Who should content aim to reach; an audience or a customer?  Well, who’s asking?

The classical ‘publisher’ should quickly answer audience. Having started my career in newspapers, I love a good and healthy ‘circulation’. For brands seeking to harness content as a marketing tool, the end play is sales.   Therefore, for content marketing the quest is for customers and a strong focus on metrics is pretty much the only way to ensure success.

Ying and Yang

In previous blog spots I’ve asked the question ‘Is your company’s content an experience or sales collateral?’ Differentiating the need to provide customers with an experience and the need to sell is essential to any strategy.  However, the medium is the message.  When corporations are the source for content, customers should be aware that being a client is part of the experience.  Metrics are the way to shepherd that experience.

Audience development does not lead to customers.  Customer development leads to customers.

A digression, but bear with.  Imagine that you are at a cocktail party full of prospective clients and you make sure to go around the room introducing yourself to everyone.  You are a networking machine, talking with everyone about anything and it worked, everyone loves you.  If you were there to develop your ‘audience’, you’ve accomplished your goal.  If you were there with something to sell,  I hope that you ended each of those fabulous conversations with an exchange of business cards or some agreement of next steps because otherwise the conversation is over.  That last step is what metrics need to do for your content for customer development.  First you offered a strong experience that you then supported with accountability.

Metric myths

The strangest thing about metrics is the amount of resistance there is towards them.  Never mind the end user, internal resistance comes first.  Here are some common objections by content marketing creators:

• Clients will be put off if we grab data.
• Metrics will make us too ‘salesy’.
• We don’t have the resources to implement the metrics.
• We don’t have the resources to manage the results.

These objections can all be dealt with by considering the audience experience (UX) and choosing the right metric at the right time.

4 Types of Metrics

Consumption metrics are considered to be the most fundamental. Views, downloads and social chatter all fall under this category.  Where these metrics get interesting is in the evaluation of consumption behavior.  Does the audience come back for more?  Do they engage with the content as readily on social as they do on the company website?  Consumption metrics don’t answer many ‘customer’ questions but it is a start and anyone can do them.

Sharing metric such as social behavior as well as the measurement of inbound links is another relatively superficial and readily available metric.  Sharing metrics are loved by many because of their visible nature but ensure that your business explores and assigns an actual value to these metrics if the focus is customer rather than audience development.

Lead generation metrics and sales metrics are the most interesting and valuable.  I challenge every content marketer to ensure that this type of metric is included at some point in any marketing plan. Lead generation metrics include subscriptions, comments and an establishment of conversation rates.  How often does someone view a company’s content before they become a customer? Sales metrics include online and offline sales as well as tracking devices such as codes.  Whilst the prompting for these metrics are the hardest, they are essential to the final sale.  Bottom line, if you believe in the value of your content, you should also believe that someone will be willing to divulge this information so critical to the sales funnel.

ABC

The editorial aspects of content marketing take time. The same is not true for metrics.  They either work quickly or they don’t.  Metrics should be the first area for trial and error in any content marketing campaign.  Ensure that there is a solid mix of prompts for a mix of metrics and watch the results carefully.  Even in the soft sell world of content ‘Always Be Closing’.