CHAPTER 8

Know When to Stop Talking

If you're a seasoned public speaker, you understand the value of “reading the room.” You can sense whether people are actively engaged and taking notes or are whispering to their seatmates. As the speech continues, you might notice people drifting off or clicking on their phones, giving you the gnawing sense that you need to change your routine mid-stream to yank their attention back from their phones or whomever they're texting. Maybe you need to stop and let them ask questions. In a matter of seconds, you should be able to monitor faces and expressions, and have a plan for making adjustments in real time to reengage the audience when things aren't going well.

On a more one-to-one conversational level, think about the last party you attended. Perhaps you were chatting with someone you just met, talking about yourself or your family. Did the person seem interested? Did their eyes stay focused on yours? Or were they looking at their watch, or around the room hoping to escape? At some point, if you read the room right, you locked it up and stopped talking in order to gauge their interest. If you didn't, you'd never learn if they had any interest or where you needed to go next in the conversation to gain it.

The Importance of Reading the Room

Whether you're up at the podium or in the cocktail party conversation, you should be reading the room. In marketing-speak, it simply means monitoring peoples' engagement. In less polite language, it means “Shut up and listen!” Content marketing is a series of conversations you're having with your audience that are intended to elicit a meaningful response. Some approaches don't always work, and methods that once worked, stop working. Knowing when to stop talking is just as important as knowing what to say. It's the only way to truly get a sense of what your audience (or your potential customer) is thinking, and whether to stay the course in your strategy or tweak it. What are you listening for from your audience when you stop talking?

• What they're saying.
• What they're not saying.
• What needs to change.

Essentially, you're observing individual engagement. Is your story being shared and starting new conversations? Is the response positive? If so, what piqued the audience's interest and got them excited? If not, can you determine what caused the negative reaction? Unless you've done something egregious, bad news is often good news. A lack of response or a negative response allows you the opportunity to adjust and make changes to better meet your audience's needs. It's block and tackle until you make a touchdown. And as you learn, you get to know your audience more intimately, allowing you to reach them in more creative and effectual ways.

In any content marketing strategy, if you start off thinking you have all the answers, you're going to lose. Just like a human conversation, if you're always doing the talking, you're not listening. Are you hammering your products too much? Are you dominating the conversation? Have you derailed the conversation to a place where your customers are unlikely to follow? Stop and measure the impact of what you've been saying. Then think about how to read the results in a way that allows you to adjust your message and ultimately build a strategy that can bring customers through the door.

How to Monitor Engagement

Just as we covered qualitative and quantitative listening tools (in Chapter 6) before the conversation starts, the same two principles apply after the conversation starts. And both are equally important.

Quantitative: It's All in the Numbers

If a tree falls in the forest, but your data didn't track it, did it make a sound? So goes your content. Content marketing isn't marketing unless it's analyzed some way, somehow for engagement and, ultimately, ROI. But you don't need to be a rocket scientist and sift through mountains of data to understand if your content is working.

In a nutshell, these are the raw numbers of data that your content can be converted to. It's all about your audience and what they're listening to. For example, how many people are coming to your site? Which pages are they visiting? What's the daily volume of traffic your site is experiencing? By analyzing the data, you can better understand where to devote your resources in your content marketing as well as which resources are working and those that aren't.

Though there are many, a few are worthy of mentioning here, both free and paid options. First, let's look at the freebies.

Google Analytics

If you're not using Google Analytics, you're not really listening. I know I'll get grief for stating this, but you can't argue with the math. Google Analytics is the best free listening tool around and will give you as much or more information than many similar paid listening tools. You just have to understand how to use it— which isn't always easy. Google Analytics gives you incredibly valuable insights as to how many people are reading your content, how many came back, how long they stayed, where they went, where they're from, what devices they're using, and whether they clicked on any links.

Additionally, Google Analytics can track your audience without knowing names and dig in to see things including:

• Topics people come to your site to find but don't.
• A high-level overview of how well your paid advertising campaign drove traffic to your landing pages as well as how many of those visiting converted into leads.
• General demographic information, such as age, gender, interests, and geographic location about your landing-page visitors.

“Google Analytics can uncover deeper, more-actionable insights that can paint a clearer picture of the results your content is achieving now and reveal critical opportunities to make improvements—if you know how to track them down and analyze those insights,” Jodi Harris of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) notes.¹

Other factors Google Analytics can help you track include social media traffic, blog post engagement, paths visitors take on your site, and whether people using mobile devices to access your materials are more or less engaged than people using other platforms.

And the truth is, Google Analytics does even more, more than could be listed here. And so, a word of advice: If you can only pick one listening tool to utilize, and you're just getting started, this is the one to choose and use.

Hootsuite (hootsuite.com)

Yup, this is a “before and after” tool for listening. Hootsuite features tools that help you monitor all your social media accounts in one place, alerting you to mentions so you can respond, and observe or join in the conversation. Social Mention collects data for you across multiple channels like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and offers some entry-level analytics free.

Bitly (bitly.com)

This one is often overlooked as a listening tool, but there's more to Bitly than a simple gadget that helps you shorten link names. The company also provides real-time analytics, helping track clicks, increase engagement, and personalize customer experiences. If you have a lot of links and channels you're directing people to, Bitly might be a good resource to help you manage them and analyze which ones seem to be working best.

Other paid content analysis platforms, such as HubSpot, TrackMaven, Marketo, and Curata, all help identify which channels and campaigns deliver the most revenue and highest marketing return on investment. Although features may differ among them, all offer “Google

Analytics on steroids” tools and reporting that can help you measure your progress and figure out what, if anything, you're doing in content marketing that's helping lead to actual sales. And when your content marketing strategy is mature enough and you've built an audience, you can more accurately assess ROI on certain pieces of content in the context of the whole campaign.

Of course, there are many more listening tools. This short list is to get you started on the variety available to you and what they're capable of helping you accomplish as you listen. Each of these, and in particular Google Analytics, is worth a look if you've reached the point at which it's time to step back and listen to what people are saying. After exploring these options, a simple Google search can help you find more and choose the ones that work best for you.

Now, although data is great for pinpointing trends and audience engagement, there's nothing quite like going directly to the source by having a real conversation with your audience to help you decide what they might want to listen to, and whether the data is off point.

Qualitative: Old-Fashioned Ideas Can Still Work

This is a deeper dive into engagement analysis, allowing you to ask yourself why people are engaging with your content and what they think of it. Qualitative research can also tell you what motivates the audience, helping you take a walk in your customers' shoes to see how your content resonates with them. Once you know this, you can fine-tune your strategy to target more specific customer groups and adjust your content to deliver what they truly seek.

You don't have to use the latest technology to stop and listen. The platforms mentioned above can help you dive deeper into the numbers, but they're not a replacement for good, old-fashioned “shoe leather” that, when combined, symbiotically produce the best results for truly homing in on what your customers are saying.

In the early years of advertising, “Mad Men” types in Madison Avenue high-rises who wanted to know what consumers were thinking convened focus groups. These live focus groups of consumers were gathered together and presented with survey questions in order to gather their thoughts on the company in question. Don't laugh. Some experts, even in today's web-focused content marketing industry, recommend interviewing customers either by phone or in person to get feedback. Some methods, unlike three-martini lunches, just don't go out of style. (Sorry, Don Draper.)

Post-Blog/Video Comments

Though you may not be ready to rent a room and hold a half-day seminar with your customers, you can use modern tools to get the equivalent information about them. This is the human side of engagement monitoring, more qualitative than quantitative. And it's two-sided, meaning you or someone at your company really must listen to what your customers say and be ready to act on it.

It's relatively easy to use any of the sites mentioned above to figure out where people are going on your site, how they got there, and what, if anything, they shared with others. But the questions remain: Why did they come in the first place, and what did they really think of what they found there? To analyze this, it's useful to have an actual person monitor all the interactions you get, especially the comment section of any social posts you've published.

Nearly every social media channel and blog has comments at some point. Once you build traction and have an audience, you should start getting feedback. People might respond with feedback saying, “Great article, but I have a question.” Yes, they will actually start talking and having real conversations with you, and it's public because it's in the comments. You can respond to the comments or use the comments as a way to provide traction leading you to your next post.

If people are responding positively or even negatively in the comments, use those comments as a lead to understand what they're looking to see more of related to your content. If they have a question, perhaps you should use your next post to help answer it. If you start getting negative comments, try not to get defensive. Negative comments can be very helpful in course correcting your content strategy if many people feel negatively about something.

Surveys

When you want to know how people are truly responding to your content, just ask them. Just as you might survey your audience prior to creating content, you can ask them how you're doing and how they're engaging in them. Be sure to honor their time and apply the same rules of brevity as laid out in Chapter 5.

Surveys don't have to be long and cumbersome, nor do you have to send them independent of your blog. These days it's pretty simple to include short surveys at the bottom of your content asking readers for a bit of input. A simple question below an article asking if the page was helpful or not is an easy click for your customers and can provide a sense of whether you're delivering what they want and need.

Test It Elsewhere

You don't necessarily need to rely on comments on your own blog for a better sense of how people view your story. You can also offer to guest blog on a relevant sister site. For instance, I was a guest blogger on the Content Marketing Institute's blog several times. Because it's a heavily trafficked site, I gained invaluable feedback from comments posted after each contribution in real time. When one of the articles made the “top picks” for that year, I knew I was onto something.

If you're a guest blogger, you can post, see what sort of comments you get, and find out what people are interested in reading. In turn, that knowledge can help you learn about angles that might resonate on your own site with your own customers.

Again, we're using the example of content marketing, but other industries have similar educational arms. For instance, if you're a business leader, Forbes.com is an excellent platform that offers a chance to post opinion pieces to a wide audience. If your company makes generic medicine, perhaps you should check with the Generic Pharmaceutical Association to see what sort of content opportunities it might offer. If you run a coffee shop, there's the Specialty Coffee Association. The list goes on, and almost every industry has this sort of resource where you can test your message. Not all of them will accept a guest blog, but you can be sure there are conversations going on, and you can test your message as part of those conversations and gain great insight based on the response you receive.

The Human Touch

One more note about engagement monitoring: Don't forget to keep listening. It's easy to have a computer program like Google Analytics crunch your numbers and make a snap decision that you're on the right track. Then you go away and forget about it and a critical mistake is made.

That's not how to be successful. You need to revisit and reassess often, meaning someone in your organization must be responsible for this task. Ask yourself: “Has there been a human intervention?” Just because you got a certain number of hits or engagements doesn't mean it's working. What does the process mean, and what purpose is served? If you're trying to get people to a website, you can scientifically track that, but qualitative insight can be difficult to determine if you don't have an actual person thinking things through who understands the strategy at its core.

Going back to our opening metaphor, read the room. Take a step back and think about what the room is telling you. Are people engaged? Are they adding to the conversation? What if the feedback is bad? Schedule a regular meeting with your team to discuss the feedback you're getting, so you can take the time to consider what's behind the numbers and how to adjust your strategy. Just be careful of reading data in a vacuum.

Data Diving: What Can Go Wrong?

There's no doubt that data is critical to measure the success of your content. But, if you're not analyzing it correctly, or not reading the right data, you could be undermining effective content. This is where a lot of companies run into trouble.

Numbers come with their own set of problems, and as Albert Einstein said, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

In other words, numbers are subject to interpretation. What you end up with might not reflect the true picture—something Einstein knew all too well. In the case of your content strategy data, this can be a potential struggle, especially if there's a rush among you and your colleagues to make the data correlate with preconceived notions or desires.

For one thing, there's likely going to be a lot of temptation— whether on your own part or among other leaders at your company—to interpret the data a certain way. Everyone is going to come at the results of the campaign with a different agenda, and you may feel pressured to make changes immediately that might not feel right.

But remember: Opening up and listening aren't just about stepping back and assessing your audience. It's also about being open to what the engagement data tells you, and not making split-second decisions, which might be based on some of the following mistakes. Here are four major pitfalls when it comes to reading data in a content marketing strategy.

Prodding the Data

The first mistake is one we just outlined, in which someone (perhaps you) looks at the data and tries to make it conform with preconceived notions. When data is used to validate an opinion, it's anticollaborative and can lead to biased decision-making.

How do you go about spotting the problem? Data from a single source, measured by one person, should throw up a caution flag. In cases like these, data might be getting measured without proper context, and/or prone to errors or omissions. Each of these scenarios should raise suspicion, with the possibility the person doing the analyzing is working in his or her own self-interest, rather than trying to come up with a broader assessment. Make sure this person isn't you, and also beware of others at your company who might take this approach. Be ready to argue your point and stand your ground.

Data Without Context

Carpenters are familiar with the expression “Measure twice; cut once.” This also applies to content marketing strategy. Many companies measure once and then start cutting away like a first-grader with a new pair of scissors and a pile of colored construction paper. No pause. The thinking behind the action is “The data says X, so we need to do Y.”

The problem is that hidden variables may be driving the results. Without collaborative interpretation of the data—such as allowing other members of the team, including yourself or your subject-matter experts—to challenge the insights, false assumptions can get made. You took the time to stop talking and listen to your customers. Good for you. Now stop and listen to the data being presented to you, and don't run off half-cocked.

Premature Data

Marketers sometimes make assumptions before a strategy can take hold and have an impact, which often leads to poor decisions. There is great pressure on marketers today to show immediate results, but you must try to set realistic expectations among stakeholders about how long it takes to see content marketing bear fruit. In most cases, data can be reasonably analyzed in six to twelve months, depending on the strategy and content channel. Prior to the passage of time, use your data analysis skills to make tweaks or identify early trouble spots. But don't make major changes based on the first batch of data. Building an audience who trusts you takes time because your content and your conversation needs to take hold.

Insufficient Data

If you have 100,000 people visiting your blog, and only three of them complain that the font size of the type in your blog is too small, chalk it up to macular degeneration of the three visitors. Your font size is fine. You'll never please everyone. (And when you increase your font size, someone else will complain it's too large.) Making changes based on small subsets of inconclusive data can lead you astray quickly and distract you from your true priorities. Don't be tempted by squeaky wheels. If a meaningful number of people complains about the same issue, then make changes.

Understanding the data you've measured requires multiple data sets, collaboration, and the ability to challenge assumptions. It also requires patience not to start chipping away at your strategy based on a few early data points. By taking your time and doing a careful analysis, you'll have a better sense that the correct assumptions are validated. Once validated, then you can take appropriate action.

The ROI Conundrum

After you've stopped, listened, and analyzed the data, your most important work might begin. Not everyone at your company—from the bottom to the C-suite—is going to understand how content marketing is supposed to work. It's likely you'll face questions about how to measure return on investment after you've conducted your research. Be prepared to discuss the long-term benefits, higher lifetime value of customers, and the lost opportunity costs as virtually all of your competition fills the content void without you. Remember: Content marketing generally sits on a path to purchase involving several touch points. Education is where the “prove it” crowd awaits your story. You don't want to get left behind by allowing your brilliant content marketing strategy to get hijacked.

Ultimately, a content marketing strategy must translate to ROI, but in most cases, this won't occur at the start. Though CMOs may tire of hearing the term, it's about audience and customer engagement. The more engaged an audience is, the more likely you will be able to convert the patience required to dollars. Your content marketing strategy is ultimately designed to bring customers and revenue to your door. You're not doing it for fun, nor to simply show off your social media prowess.

That said, it's very hard for a single content marketing effort (like an individual blog, post, or tweet) to result in the clang of a cash register. Again, we're not talking about putting up a billboard on Interstate 10 and watching to see how many more cars get off at the next exit to go to your restaurant. That's pretty easy to measure, and the results are pretty clear.

It's not that clean in content marketing. You're jumping into the middle of a bigger conversation and using micro-conversations with your unique approach. If you're new to the conversation, you won't be known. You have to build trust and not necessarily expect early ROI. Once you've had a legitimate run at your content marketing strategy and it's been out there six to twelve months, then go ahead and measure, and try to determine ROI. Just don't make the mistake of attempting to calculate it prior to that.

You might also have to educate your team to understand that just because you didn't get a certain number of hits or engagements doesn't mean your campaign isn't working. Remember that it's very difficult to track what ultimately led a customer to press the proverbial “buy” button. They may have been part of a conversation you participated in months ago and then moved along to other interests. But at some point, they saw a call to action of some sort and because of the work you did earlier, you're top of mind for them again and they go to your website.

If that sign-up doesn't happen for a month after they read your content, it's going to be hard to know if your blog post was the reason. A lot of marketers will measure ROI solely on the last click. Maybe there was an online banner with an offer and you can say they bought from you because of that banner. However, that doesn't take into account all the trust you built a month or two earlier when the customer was on your blog.

This attribution problem is a threat to content marketing because so many people make the mistake of expecting ROI right away, and, understandably, CMOs are increasingly under pressure to show ROI with everything they do. But it's not that simple. The truth is, if you're not using a content marketing strategy because it's hard to measure ROI, you may not be seeing the bigger picture. Content is king now, and it's not going away. And though there may be a lot of it, you have an opportunity to stand out because brands are still shouting. People want to have a conversation. They want to spend more time getting to know you, and like you as well. That's what content marketing is about—engaging over time, building trust, listening to feedback, and eventually having the customer see you as a partner. At the end of the day, it's about building an audience, not breeding customers.

Icebreaker

Using your fresh new brand personality (voice and tone from Chapter 1), think of three survey questions to test in a small sample of readers. Think about one main primary objective you're aiming for.

Think about what you're trying to get the audience to do and what you think they need to hear. I'll give you a hint: One of the questions should be a fill-in box asking for topic suggestions. Now you have only two to come up with on your own. Ready, go!