Every piece of content a company publishes or shares online can be considered a marketing asset. However, to ensure that the content is actually helping a brand meet its marketing goals by creating an inbound path for consumers to follow into its sales and marketing funnel, it’s important that the company’s agency partners or in-house marketing team members assess the impact of its content so that the strategy can be refined and improved.
To learn how to adjust a content strategy to ensure that it helps accomplish their strategic objectives, companies often evaluate the results of their own efforts against those of their competitors, analyzing critical metrics to determine how well their content is performing in comparison. The members of Forbes Agency Council are no strangers to managing and analyzing content. Here, 15 members share their best advice for staying ahead of competitors in the content game to become a trusted voice of authority and increase organic reach and traffic.
Forbes Agency Council members share effective tips marketers can use to analyze a company’s content.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Understand Your Objective Or Goal First
Understand your objective or goal first. Are you using content to increase your organic rankings? Or, do you want to increase your qualified leads? Different content is used to achieve different results. If you know what your end goal is, you can plan your content, analyze its performance and iterate based off of performance metrics. – Justin Buckley, ATTN Agency
2. Audit And Inventory Your Content
Content audit and content inventory are the standard processes of strategic communication, both visual and narrative. It enables your team to catalog everything in a digestible form. These important steps can help with information architecture and communications infrastructure, keeping the form and function consistent with the brand by identifying gaps in areas that need to be expanded or reworked. – Goran Paun, ArtVersion
3. Write Down Your Goals
Write down the goals you are hoping to achieve with your content marketing efforts, then go see the metrics. The question is whether your content helps you reach those goals. If yes, keep going. Pay attention to your weak points, improve, but stay the course. If not, change the strategy. This is the only thing you need to care about. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS
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4. Have A Goal For Each Piece Of Content
With every piece of content, ask yourself, “Is this bringing us closer to the goal?” Some content is designed to inform and move Web visitors down the funnel, while other pieces are informative and designed to attract a newsletter sign-up. Regardless, if there isn’t a goal to measure the content against, then the content (or goals) needs to be reassessed and reworked. – Bernard May, National Positions
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5. Develop A Content-Creation Framework
Develop a comprehensive framework of content to create. The framework should be broad enough that all content can be labeled within it, but narrow enough that different pieces can be grouped for measurement and comparison. Having several tiers within the framework will allow the company to accurately gauge where content is needed and which types of content are most effective. – Donna Robinson, Collective Measures
6. Focus On More ‘Difficult’ Engagement Metrics
Focus on the more “difficult” engagement metrics: shares, saves and profile visits. Likes are nice, but too easy. Reach and views depend on how well you game the algorithm, which matters, but is not a true measure of your content’s effectiveness. Share, save and profile visit metrics show which content is relevant and valued—in other words, effective, because irrelevant content doesn’t get shared, saved or prompt profile visits. – Michael Parise, DENT Agency LLC
7. Be Ready For Surprises
The worst thing one can do is preplan content without leaving any wiggle room for last-minute changes to keep up with market trends. What’s popular today may be outdated tomorrow! So, the key is to build a solid database of evergreen content while setting aside resources to create new, trending posts or modify the existing ones for better reach. – Ajay Prasad, GMR Web Team
8. Make Sure All Key Messaging Is Consistent
Make sure all of your key messaging and content is consistent across the board (website, social media, expert titles and so on). Be sure your mission is clear and all your keywords and calls to action are in your boilerplates and “About” sections. Ensure your social media handles and bio sections reflect your overall mission statements, tag lines and content—make it simple, concise and clear. – Jessica Kopach, The JKO Agency
9. Bring Each Team To The Table
Content analysis should never occur in silos. Each team brings a valuable puzzle piece to the management and analysis process. SEO teams measure unique page views, time on page and the quality and quantity of backlinks generated; sales teams inform content creators on what type of information customers require; and content strategists arrange each puzzle piece to fill in the gaps. – Jonathan Schwartz, Bullseye Strategy
10. Ensure Your Content Speaks To Your Audience
The most important thing is that your content speaks to your audience. So many companies overcomplicate content and spend hours deciding topics, layouts and colors but don’t take enough time to truly understand their audience and create content that makes them want to take action. If your content does not get enough engagement, go back to the basics and try to get to know your target audience better. – Anastasia Cecchetto, Ace Influencers
11. Confirm All Content Is Leading To Your Brand
The best advice I can offer is to review every content asset in your library and ask: “Is this content leading with our brand or to our brand?” It cannot do both. Content that leads with your brand won’t help you build credibility, authority or trust. If you’re not sure, it’s worth hiring a strategist to audit your content and provide actionable feedback. – Beth Newton, alpha | BRAVO
12. Focus On Low-Hanging Fruit And High-Value Content
Let’s face it, too many companies spend thousands of dollars on a single piece of content only to find it going nowhere in terms of conversions or page views. So, in order to scale your content marketing, focusing on low-hanging fruit and high-value content—such as bottom-line-focused calculators, brand A versus brand B content comparisons and product-cost-related topics—is critical. – Yan Zhang, XYZ Advantage
13. Do It Constantly And Reflexively
As a small, advocacy-based PR firm, we’ve placed transparent system-building at our core. Encourage employees to provide feedback on and suggestions for improving standard operating procedures, potential new revenue streams and, of course, what makes up the core content you produce daily. A company is more assured and individualistic if every team member can own and ideate its presence. – Evan Nison, NisonCo
14. Decide What Action You Want The Audience To Take
The best way I have found to manage and analyze a company’s content is to first determine what action you want the audience to perform. Then, produce content that makes it as easy as possible to complete that action. Moreover, it’s best not to try to do everything at once. Focus on the specific channels that align with your strategy. – Roger Hurni, Off Madison Ave
15. Look At Brand Creative And Performance Creative Separately
Look at brand creative (linear TV, connected TV, YouTube, website, email, organic social) versus performance marketing creative (Facebook, Google, Pinterest, TikTok, direct mail) separately and define different key performance indicators for each. Too many times, these concepts compete, when brand is really about impressions and engagement, while performance creative looks at spend, click-through rate, conversion rate, return on ad spend and so forth. – Tucker Matheson, Markacy
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
