We will cover five content marketing reports, starting from reports that highlight top-of-the-funnel effectiveness and make our way down to how content marketers can report on revenue. Problem: How do content marketers know if their blog posts are engaging and converting readers into leads/contacts? Ingredients: Landing Page contains Blog Unique Pageviews (from web analytics) Sum of Leads or Contact Count (U-Shaped or other attribution model) Timeframe: Based on Touchpoint Date Recipe 4.2: LANDING PAGE -> FORM URL REPORT Problem: How do content marketers map the path of their readers with data? From a data and reporting point of view, the path of a visitor would contain two pieces of information: the blog landing page URL and the URL where they filled out a form to download a piece of content. Ingredients: Landing Page contains Blog Form URL Sum of Lead/Contact Count (U-Shaped or other attribution model) Timeframe: Based on Touchpoint Date Recipe 4.3: BLOG PAGEVIEWS -> TOUCHPOINT ENGAGEMENT CONVERSION REPORT This report is similar to the first report (Recipe 4.1), but for marketers doing ABM. Ingredients: Landing Page contains Blog Unique Pageviews (from web analytics) Sum of Touchpoint Count Grade equals A, B, C, D (optional) Timeframe: Based on Touchpoint Date Recipe 4.4: BLOG PIPELINE & REVENUE Problem: How do content marketers prove the business value of their efforts? To report on just the blog, create a filter: Landing Page contains “blog” or whatever URL structure you use to specify blog posts. In the second opportunity report — the one that will report on revenue — follow the same steps. Solution: Content marketers can report on the pipeline and revenue generated based on the Form URL, instead of Landing Page. These reports will do just that.
Content marketing has established itself as a central feature of
most B2B marketing strategies. When executed well, it’s a cost
effective way to bring in new demand, engage and nurture existing
prospects, and convince opportunities down-funnel that your product
or service is the right one.
Even though the majority of marketers believe that their content
is working, they struggle to prove it with data. According to the
State of Content Marketing Report by CMI, while 88% of B2B
organizations utilize content marketing, when asked what their top
challenges are, 57% said “measuring content effectiveness” and 52%
“measuring the ROI of their content marketing programs.”
A big problem is that many content marketers are still measuring
success in terms of pageviews and social shares. Neither of those
are bad things, but they also aren’t true measure of business
value. A blog post that generates a ton of pageviews and social
shares isn’t necessarily “effective” nor does it mean that it will
have any impact on revenue.
So how should content marketers track and measure their results,
and what reports will help them prove their value?
We will cover five content marketing reports, starting from
reports that highlight top-of-the-funnel effectiveness and make our
way down to how content marketers can report on revenue.
Recipe 4.1: BLOG PAGEVIEWS -> NEW LEADS/CONTACTS
CONVERSION REPORT
B2B marketing is all about effectively moving prospects through
the customer funnel. At the top-of-the-funnel, marketers are trying
to turn first-time visitors into (qualified) leads. Content
marketers often do this through blog posts that get shared on
social media, get promoted by ads, get emailed around, and/or get
found on search engines.
The most important way blog posts demonstrate value is by
converting people to leads. When someone reads a blog post and
eventually becomes a lead, they’re indicating that the blog post
was relevant and useful, or else they wouldn’t offer their contact
information to that company.
Problem:
How do content marketers know if their blog posts are engaging
and converting readers into leads/contacts?
Solution:
A blog pageview -> new leads/contacts conversion report tells
content marketers what percentage of the readership found the blog
post valuable enough to eventually become a lead or contact by
simply dividing unique pageviews (the number of people that read
the post) by net new leads or contacts that had that post as a
landing page.
To create this report, start by creating a lead report. Set the
Landing Page field as the row grouping and drag Lead Count into the
column grouping. Choose to sum the lead count. Then, create a
filter: Landing Page contains “blog” or however your site
structures its blog article URLs. This will give you one portion of
the report. To understand the effectiveness of each article you’ll
need to connect this data to your web analytics.
There are a variety of ways to do this. You can export this
report data to Excel and match the Pageview data using the landing
page URL as the common column to merge. Create an Excel formula to
calculate the rate of leads per page view, which is Total Leads /
Unique Pageviews.
Ingredients:
- Landing Page contains Blog
- Unique Pageviews (from web analytics)
- Sum of Leads or Contact Count (U-Shaped or other attribution
model) - Timeframe: Based on Touchpoint Date
Recipe 4.2: LANDING PAGE -> FORM URL
REPORT
Problem:
How do content marketers map the path of their readers with
data? And how do they know if readers are taking their desired path
to conversion?
Solution:
In the Net New Leads by Landing Page Report in Chapter 2 [link],
we answered the question of “How many?” In the report above, Recipe
4.1, we answered, “How efficiently?” This report answers,
“Where?”
Before we get to the report, let’s take a step back. As we
discussed earlier, the goal of content marketing is to provide
value to prospective customers. You want to create situations where
the customer learns something valuable, and, if they are a good
fit, they want to learn more about what you do. A win-win
situation. Marketers often do this through two types of content —
gated and ungated.
Gated content includes ebooks, whitepapers, reports, webinars,
etc. To access these, you have to provide contact information,
which is the primary step in becoming…
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