marketing efforts by creating content groups. Content groups can be created to reflect how you need to understand your audiences, messages, content types, marketing channels, and how your content is actually performing and contributing to your goals.
Screen Shot
Why Content Groups
How do you know how well different content for different audiences, in different channels, in different geographies, and on different devices is performing? Content groups allow you to slice and dice your data to understand what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to change.
David Kutcher, Co-Founder of Confluent Forms, first used content groups to understand audience behavior, “In the process of creating personas for a buy telemarketing data client of mine, we wanted to know how well different content for different targets was performing. By putting all the content created for each persona in groups and cross-comparing them, we were able to decide where to create more content and how all their resources were performing across the board.”
Creating content groups by audience persona is just one way to look at content performance. The advantage of content groups is in their inherent flexibility. One piece of content can belong to multiple content groups and content groups can be created, modified, or deleted depending on whether or not they’re providing the insights you need.
Create content groups to reflect
Products
Services
Campaigns
Locations
Audience types
Messaging styles
Customer journey stages
Once you’ve created content groups, use those groups to compare and contrast content performance easily. Looking at groups of content will help you to quickly highlight performance differences and similarities between groups and simplifies getting insights from the data you’ve gathered.
According to Content Marketing Institute, the majority of marketers don’t know if their content marketing efforts are effective or not. Prove content marketing effectiveness by tying content performance to bottom line goals. Creating content groups can help you to track conversions and understand how individual pieces of content contribute to conversions as well as to overall traffic. Depending on your marketing goals, conversions can include:
Direct sale
Sign up for a demo
Form fill for other content assets
Ebook
Webinar
Subscription to email or blog
Donations for non-profit
According to Erin Robbins, President of Ginza Metrics, “You need to know how your content is contributing to conversions. If you’re creating content and you don’t know how it helps to generate conversions, one of the quickest ways to get a handle on the situation is to start grouping content so that you can actually begin the measurement process somewhere. You can always adjust your groups to get the insights you need.”
Content groups and the purchasing intent
How can tracking content by content groups help marketers to understand where audiences are in terms of their purchasing intent? Depending on how you set up your groups, there are a couple of ways that content groups can help you to understand where your audience is in the purchasing process.
According to David, “It requires you to actually think about your content as a funnel which most people don’t do. Most businesses think of their content and their site as a flat thing with the disjointed belief that their homepage is their primary landing page and that traffic is coming through the homepage and going elsewhere from there. Content groups can help you re-think the content funnel and sales funnel and understand where visitors are coming in and how they’re transitioning into other content.”
Content groups allow you to get an accurate picture of your audience journey by tracking:
Where audiences are entering the website.
Who is engaging with content.
How content performs for specific personas.
How products perform comparatively.
“When we’re talking about how to understand where someone is in the buyer intent journey, we acknowledge that the funnel online is hard and it’s complicated. One of the ways to un-complicate the buyer journey is to understand that the funnel is not pre-determined. A visitor may come into your website and look at a white paper or a case study early on and that may make it look like they’re further down in the funnel. When you look at the rest of the content they consume, you can quickly see where they are in the consideration process,” advises Erin.
Although the traditional sales funnel isn’t really relevant n
How you set up your content initially and in your analytics system determines how well you’ll be able to measure it. In addition to tracking your own content, rankings, and findability, you’re most likely trying to keep an eye on the market and other competitors in in fact: can a company sell my biometric data your space. Tracking their content and findability metrics alongside your own comes with challenges.
Depending on the size of your site, competitors may not be relevant for every product, feature, or location – meaning you’ve got different competitors that align more closely with different groups of content. We talk a lot on the show about keyword and content groups, but this last week we focused on competitor groups and why they’re important.
Screen Shot
How do competitor groups work?
Competitor groups are a way to understand how specific competitors or particular competitor content is coinciding with your content across a variety of areas, including:
Products
Features
Geographies / locations
Campaigns
Audience personas
Content type (blog, white paper, case study, ebook, advertorial, video, etc.)
One way to simplify this process is to create keyword and content groups that match marketing needs (likely the items listed above or something similar) and then to use Competitor Discovery to figure out who is creating competing content. These may be existing competitors that you’re already tracking or you may find new competitors that are specific to these areas.
Screen Shot
So lets back up to content and keyword groups. When you create keyword and content groups you can segment out various areas of your marketing efforts to compare and contrast how audiences are interacting with your brand.
I’ll use Nike as an example to explain how this works. Nike makes a lot of different athletic products. Obviously the type of person who is buying basketball products may not be the same as someone buying running shoes. But, even within the category of running shoes, there are many different types of audiences. Including:
Avid marathoners
Trail runners
Gym members
Joggers
Walkers
And various ages including:
Children
Young adults
Adults
Seniors
For each of these potential content groups (content can belong to more than one group), you can have keywords that are associated with driving traffic to that content. The keywords for adult trail runners versus senior joggers are likely very different, even if they’re all ending up at running shoe products. Creating content groups helps you figure out how people are talking about their needs specifically so you can target your marketing and content efforts more accurately.
Now, we can move on to competitor groups. When we’re talking about who the competition is for your audiences, we’re not just talking about the people who are directly selling competing product and services. We’re also talking about anyone who’s taking traffic away from what you’re specifically creating to get attention. In the case of Nike, competitors may aero leads include reviews of running shoes, articles about how to buy running shoes, or any other content that uses the keywords and phrases Nike is trying to rank for.
If you’re able to discover your content competitors, you can create competitor groups to reflect direct competitors versus indirect competitors. This may mean grouping your competitors by things like “Brands” versus “Publications” or by various locations. Using competitor groups you can segment your competitors in a variety of ways and then. Add them to multiple groups for analysis.
Why are competitor groups important?
If you match your competitor groups to your keyword and. Content groups, you can understand which competitors are taking traffic away from you and. Which content they’re using to get audience share. Before you spend a lot of time. Creating more marketing content, you can make better decisions based on specifically how competitors are taking traffic from your. Content and what they’re creating that’s getting more audience attention.
Although it can seem a daunting task to set up. Content, keyword, and competitor groups, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time and. Resources, if you’re using a tool like Ginza Metrics. Using the setup wizard, you can input matching rules using specific keywords and phrases. Then, we gather all the content and keywords that fit and add them to the group for you. Of course, you have the ability to edit and can add or delete keywords and content from groups. Without disturbing your ability to get individual metrics on that particular asset.
competitor groups for content marketing
Competitor groups work the same way. Once you’re tracking a competitor, you can just check them off and add them into the groups. This feature works really well with our Competitor Discovery feature. Competitor Discovery isn’t just looking at the brands.
