If you’re serious about content marketing, you know that one of the most difficult things it to measure its effectiveness.
(Once you’ve got things up and running that is, and you’re getting enough attention from the right kind of audience).
Solving the content marketing attribution problem is a huge challenge. Hubspot, and many other marketing solutions are pretty much build around that problem.
So it’s always interesting to hear how companies currently winning in content are going about this.
Which is why I found this interview with Intercom’s Managing Editor, John Collins, super interesting. Around 30 minutes into the call, the talk about content marketing metrics:
At Intercom, they’ve got a really strong finance and analytics team, and there’s an analytics person who works on the marketing side, so they’ve got a lot of internal data.
One of they ways they measure content marketing ROI is by segmenting signups based on behavior.
Some of the segments they have:
- people who first came to the marketing site, and then to the blog and then signed up for the product.
- people who went to the marketing site and signed up for the product, without visiting the blog.
- people who come to the blog first, then go to the marketing site and sign up
They found that first segment has a higher average LTV than the second or third.
So this is how they analyze the ROI of their content on a really high level.
On a more micro-level, they don’t get too hung up on metrics.
They don’t attribute certain blog posts to signups. If a post gets a low number of pageviews, then that’s a good enough indicator that this kind of content isn’t probably the best thing to repeat.
Pageviews are really only important if you’re selling advertising. And none of us are.—John Collins
You can listen to the entire interview here:
What are some interesting ways you’ve seen companies measuring the effectiveness of their content marketing?