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Survey Results vs. Analytics: What Drives Your Content Strategy?


A couple of months ago (more or less) Smart Insights published an infographic on the “7 Steps to Success: Competing with Content Marketing.” The graphic presents the results of its survey together marketing automation provider, Hubspot, of ~700 European marketers.

Among the many interesting stats, are included results for the content that is perceived most positively.

Namely:

  • Blog post or articles 51%

  • eNewsletters or online magazines 43%

  • Infographics 37%

  • Long form content, e.g. white papers, ebooks, industry reports 31%

  • Viral videos 28%

  • Animated explainer videos 28%

  • Webinars 20%

  • Own community or forum 21%

  • Competition, quizzes, 18%

  • Mobile app or engagement specific tool 18%

  • Calculating interactive tools and games 17%

  • Apps and engagement tools 16.3%

These numbers raise several questions – the first of which is: based on what parameters were these types of contents considered positively?

And what about matching the content to the user journey phase?

How can you compare a viral video with a white paper without asking – where in the journey is the user meeting this content? Not all content was created equal. Or, rather - not all content was created equally for all purposes.

Not all content was created equally for all purposes.

Obviously, content that is effective in converting readers in the ‘desire’ stage, won’t work for those who are in the ‘justification’ stage.

I won’t offer someone who has a 20 vs. an 80-point rating on my nurture scale the same piece of content.

Clearly, infographics are better suited for top of the funnel engagement, whereas whitepapers better support middle to bottom of the funnel engagement.

This brings us back to the one question we should always ask ourselves . . . “why?” For example – “why would this piece of content work well on my product landing page?” “Why would I want to promote it as premier content on my blog’s main page?” And so forth.

I suppose, that as a persona-centric marketers, the question before “why?” should be “who?” Who will be reading this content? Where will they meet it? Where in the funnel are they? Why should this be interesting for them right now?

Answering these questions makes the above stats irrelevant. This is especially the case when you consider not the next “w” with a question mark. Rather, an “m” with an exclamation mark. That is – measure, measure, measure – and then measure some more.

Theories are good. Assumptions are dangerous. And the only way we can confirm our gut and make informed and data-driven decisions about our content strategy – is when we measure engagement. Whether using Google Analytics, marketing automation reports, or other tools (there are plenty of them in MarTech today) – no matter what you do, measure.

Want to cook up a killer content marketing strategy? Get in touch and let’s do great marketing together >>

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