A Valuable Guide to Assess Digital Content Strategy

By CIOReview | Friday, March 31, 2017

Digital content, as a marketing operation, has evolved to a great extent over the past couple of years. In the fast-paced, technology-driven world that we live in, digital content is being distributed across scores of channels for users to consume. Therefore, it is high time marketers develop new, agile metrics to tally how much web content their users are ingesting so as to devise a resourceful marketing strategy for ensuring success. While doing so, they must also focus on correlating content absorption with buying behavior and seek to identify the causation.

A data-driven approach to marketing is the key to assess the progress and future of any business. It is advisable to employ metrics-driven marketing tactics instead of relying on just one silver-bullet formula. To evaluate the functionality of any digital content strategy, the subsequent measures can be taken into consideration.

Gauging social media uptake is not the final answer to understanding how lucrative a business is. One must also weigh the relative performance of all the channels through which the web content is propagated. Having analyzed the demographics of these channels, an enterprise can opt for the right channel that fits the requirements of its target audience. However, it must be kept in mind that different customers hold different demands. Accordingly, the enterprise might have to customize its web content in several formats as per the needs of its intended customers.

At this point, a crucial question that comes to mind is: How will the enterprise figure out who its prospective clients are? This is possible by cross-referencing a prospect name with third-party data, thereby creating targeted lists for sales and marketing campaigns. Following which, the enterprise needs to verify if the web content is adequately shared around its ecosystem. Evidences of a link spreading rapidly could be a sure sign that the enterprise is securing ample number of prospects. The next step is to check whether any of these prospects had shown interest in buying the data that was circulated. This enables enterprises to gain an in-depth knowledge regarding the utility of its content in the forthcoming days.

A handful of companies today are known to have built an in-house program that can scan through the internet to trace Actionable Internet Mentions (AIMs) based on products, brands and other relevant statistics. What these companies can experiment on for better results is the adding of titles of their own content or links they are shared through, to the existing AIM list. This will considerably add some value when it comes to measuring the total uptake of the digital content. As a consequence, the respective companies shall be able to determine the number of views and the range of feedbacks that their content has received.

Going by the aforementioned plans and tactics, it can be deduced that although metrics-oriented marketing entails a lengthy chain of procedures, it is not too complex to implement either. Enterprises can conveniently follow any of these measures or to be more precise, combine a couple of them which can be deemed all the more reliable for augmenting their growth in the market space.

Nevertheless, it is imperative for companies to focus on two crucial aspects—keep track of its current rate of success and simultaneously look for ways to enhance their scope for upcoming campaigns. This will stand as a justification of their quest to improve by harnessing customer feedbacks to endorse quality services, estimate outcome and adapt to the ever-changing environment.