Beyond Analytics – Measuring Content Meaning Instead of Mediocrity
Presenter: Robert Rose, Chief Strategist, Content Marketing Insitute (Twitter: @Robert_Rose)
“There are no Google Analytic screen shots in any of these slides.”
But isn’t this a presentation on marketing analytics? Isn’t that what Google Analytics is?
Robert Rose is energetic and charismatic, as anyone who has seen him speak knows. He delivered a rousing keynote speech during the opening sessions of the first day of IDW, and his individual sessions continued with the same energy.
In Beyond Analytics: Measuring Content Meaning Instead of Mediocrity, Robert took his audience through a radical idea … that analytics go far beyond the number of page likes your company has on Facebook, or the number of hits on the web site. These numbers are just numbers and can be interpreted in many ways, and easily skewed to serve any purpose.
Robert’s focus was on the quality of your customer interactions, not the number of customer interactions. Quality is key, and if you can get your managers and executives to move past the idea that each growth chart must be a line that “goes up and to the right” you can start to measure the real value of your content.
He cited examples of customers that he has worked with that struggled with this idea, but one they started to see the value of providing better quality content to potential customers, the number of sales leads that actually lead to a sale rise. But the total number of sales leads may go down, which is going to scare people.
According to Robert, when you improve content by breaking down silos (a theme we heard over and over again at iDW), your organization can increase quality of content, which increases the quality of customer experiences, which leads to revenue growth. He tempered this with a dash of reality, admitting that this is easy to say, hard to do. He left the audience with the suggestion to take one small step at a time to break down silos within your organization and to produce quality content.
Summarizing the main points of his talk, including why there were no Google analytics, Robert noted, “Have the capability to measure everything — and then don’t. Report on only what’s important. Analytics drive changes to process — NOT prove a point.” In other words, by measuring the quality of content, not just the number of likes or clicks or page visits, you can start to get a better picture of how to engage the customer, provide a better customer experience, and use content to increase revenue.
