If you're a marketer who reports back to your management team about current initiatives, including content—how's that going? For most, the answer is that it's a major challenge.
Luckily, we've figured out the four most common content reporting roadblocks and how you can remedy them.
1. Focusing Only on Channel and Web Performance Metrics
As marketers, we're hardwired to measure campaign performance. But measuring performance on a single metric is like judging the quality of an omelet based on a single ingredient. If you focus on only one channel or one KPI, you'll miss key parts of the buyer journey.
For example, measuring channel and Web performance metrics such as open and clickthrough rates won't give you the whole story.
When you're reporting on campaign performance, include item-level metrics so you know more about your visitors once they land and start moving around on your site. That way, you can tell exactly how many people engaged with which piece of content for how long. It's incredibly specific, as well as instructive.
If a buyer has high pageviews and a low bounce rate, for example, that tells you the buyer likes a certain format or type of content better. Taking such an approach will give you a much broader perspective and help you shape your content decisions more intelligently.
2. Missing Details About the Buyer Journey
Depending on which marketing systems you have and how they're set up, you may or may not have clear visibility into your buyers' journey. Many marketers think they know their buyer journey only to realize that the details are a bit fuzzy. They wish they could watch their visitors' paths more closely and find out what exactly is driving them forward.
Fortunately, that is well within reach. Using the right tech, you can view the behavior of each person who would otherwise be an anonymous visitor and break down data silos through deep integration. That helps bridge the digital divide that's so common in organizations' tech stacks. For example, a "video view" on Facebook is not equal to a "video view" on Twitter.
By connecting your tech stack and flowing your data from other touchpoints into your content experience platform, you get all of your metrics in one place and a single, unified data language that drives informed decisions rather than educated guesses.
All that helps you understand where buyers are in their journey so you can meet them where they are with the right content, which helps you to not only create an optimal journey but also better strategize when creating high-performing content experiences.
3. Lacking Access to Comprehensive Reports
Reports are a necessary evil. You know how important they are to your executives, andfor justifying the marketing department's budget.
They can also be the source of much frustration. You want to create a report that gets really specific, like identifying contacts and what they're consuming as individual people. But creating such reports used to be manual or downright impossible. Either the data you want wasn't captured or you ended up exporting raw files and working with the data to get to the insights you needed, even though your tools had promised intuitiveness and cool dashboards.
That's why you should continuously evaluate the solutions you're using. That means digging into granular reports and sourcing tech solutions that show performance and nuance easily. That helps you shine light on what's important to your business, and it also makes it easy to segment data by person or company, look at trends by industry, and then communicate insights to key decision-makers.
4. Manual Content-Planning
Great content alone is not enough to engage buyers and convert them into customers; it has to be the right content at the right time. Unfortunately, much of the work marketers are doing to plan their content is far too manual and time-consuming, and they don't have accurate feedback mechanisms in place to know whether what they're creating actually makes a significant impact.
The solution is to better tag your content so you can easily report on segments you care about, then use that information to make data-informed decisions for content planning. You can also trigger filters to auto-tag content so you don't have to manually tag everything, which contributes to even further efficiency.
It's also valuable to collaborate with the sales team, sharing knowledge across departments and teaching them how to view the performance of their own tagged content. That enables them to have more success in moving prospects and customers forward in their journey with your brand and in delivering a superior experience.
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Content can be a springboard for educating prospects, converting customers, and serving loyal buyers, but it must be supported by sufficient reporting. Once you get your reporting and content management nailed down, you can enjoy delivering a top-notch content experience—and also enjoy all the rewards that come with it.
More Resources on Content Reporting and Measurement
How CMOs Can Prove Their ROI in the C-Suite
The Content Formula: How to Create and Measure Content That Converts
