If you’re like most marketers, you probably understand that content is key to your efforts to drive awareness, leads, and results. But just how valuable is it? This is more than an arbitrary question – it impacts the way you talk to your clients, the way you structure your marketing strategy, and the way you allocate your budget to other marketing pursuits.
Luckily, it’s also an answerable question.
If you’ve ever wondered how to calculate your content value, this guide will give you the steps you need.
How to Ensure You’re Getting the Most Content Value Possible: 5 Key Steps
If you’re looking to define and measure the value of your content, you’re not alone. Content is always important, of course, but there are steps you can take to improve the value of your content right off the bat:
1. Include Governance in Your Content Strategy
Before you develop a content strategy designed to produce the biggest returns on your investment, you need to execute a content audit. This will help you understand what your current content looks like and how it can be improved. It’s also a great way to help you understand what your competitors are doing, and how you can gain an edge on them.
Once you’ve conducted a content audit, you’ll be able to put the pieces in place to build a new content strategy that allows you to produce the highest-value content possible. As you develop this content strategy, be sure that you’re including governance in its layout.
Designed to help you outline who is responsible for various aspects of content creation and distribution, governance is a crucial foundation for building a successful content strategy in the future.
2. Develop an Understanding for How Customers Use Your Content
It’s impossible to improve something that you don’t fully understand. With that in mind, now is the best possible time to figure out how customers are engaging with your content. Engagement scoring is a great way of doing this.
Go through your various content types and score the varieties that produce higher engagement rates, from social media content and web content to blog material. From there, create a graph of all content types and their various scores. This will help you pinpoint your most valuable content, and identify key areas where you should invest more funds into content creation. What’s more, it will give you an idea of which content types are under-producing, and what you need to do to improve them, maximize value, or to re-allocate their spending.
Continue tracking those metrics and use the data provided as a guidepost by which to structure your strategy.
If you’re going to conduct engagement scoring, be sure that you’re choosing the metrics that are most relevant for your company, and that you continue to track them accurately and consistently.
3. Understand How Your Site Uses Content to Keep Users
Before you can create outstanding content value, you need to know how your existing content is contributing to keeping readers on your site. Think about this as you conduct your content audit. As you evaluate your site’s various pages, take note of the pages that have high “content velocity,” or a lot of potentials to keep users on your page.
From there, move out to take an overview of your content’s context. How is it interacting with other pages or areas to provide value to users? The more you understand this, the more capable you’ll be of improving your content value down the line.
4. Understand How Your Content Improves Business Outcomes
One of the most critical steps you can take in improving your content is understanding how your existing content is influencing your business outcomes. Is it driving conversions and engagement? If so, how exactly is the content doing that?
The more you can understand this, the more capable you’ll be of allocating your media spending to the most productive places possible, and developing the distribution and creation strategy your company needs to succeed.
5. Look at Key Metrics
Another key step in improving your content value is to look at the key metrics of your content strategy. These metrics may include average production length, delivery rates, coverage gaps, and more.
While these metrics will look a bit different for all companies, they’re essential to determining the overall success of your content strategy and exposing areas that are ripe for improvement.
Benefit From More Content Value – Starting Today
Improving the value of the content you’re producing is an important – and achievable – goal. Because content is one of the most lucrative and reliable sources of online marketing, smart marketers are always looking for ways to make it more efficient, productive, and targeted.
Unfortunately, it can be tough to measure the true value of content, especially because most metrics only go as deep as ROI. The truth is, however, that content is much broader; measuring its real value can be complex.
Fortunately, these five tips are a smart way to get started. There’s some inherent fluidity within the content value. People who understand that are well-prepared to take the steps needed to ensure their content value is increasing regularly, rather than decreasing.
By doing simple things like storing your content, evaluating key metrics, tracking how users interact with your content, and building a governance strategy into your content strategy, it’s easy to improve your approach to content, and ensure that the steps you’re taking are upwardly mobile and productive, both now and in the future.
