Content marketing has a problem that not enough people are talking about: How do I accurately measure the true value of the content I create?
Content performance metrics are still being measured in the form of opens, clicks, pageviews, and shares. Thus, content marketers are getting better at leveraging a common formula: clickable headlines + paid distribution = numbers that look like success. Unfortunately, that success is often an illusion.
The real value generated from such metrics for a given content program could actually be zero, because audience engagement and loyalty may be limited to just that one campaign. The harder it is for content marketers to prove that their content results directly tie into a company’s overall financial success, the harder it is for them to ask for more money to produce better content and truly engage audiences over time. This is a huge mistake and a disservice to the marketing profession.
At companies that are attempting to link content more directly to shareholder KPIs, content marketers are quickly evolving into hybrid creatures: half editors, half data scientists. To succeed, these chimeras need a formula that goes one step further than attention time. The formula needs to consider the lifetime value of each audience member, and, more importantly, how to maximize that value from the best audience segments.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my career thinking about better ways to prove marketing attribution. That effort has evolved with the help of the latest marketing automation technologies. At Contently, we have the pleasure of looking at a treasure trove of content performance data in our own technology platform, which has allowed me to develop a pretty exciting formula for the content marketing world. We have lovingly named it ROCI [rock-ee], short for Return on Content Investment:
ROCI = (Revenue Attributed to All Content Marketing Assets – Total Content Marketing Spend) + (Share of Audience Attention * Fair Market $ Value of Target Audience)
It’s by no means a finished theorem, as solving the problem of true content value over time is incredibly hard and unique to each business model. But over the next few months, we will be working with the best minds in the marketing and data worlds to test and adapt this formula. If you have any thoughts, opinions, or insights, I hope you’ll let us know.
Ray Cheng (@Ray_Jing) is the VP of Marketing at Contently.
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