Channel Performance: Does Where I Promote Content Matter?

In marketing as in real estate, it’s all about location. We spend time, energy, and money to create the perfect assets to promote our brand, our message, and our product and/or services offerings. But if we don’t promote them in the right places, our assets are not going to achieve the ROI we expect from them. So, where should we promote our content? And how do we know that the channel is effective for our business? Let’s dive into marketing channel performance!

In our last metrics conversation about Asset Performance, we learned how important it is to align our metrics to determine the effectiveness of each piece of our creative content, as well as the sentiment of our audience regarding that content. Measuring channel performance is just as important. Many times, organizations start on a content path, define their personas, create excellent assets tied to the buyer journey, and then miss the mark by not honing in on the specific channels providing the best ROI. 

To evaluate which channels to focus on in order to engage our target audience, we first need to understand that target audience. Where are they congregating digitally? What associations do they belong to? What are the key words that they employ in searches? Who does your sales team identify as your “ideal customer”? Once we have a good overall idea of that target audience, then we can analyze our content promotion vehicles. 

To measure channel performance, the key questions we want to ask about each of our promotion channels are:

• How many views did the content receive?

When reviewing impressions of social, paid/organic ads, websites and blogs, or total unique emails sent, we need to track and understand how many “eyeballs” saw our content promotion. This will help determine content visibility and reach.

• How many of those views took action/clicked?

We must pay close attention to the click ratio. This is the metric that indicates interest. It indicates that our content is engaging enough to want to know more. And it gives us an opportunity for A/B testing, layout/color preferences, and channel “bake-offs” to determine the best combination of placement and design to generate the most engagement.

• How many people shared our content?

This metric gives us a window into the brand trust of our audience. Even if those who share the content don’t engage with it themselves, the action of sending it to others implies value of your brand. This is important because highly shared content generates more impressions, more engagement and ultimately, more leads.

• How long did our audience remain engaged with our content?

Audience engagement lets us know how they feel about the quality of our content. The best metric here is time-on-page. People spend time on things that interest them, that speak to their needs, or that solve a problem for them. We could spend many thousands of dollars to blanket ads that generate clicks, but if the majority of those clicks then show a high bounce-rate, we would know that our content needs rework.

• How many of the target audience converted as a result of the content?

Conversion is different from click-throughs; conversion is that next step after the click. It is the audience doing what we intend them to do that will identify them as leads. Actions such as filling out a form, asking to be contacted, requesting a trial or demo, or attending a webinar are all conversion activity metrics that will ultimately determine the effectiveness of your content and its channel placement.

With these questions in mind, we can build out a dashboard or analytics tracker that can be reviewed monthly so that we can continuously monitor channel performance and make real-time adjustments to drive the best engagement and ROI. 

Some of key metrics to include in your dashboard are:

*Attributed Revenue is defined as the amount of revenue (Closed-Won opportunities) that can be attributed to a traffic source or campaign.

Now we are armed with the basics of evaluating our channel performance. We also need a solid campaign-naming convention and channel taxonomy to achieve accurate revenue attribution and marketing ROI, but measuring your content placements and how those channels perform is a key step in proving that all your hard work creating and promoting content is paying off. 

As always, if you need help with measuring your metrics, reach out! We’re here to help.

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