I’ve written a lot about the critical role of content across the enterprise. It’s a valuable business asset that is central to an organizations’ digital journey. It must be created, managed and distributed with compliance in mind (which can vary by vertical industry and global region) and perhaps importantly, content must play a vital role in supporting the customer journey. If done well, your content will do much more than simply inform, but truly engage and act as a catalyst to building long-term credibility and trust. Content should be viewed as thoughtful, purposeful and part of the revenue stream.
I’d like to talk about this last point. We know content directly impacts the customer experience you are trying to attain. It also can differentiate your business and give you an edge among customers, prospects and the market as a whole. But do you know how to measure the success of your content strategies?
Organizations want to believe they are creating and publishing personalized content that their prospects actually want, and importantly, is reaching them at the right place, at the right time, and via their preferred device for optimal consumption. In reality, however, many organizations lack a strong content infrastructure to measure the true impact of their content strategies.
We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to sponsor the recent webinar with the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) on “The Role of Content in B2B Revenue Growth” featuring guest speaker Phyllis Davidson, VP, Principal Analyst with Forrester.
On the webinar, Phyllis told us that, according to Forrester’s 2022 The State of B2B Content’ Survey Report, nearly half (47%) of respondents consider themselves beginners at tracking content impact metrics that indicate whether content is resonating with audiences, while 29% said their organization doesn’t have a method for attributing content to opportunities and/or revenue. It’s a wakeup call for organizations. Many are not only publishing too much content that results in customer angst and/or a disjointed customer experience, but are also continuing to spin wheels with functional silos that not only break the customer journey but lead to growing content waste. They lack a cohesive and effective content operations infrastructure to measure the impact of content among their intended audiences and across their own business.
According to Phyllis, Forrester has done studies about what customers think of vendor content. One recent study reported that 69% of respondents say if they aren’t getting meaningful content, they aren’t likely to continue the relationship. 61% say vendors give them too much content, and 63% say the material they get from vendors is more about creative style and not enough valuable substance.
It’s critical that content delivered meets the needs of your customers. If your organization creates content in silos, it results in an unsuccessful content lifecycle management stream which in turn impacts your ability to successfully support the customer journey.
During the webinar, Phyllis talked about how organizations that want to improve the customer experience must first improve their content operations. She noted how companies are “on a hamster wheel” delivering so much content yet lacking the ability to measure the success of their content, simply because they can’t manage it.
Quark knows content and has a long history in delivering tools that help enterprises address the full content lifecycle ecosystem. Built-in intelligence capabilities available in Quark Publishing Platform (QPP) NextGen enable organizations to measure how their content is being consumed by external audiences with accurate insights about engagement and consumption to make smart data-driven decisions about what content should be reused, repurposed or retired. Content ROI can be measured by comparing production costs with robust self-service consumption reporting and analytics.
The platform supports metadata and taxonomy which is the key to effective content inventory management. You can see what content is of most value to your audience and tag it with metadata that adds context and meaning to the content. This makes it simple to find assets that are being consumed the most by your audience. Your organization can better understand which content was a contributing factor to signing a new customer (for example) and better informs the type of content you create in the future to support business growth.
Watch “The Role of Content in B2B Revenue Growth” and learn how to make your content work for you.
To learn more about Quark Publishing Platform and how it can help you measure the ROI of you content strategies, you can request a demo.