October 30, 2024
I was in Helsinki once when a woman came up to me after a talk and asked, “How can I get my content creators to care about their content?”. She was stating an inconvenient truth out loud – a lot of times, people just create the content and publish it. Whether or not it actually does anything is not really their problem. They just throw it over the wall and hope for the best.
One of the problems here is simple attribution – we generally don’t identify or track conversions as well as we should, so how would we know if our content was “effective”? In many cases, we can’t even define what “effective” even means.
A lot of content creators know this. I don’t want to say they hide behind it, but they simply know that their accountability ends with publication. They just have to get content out the door and are less concerned with what happens after that.
This is what my Finnish friend was struggling with. Her editors created a bunch of content, but after they hit publish, they didn’t have any skin in the game.
One of the solutions here is to include your tracking down to the “micro-event” or “micro-action” level. So, you don’t just track cart checkouts, but you break tracking down into smaller actions. If we accept that a conversion funnel includes lots of smaller events leading up to the moment where someone provides demonstrable value, you can start tracking those events.
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Don’t just track who clicks a video link from your home page. Track who plays it. Who gets to 10%. 50% 100% percent.
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Don’t just track page views, track scroll depth. How far “down” a piece of content does the visitor progress? (I like this so much better than time-on-page. Scrolling implies they’re doing something, and didn’t just switch windows or go to the bathroom.)
Once you’ve drilled down this level, you can more accurately track that wildly over-used word: “engagement.” And because you can track this more granularly, that means you can bring experimentation to bear.
Experimentation is what it sounds like: trying different things, with a structured tracking system to definitively define which option works better.
Consider:
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Don’t just write one headline for that article. Write five, each taking a different angle or in a different format or tone. Then find out which one gets clicked on more often.
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Fiddle with design elements on the page. Try different images that completely change the tone and focus of the article.
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Break the content down into different lengths. Find which one gets people to the Call to Action more consistently. Clearly, more people are likely to get to the end of shorter content, but how serious are they? Fewer people will stick with longer content, but they might be naturally more qualified leads.
Believe me when I said that you don’t know the answer to any of this. You don’t -- you might have theories or suspicions, but you don’t know. The only people who know are the people who are consuming your content, and experimentation fundamentally becomes a way to ask them.
I would never be so bold as to say that you’ll ever be able to absolutely predict with your customers want and what will resonate with them, but experimentation and micro-analytics gets you closer to refining that prediction over time.