Content marketing measurement

Today, consumers face a world of overwhelming information density. Getting your message through to them presents an enormous challenge … and a problem that is getting much, much more difficult. In the next five years, the amount of information on the web is projected to increase by at least 500%. This represents the most profound competitive issue for any organization today: How do you stand out from this noise and maintain valuable mindshare with your customers?

A content marketing measurement process

The result of two years of research and nine months of testing and development by my team, our process actually quantifies your content marketing effort and compares your success to your closest competitors.

We’ve named this new consulting practice The Content Code since it is based on many of the principles defined by Mark Schaefer’s popular book of the same name.

Our premise is simple. Publishing content is no longer the finish line – it is the starting line. Content that isn’t seen and shared creates no economic value. This suggests the need to develop an entirely new marketing competency based on an ability to get your content to move – to get it to ignite, create organic advocacy, and deliver powerful new economic value.

Schaefer Marketing Solutions is the first company dedicated to doing exactly that.

The Deliverables

The Content Code team has created a unique, proprietary process to help your organization achieve the very best position to drive new economic benefits from your content investment. We provide the framework to build your own content ignition competency by laying out a detailed, easy-to-follow strategy based on a proven research regimen.

There is a lot of work involved in this process and after about 3-4 weeks, we’ll provide a Content Ignition Score that will actually quantify content marketing success – and how you stack up in your industry.

By working toward a higher Content Ignition Score, you’ll be clearly focused on the optimum strategy that drives social sharing – and valuable customer advocacy — over time.

The assessment we provide will summarize the results of more than 50 specific tests and software platforms that have been assembled over the last two years. The final report provides a detailed, prioritized guide (between 70 and 80 pages long) to help you determine what projects will deliver the best return on your content investment including:

• Industry-specific considerations and your points of strategic leverage
• New channels for content distribution, promotion, and syndication
• Insights into the industry influencers most active in sharing industry content
• Specific recommendations on content form and functionality to immediately improve social sharing
• Insights into active audience development
• Data-driven content generation ideas most likely to connect with your customers
• Detailed structural considerations to improve content shareability including an analysis of content type, length, tone, positioning and other factors that contribute to social sharing success

The Process

The process begins with an initial discovery meeting with a small amount of pre-work and then a live (or online) client meeting that takes between three and four hours.

We will use this information, and data from internal and external sources, to complete a comprehensive assessment that includes more than $100,000 worth of software tools, proprietary analytics, and an extensive 50-point audit.

The report includes critical topics such as:

• Industry structure and competitive assessment
• Evaluation of content density in your vertical
• Conversation hierarchy rating
• Content Shareability ratings
• Site structure and mechanical considerations of content sharing
• Headline effectiveness
• Measurements of content consistency and readability
• Recommendations on optimal post length, the possible use of quizzes, infographics, lists, hashtags
• An assessment of visual content and video content optimization
• Predictive analytics
• Assessment of current audience affinity tribes
• Reports on audience geography and relevance
• Assessing your Alpha Audience
• Assessment of industry influencers and your content
• Recommendations on data-driven content
• Elements of social proof
• Content distribution imperatives
• Multi-channel content
• Employee networks
• Crowd-sourced distribution
• Syndication
• Paid media
• SEO and site authority
• … and much more

Our research will include insights and clues from more than 6 million online content sources, thousands of databases, and our own proprietary algorithms. We also prioritize these findings so you can easily focus your efforts on the imperatives that will drive the most improvement in your content marketing effort.

Feedback

The feedback from customers (including Fortune 500 companies) has been amazing.

“This assessment completely blew away our expectations. The scope and detail of the report is amazing and for the first time we have a real strategy to get value from our content.”

“This report helped expose flaws in our process I never knew existed. I expect this will pay for itself in about a month!”

“This is exactly what we have been looking for – a method to measure and quantify our content marketing efforts. This is an OH WOW.”

“Having a data-based strategy from your team will help us create a competitive advantage with our marketing. I have no doubt about this.”

Next steps

The ideal customer profile for our services:

• Has been producing quality content consistently for at least two years.
• Has in-house resources prepared to activate the new recommendations.
• Producing content in the English language.
• Probably a large company or brand with a national or international audience

The cost of this assessment is around $30,000 and may vary by the nature and scope of the content stream being evaluated.

Please contact us for a no obligation discussion on how The Content Code assessment process will work for your company.