Activity metrics killed the future of content marketing
Ok, we're being a little dramatic her, but seriously...are we?
Hello content friends!
This week’s op-ed is by Shannon Curran, brand and marketing consultant with a long and impressive resume in content, including MadKudu, OpenView and Babson.
After listening to You’re Killing ROI with your Marketing Attribution, Shannon not only challenges our perspectives, she also challenges legacy assumptions about marketing metrics, SEO, influencers and brand strategy.
The disadvantages of old school marketing metrics
Content marketing gets a really bad reputation, because for so many years, content marketing teams got really big and very far away from revenue. I've been noticing this as I've been hiring content marketers over the last two years-ish in the startup space: content marketers have been so far removed from business impact because they’ve been focused on activity metrics. How many times can we publish? How much stuff can we get out? And they typically were on teams that didn't even have access to Salesforce or didn't understand how their activities impacted revenue.
This is kind of what you were saying, Devin: it was okay to focus on activity back when there was so much money, but now it is getting impossible to sit in a job like that, because companies now expect content to tie directly to revenue.
I'm finding that a lot of those content marketers weren't served well by the companies that they worked for - and a lot of them came up in those companies - because they were brought up on activities, and now they're coming into interviews where they can't prove that they even understand the business. They literally don't understand how the business works.
So I think that a lot of content marketing got very tone deaf, because it was created by folks who weren’t taught and thus didn’t understand how content impacted the business.
The new nurture
A lot of the nurturing that used to be in content marketing is now considered brand and community. Sure, if you talk about brand, there will be a content portion and the same thing with community. But really brand and community are bigger than content. They are large portions of the way that you reach your audience: your brand, your reputation and then through the community that you're able to build.
I know that for Margaret, brand and community are part of a flywheel, so I think content marketing has almost disappeared and it's gone into these two larger buckets focused on the way that you interact with your potential customers and the market that they're in. Content is no longer a standalone department - it now sits underneath all marketing programs.
When we think about what content marketing used to mean, I think of it more as brand and affinity, as Margaret talked about, as well as reputation. Like how do we build an excellent reputation for our business that people trust us?
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Going to the mattresses on SEO
This is something I think Margaret and I have disagreed on in the past: SEO as a distribution channel.
SEO certainly is a way to distribute content. It is a vehicle in which people receive the content through search. But SEO can also educate your strategy. If you're looking at which keywords have demand and what are people searching for, especially when you're in an early stage startup, that can give you information about what people are interested in. It's not just optimizing for SEO to be able to distribute that content.
(Side note: I do think paid is actually a better way to get more information quicker for many startups, because SEO is a long -term play.)
The great influencer debate
There’s a lot more talk now about internal teams as influencers and the challenges of tracking the impact of this channel.
I do think that this channel is already getting slightly co-opted by paid as some of the larger internal influencers get paid by brands. Really, we are in influencer marketing 1.0 - the first tummy tea Kardashian payment - because most companies don’t really know how to execute influencer strategy. They know that influencers are important, because people listen to people, and they buy from their peers and people they trust. But many companies still aren’t sure how to make paid sponsorships work. So, I think influencer strategy is going to see a lot of change over the next year+, which is good, because right now I don't think it's as effective as it could be.
Brand doesn’t have to be at odds with metrics
I do agree in theory that there are many effective marketing tactics that cannot be measured. At the same time, I think it's critical for budget owners to be able to quantify the impact of the money they spend. Especially at a company that, for example, is looking to raise another round or that might be running out of money. Maybe they raised when money was cheap and it's not anymore. And they’re trying to determine the impact of every dollar they spend.
I understand Margaret's opinion: if you know that your target audience is in these channels and you know that you have to talk to them there and you have to get to them there, that's enough reason to know that you should spend the money.
But I also believe that leading indicators need to be associated with that. What are the leading indicators within your funnel to indicate you are headed in the right direction? Is it volume? Engagement?
I'm really loving Gong's stance that every conversation you have, not just Sales, but every CS conversation, should be reported. You could have a conversation about where people are seeing you, where they're finding you, how they understand you. All your executives can record on Gong as well. So you end up with this really beautiful picture of where people are experiencing your brand. It's not just, what made you click demo? It's, Oh hey, almost every single one of those conversations is with one of my peers, so where should you actually be putting your money? Customer marketing.
And while you should certainly be doing top of funnel brand work, I think that it is really hard to justify for some companies - like startups - that are still trying to figure out if they know their customer well. Is that customer constantly changing? Are they working on a pivot? If you haven’t answered those questions, how can you assign leading indicators to your brand activities?
It could be volume. It could be DMs to your founders. Say you start a DM program and your founders are starting to get around five DMs a month and X number of engagements. Then you know your plan is working and it’s worth continuing. It's not resulting in revenue. It's not resulting in conversion, but you know that that channel is starting to build awareness and trust. It's showing that you should continue to put more effort, especially if that channel is actually only costing you human capital and not cash.
Right now, I think it’s important to talk about the value of human capital as teams are getting smaller and capital is more scarce. Sometimes you have more money than you do human time, in which case you’re focused on finding channels that will give you the biggest bang for your buck, even if it’s just to build swell at the top that you know will result at some point in revenue.
But when budgets are low and teams are lean, it’s more important than ever to quantify the impact of human work to show your CFO. Even if it’s just a few leading indicators and clear definitions of what “good” looks like to demonstrate that the seemingly immeasurable marketing activities you’re engaging in are moving you towards your goal.