5 Data-Driven Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing, According to Priceonomics

Optimize Your Content Marketing “Stack” In order to be successful at content marketing, there are three key components on which you need to focus. As companies grow and scale their content initiatives, we recommend partnering with a content marketing company, like NewsCred, that provides expertise and services that will help increase your marketing team’s efficiency and scalability. See the chart below for our recommendations for the minimum tools required to measure success for various content marketing goals. Distribute The third part of the stack is “Distribute,” as in “How can we make our content spread?” (And because you’ve already defined it, you know what “spread” really means for your business.) You can’t always know how well certain pieces will perform. Priceonomics aims to reduce the guesswork in creating great content by classifying each potential input into a template for repeatable success. (e.g. “Was Uber or Lyft More Popular in San Francisco in 2016?”) Cost/money rankings (e.g. “The Most Expensive Vacation Rentals Globally in 2016”) Now, when a client comes to them with a specific data set and content goals, Priceonomics knows exactly what story format to recommend and what it takes to make, measure, and distribute it properly. When a client is working with Priceonomics on a story, Priceonomics will sit down with them to create two headlines. Once the real article is live on the actual Priceonomics blog, the team does a second set of A/B tests. The Priceonomics team celebrates their wins with a direct plug-in on Slack that alerts their company when a notable person or publication mentions or shares their articles.

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Our friends at Priceonomics are on a mission to turn your data into great stories that spread – and they provided some keys to doing exactly that at the conference they hosted this November in San Francisco. Hundreds of marketers gathered to learn about how Priceonomics uses journalists, data scientists, engineers, and analysts to create data-driven content with the goal of spreading quality information across the web.

As a content marketing strategist who works with leading brands everyday, I found that these takeaways most resonated with me – and can be helpful to any content marketer:

Define “Awareness” for Your Brand

Viral content used to be the ultimate expression of successful digital marketing. Every brand wanted to have its own “ice bucket challenge” or land on the homepage of Reddit or BuzzFeed. In marketer-speak, we tend to associate those wins with “awareness.”

But does a homepage spot on Reddit or BuzzFeed really translate to an increase in your bottom line?

Priceonomics seeks to create content that “spreads” in an effort to build “awareness” for its brand, but they acknowledge that what equals success for themselves may not equal success for another company.

They define “awareness” goals differently for B2C and B2B companies:

For B2C brands, the awareness goal is often to be the “first choice” in a consumer’s mind. SEO is a pretty telling way to measure how well your brand is associated with certain words or terms – without shelling out money for market research. SEO takes into consideration multiple complex factors, including mentions of your brand across the web and social. High SEO rankings on key search terms drive free traffic to your site, which can boost e-commerce sales, social interactions, or positive consumer behaviors like downloading coupons to use in-store. Each of these actions correlates to actual business results that have an effect on your bottom line.

For B2B brands, awareness is less about mass appeal, than it is appealing to the right people. And the easiest way to measure this is through leads generated for your company. B2B brands spend time and money on outbound marketing to potential prospects. A greater “awareness” of your brand translates to increased inbound interest. Increased inbound interest allows brands to scale back on their paid marketing and mine quality leads who come to them. Leads translate to MQLs and SQLs that have actual dollar values tied to them. This is the business result against which B2B teams can justify their “awareness” goal.

Optimize Your Content Marketing “Stack”

In order to be successful at content marketing, there are three key components on which you need to focus. According to Priceonomics, your essential content marketing “stack” consists of: Make, Measure, and Distribute – and it’s in every marketer’s best interest to make sure each piece is optimized.

Make

The first component, “Make,” is about the content – as in, “What are we actually creating” And, “Who’s creating it?”

For the “Make” stage, your requirements depend entirely on the scope of your content marketing program and the size of your company. The simplest set-up requires internal employees to create a documented content strategy and manage the program, freelancers to help develop content, and potentially vendors or agencies with specific content marketing expertise.

As companies grow and scale their content initiatives, we recommend partnering with a content marketing company, like NewsCred, that provides expertise and services that will help increase your marketing team’s efficiency and scalability.

Measure

With “Measure,” you define: “What do we want to happen?” And, “How are we going to ensure this actually does happen?”

This second part of the stack is the unique tools required to actually gauge the success of each goal at every stage. See the chart below for our recommendations for the minimum tools required to measure success for…

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