The greatest challenge of content campaigns: Reporting

Over the last few years, “content is king” has been a staple saying of the marketing world. Brands have jumped on the content bandwagon as the most effective way to connect with their audience. Furthermore, many studies show that the growth of the content marketing ecosystem has soared by leaps and bounds compared to “traditional advertising.”

There is, however, a fly in the content ointment. Because, while it looks good on paper, once we launch a content marketing campaign, we face a significant challenge – content-focused metrics.

Indeed, any content-creating company resorts to measurement tools such as Google Analytics, the social networks’ dashboards, or even dashboarding tools such as Google Data Studio. Unfortunately, solid as they are, those tools are unable to answer questions such as:

What content is more successful in terms of engagement and why?

For which phase of the customer journey are we creating more content?

For which stage of the journey are we garnering more visibility?

What type of actions are we focusing more on with our content?

And so on.

If we want to answer these questions, we need to address two critical issues:

1. A well-defined strategy for each phase of the customer journey (Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Conversion, etc.) and each type of action (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, etc.), what kind of content we want to create, and on which platforms.
2. A tool that links each content with the phase of the journey for which it works and the type of action it responds to.

One way of implementing these metrics by stage and type of action is to use Google Analytics with a high level of customization, properly tagging each piece of content. Unfortunately, that is a time-consuming approach. And, worst of all, it would only be helpful for blog or web content while leaving out all the social media parts.

Solving that problem was the main reason why we created Contegy. We needed a tool covering the entire content lifecycle: Strategy, Creativity, Production, and Measurement.

Once we have a single hub where the strategy, the generation of briefings and content, and all the metrics come together, we can start answering those persistent questions.

Even the longest customer journey begins with a single step. In Contegy, everything starts with the following ones:

1.- By defining buyer personas and their customer journey.

2.- By defining the platforms for each piece of content corresponding to the action type and journey stage.

Now, with these essential elements strategically established, it’s time to organize the brand’s activity into campaigns and actions.

Once this structure in place, we are good to go. We can start writing briefings and creating content associated with the previous elements of the strategy following this logic: Content -> Briefing -> Action -> Campaign -> Journey Stage & Action Type -> Buyer Persona.

Thus, when a content piece is published and thanks to Contegy’s multiple integrations with social networks and CMS, we can obtain content-focused reports that answer the questions we asked ourselves at the beginning of this post.