Content marketing has become an umbrella term to describe all of the marketing formats used to create and share information in order to attract, acquire and engage current and potential customers for the express purpose of driving profitable customer action. More and more organizations are relying on content marketing to catch customer attention and deepen engagement. Companies who excel at content marketing “put their audience’s informational needs ahead of their company’s sales/promotional message.”

An eMarketer report outlined four factors that help brands generate great content marketing:

1. Create value
2. Tell a story
3. Choose the right channel
4. Build traffic

Quantify the Value of Your Content

Compelling content is critical, but creating it is just the first step. You must be able to quantify the value and impact of your content otherwise it is content for the sake of content. Much of the content being created today resides on external sites,  making measurement challenging.

An Outbrain survey found that link referrals are one of the primary measures organizations use to measure online content. This is because in an environment where people so bombarded by content, taking the time to forward it indicates engagement. For some marketers, consumption is a good enough metric, as measured by views or downloads.  Other marketers are exploring sentiment – both positive and negative mentions – as a metric.

Reach and engagement are two useful output measures that provide insights into the value of your content.  They can be a part of your data chain between the implementation of your content tactics and the customer-centric business outcomes desired by your organization.

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Let’s briefly examine each.

Reach provides a measure of how many people with whom you potentially interacted.  To measure content reach you want to include both the total number of people who could potentially see your message through your list and forwards, as well as any shares/likes/retweets of your content from your fans or followers. This equation illustrates the above metric:

Content reach = (sum of your list and forwards) + (sum of shares/likes/retweets) X reach of each sharer).

Engagement attempts to measure the involvement of your target audience with your content. In addition to shares, involvement includes replies such as public comments to an article or to a tweet. This equation provides a way to calculate engagement of content:

Content engagement = Shares + Replies/content reach.

Creating content and these measures can only take you so far when it comes to proving the results of your Marketing efforts. The key is to link these to your Marketing objectives associated with a corresponding outcome. This is the basis for the creation of our patented Accelance® Blueprint and Outcome-Based Mapping Methodology and Application.

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