What’s the goal of any piece of content? To get it in front of human eyes, engaged with, loved and shared, ultimately with the aim that this beautiful little piece of content is going to bring your client some serious ROI. Fellow content marketers will all agree that creating winning content that successfully elevates a brand and provokes action is no simple task. It takes a powerful strategy, a huge amount of creativity, commitment... and it also helps to have super talented staff on your team.

So, let’s say you’ve got the perfect formula, and your campaign is well underway being seen, engaged with, loved and shared by your target audience. Is that enough to call it a win and pat yourself on the back? Not exactly.

Without sinking your teeth into the nitty gritty performance metrics of your campaigns, you can’t possibly know how well it’s REALLY doing. Sure, likes and shares are great, but to really paint a picture of how a campaign is performing, businesses need to look beyond the “fluff” or vanity metrics and heed the content metrics that are genuinely affecting the client’s bottom line.

There are hundreds of different marketing metrics your business can measure, and while we’re believers that all data is useful when it comes to measuring ROI in our campaigns, we’ve picked our top five key metrics that you need to be keeping an eye on to track the performance of your work. The good news is, all of these metrics can be broken down into simple measurable stats, all of which can be tracked through a basic Google Analytics account and by diving a bit deeper into the platform analytics that you are publishing on. Let’s dive in.  

 

Views

This may seem like a no-brainer, but knowing how many times a piece of content has been viewed is a great insight in determining which videos/ posts really resonate with your audience and which ones miss the mark. Other useful metrics in evaluating the popularity of your content is to compare total views with unique views (this lets you know how many times the content was reloaded). We also like to look at completed views and when viewers dropped off in films.

 

Sources of Traffic

All your traffic comes from somewhere, and knowing where your audience is coming from is key when strategising how best to amplify your content. The three primary traffic sources you’ll see in your metrics report are direct (when visitors type your URL into the search bar), referral (when visitors find your site through clicking a link on another site), and search (when visitors find your content through searching certain keywords on a search engine like Google), although you’ll likely also have traffic from banner ads and paid search if you’re investing in SEO and ads. To harness this metric for improved ROI, take a look at which sources are providing the most traffic, then adjust your strategy accordingly to put more resources into this area. For example, if Facebook is your top source of traffic, it might be beneficial to invest in more promoted Facebook content, and increase your posting frequency.

 

Bounce Rate

In plain English, bounce rate refers to the number of people who leave your site after only visiting one page. If your bounce rate is high, it could be worth looking at the layout of the page and how the content is presented – are there links to other products, videos and posts, and are the links obvious and easy to navigate? Are your call to actions presented in an enticing way? You want to give your audience every reason to continue to engage in your content, which in turn keeps them on your site for longer.

 

Time Spent on Your Site

One way to really measure the quality of your content is by measuring how long people are actually looking at it. It’s fair to say, the longer someone spends on the site, the more content they’re consuming, whereas if your metrics are telling you that no one is watching your video content to the end, it might be time to revisit your strategy.

 

Social Elevation

This is one that we use to track brand sentiment and involvement with the brand on social platforms, where we are looking at how often in comments the brand is getting credit for the content through positive mentions and shares with mentions along with click-through-rate. It’s a metric that we have built a bespoke measurement tool for along with our content fit test... more about that another time.

 

Tribes. They’re everywhere.

As humans, we want to get around people who get us. It’s in our nature. We want to feel like we belong and that our participation is important. We all want to know that we can make a difference and that our actions count.

It was once thought that the internet would be the great equaliser; that (unparalleled) widespread access to information would economically liberate the masses, but ultimately homogenise us culturally.

Social media has proved otherwise.

Not only have we seen more tribes than ever before, which connect over cross-cultural and geographic boundaries, we’ve seen more innovative ways to organise and mobilise these tribes.

We’ve raised millions of dollars for ALS research through an ice bucket challenge, which enabled a huge scientific breakthrough. We’ve brought home Nigerian girls who were kidnapped by rebel forces, all without leaving our homes.

However, there is a downside -- well, for marketers anyway: our clients are now demanding social campaigns with as much scalability as the ice bucket challenge. With next to no budget. Because social media is free, right?

Due to the success of grassroots campaigns plastered all over social media, a kind of availability bias ensues: because we are inundated with information about the movements, it makes us all feel closer to the problem and the solution than perhaps we really are. This, in turn, it makes it easy for our clients envision their campaigns gleaning a similar level support and making a similar level of impact.

While it’s very much possible to shape an advertising campaign around a social movement, that doesn’t mean that every social campaign calls for a social movement. It’s got to be the right fit, otherwise it’s going to flop. You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole.

To effectively harness the power of the social tribes, your campaign requires a few key ingredients:

  1. Disruption: your cause needs to inherently challenge some kind of status quo. As we have seen, this works particularly well for social causes, where the tribe is driven by a moral or ethical imperative. This also means that you need to propose a better way forward, and clearly outline how easy it is for people step up and make a difference.

 

  1. Connection: you need to bring people together on a social level. They’re united by a common cause, but it needs to be a real cause and they need to opt in. The people who actively opt in generally want to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves, and as an individual, are an essential part of an important group. The impact of mobilising the tribe also depends on the strength of the call to action from the leadership team.

 

  1. Commitment: in order to make change, you need time and consistency. The group needs to see you, their leader, in the trenches day in and day out, fighting to make a real change. A two-week campaign period with two content pieces does not a social movement make.

 

You also need time to recruit supporters to your tribe, aka build up your following  -- after all, there is strength in numbers, and you’ve got to make some noise to get noticed.

So, how can it work?

Recently, 3rdspace partnered with ITF to fight a real injustice. We rallied together our own special tribe who called for Levis to provide better working conditions for the dock workers of Madagascar, who earn as little as 16 cents an hour shipping denim all around the world.

The result? We got Levis to commit to change in just three days.

Here’s how we did it.

At 3rdspace, we are always talking to our partners about the importance of developing a powerful content purpose as a way that can help guide the content team and marketing team from the inside out.

But where does it all go from there?

We’ve found a lot of brands talk about their content pillars and feel they've nailed their content strategy. The truth is, while it may mean a lot to the business and brand, that strategy and those pillars will not resonate with consumers.

There are also a lot of stakeholders when it comes to content, and everyone thinks their piece of content is the most important.

So, we’ve designed some innovative tools to help businesses not only define their content mission, but also create content that brings to life that mission in a way that has value to the audience.

We have also created 5 simple criteria to help select the best content.

  1. Is it relevant not only to the brand, but to the person we want to view it and share it? For content to connect it needs to express how our audience think and feel in a way that is more dynamic than how they would express it themselves.
  2. Does it have an “emotional gift”? Is it helpful, inspirational or does it generate humour that is reflective of the brand’s personality?
  3. Does it reinforce our brand purpose in a way that is easily understood in the language of a trusted friend?
  4. Does it start a conversation? Content should always evolve a brand story arc, but more importantly, if we can inspire our audience to share their stories, the content has more value than a “share”.
  5.  Is the format and the channel we are presenting the idea in the best way to tell the story? Sometimes a still image or a thought provoking editorial piece or quiz can be more appropriate and time relevant than a produced film. Also consider taking the idea into newer channels where you may not have huge following but can have great impact.

Always focussing on what most strongly connects you and your consumers – your Core Purpose.

Rob Logan is the founder of 3rdspace - where brands with purpose create content of value.

Content Agency 3rd Space has recently started working with the lovely people at Crust Gourmet Pizza. In our first campaign, Crust needed a localised solution for South Australia to prompt brand awareness and trial.

So…. we employed two new delivery drivers for them. Meet Travis Boak and Tex Walker, the two local rival AFL captains.

Our solution embedded the brand in the parochial and passionate minds of South Aussies, who being a two team town, LOVE their footy!

The value offer: The Captains’ 2 for $30 Deal.  All customers have to do is jump online, order the deal and pick their captain for the chance to have one of the boys deliver direct to their door.

The timing has been perfect leading into footy finals, not only with the two captains being the new Crust ambassadors, and also the fact that pizza is the natural go-to food for watching the footy.

We kicked off the campaign with a short clip of the two Captains delivering Crust Gourmet Pizzas to fans across Adelaide, with plenty more deliveries and surprise content still to come: https://www.facebook.com/crustpizza

The campaign seems to have ticked a lot of (pizza) boxes for Crust – Surprise, Celebrity, Passion, Finals, Rivalry, Fun and so far, the most commented and shared social campaign on Crust Gourmet Pizza’s Facebook page - so we’ll tick the engagement box too.

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