Measuring the performance of your content campaigns and other online activities isn’t as simple as looking at data — you need to know the content marketing metrics that matter. The Synthesio platform now lets you track top URLs, hashtags and retweets, simplifying the task of measuring campaign feedback, content performance, brand intelligence and more. The goal of these new tools is to move you past vanity metrics (e.g. likes and followers) and help you understand how your content marketing is performing online. We believe that’s the best way to identify strengths and weaknesses in your content marketing and make the necessary adjustments to achieve success.
Our latest release, Synthesio 3.0, introduced new widgets to help you track top URLs, hashtags, and retweets:
Many content marketing campaigns have a chance to succeed, but marketers don’t always do the right things to promote success. This is especially true in the post-launch phase of your campaign. Suppose you’ve spent time planning your campaign, building the message and materials, scheduling and deploying it. Now your campaign is live on the internet and users are interacting with it. At this stage, many marketers assume that their work is done, but that’s where they are mistaken. In some ways, this is the most critical phase of your campaign — the “measurement phase”.
In an ideal world, your content marketing campaign will achieve its pre-launch KPIs without any manual follow-up or maintenance. This rarely happens, though, and sometimes it causes marketers to panic. But it shouldn’t; it just means that some measurement and re-calibrating is required. Suppose your campaign isn’t generating the level of buzz you had anticipated. Taking a look at your top URLs may tell you a different story. Perhaps your overall buzz is underperforming, but you are generating a lot of conversation on a couple of sites. What’s the nature of those sites? Are they forums, blogs, social networks or something else? Where in the world are they based? Are they dedicated to certain types of users or discussions? Answering these questions can help you find out where your campaign is generating interest, so you can focus more resources on stoking the conversation on those high-performing channels.
Similarly, taking a look at your top hashtags can help you identify topics within your campaign that are resonating with users. Many marketers assume that the brand hashtag will garner the most discussion. However, most of the time users make the conversation about themselves rather than the brand (they want to talk about a particular experience they’ve had with a product or service rather than discuss your company generally). While this may seem like an unintended outcome, it’s actually an opportunity for your brand. You now have information on what your customers care about, which means that you can address that issue head-on in your next campaign. This will make your customers feel like you’re speaking to them directly rather than gesturing broadly at the marketplace. Customers that feel like they are being heard tend to be happier.
That brings us to the next important point: content marketing campaigns should help you find users that are vocal about your brand — whether they are saying positive or negative things. With our new top retweets tool, you can see which tweets have garnered the most attention and the users that posted them. Again, many marketers assume that the brand’s tweets will rank at the top of this list, and often they are wrong. The reason is the same: users latch on to a personal commentary, often times voiced by other customers, about experiences with a specific product or service. Whether your top retweeted tweets are positive or negative, you can identify the users you need to connect with — either to repair your brand’s image or to boost positive commentary.
Content marketing is a critical part of brand communications, but if you aren’t able to measure and track the metrics that matter to your content marketing campaigns, you are losing valuable data and insights. To find out more about how we can help you better understand, track and measure your content marketing campaigns, drop us a line or request a demo. We’re excited to hear from you.
