Byron White, President of ideaLaunch, and Carolyn McKibbin, Director of Content Services, presented a Webinar entitled “Tracking Content ROI”  at the BrightTALK Content Marketing Summit on January 20^th.

Byron started by going over some of the basics behind content marketing and the factors that can make it challenging if you don’t have a solid strategy. The goal of content marketing is to engage, educate, and earn the trust of potential clients or customers. The idea is that once potential clients or customers come to see you as a trusted source of industry information, they will move out of the “potential”category and become converted.

Readers, however, are moving at a faster pace than ever nowadays, so Byron explains that we need to be catching people “on the fly.” Using content assets like applets, webinars, desktop downloads, RSS feeds, Podcasts, mobile apps, widgets and gadgets (all with marks of your brand identity), you can easily, quickly reach out to today’s discriminating consumers.

Carolyn then took over and began her portion of the Webinar discussing the importance of researching how a particular client stacks up against its competition. Detailing this helps pinpoint opportunities for improvement. Then, a content and SEO plan is created. This process begins by going after the “low-lying fruit,”—keywords between positions 11-50 in Google that will give clients the best chance of reaching higher listings.

Clients should be involved the whole way as well, going through keyword lists and choosing “golden keywords,” some that have higher rankings than others. Those with high rankings are referred to as primary keywords and will do the work of improving client rankings for their web site, and other, secondary keywords, help to buffer the primary keywords by providing them with relevancy that tells the search engines what that page is talking about.

Using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter is an effective way to find out what people are saying about your clients and their industry. This insight will help you to develop an effective content strategy and find the right content assets to formulate that strategy. Content should always be time-stamped and scored to determine the effect that it is having for the client

Return on Investment (ROI) can be measured in a lot of ways. Increases in listing position, sales, traffic, warm leads, conversion rates, and decreased user acquisition cost all point to positive ROI. All of this should be correlated with your content assets to see what has had the most effect and when. You can also track your landing pages—looking at traffic, repeat visitation and the length of time people are spending on your site. Like Byron says, “If you’re not tracking your landing pages, you’re living in the dinosaur age.”

Image from buffalocoin.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Content Creation, Content Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.