Content Marketing: Creating vs. Engineering Content – The Final Chapter

Making Your Content Better

So to ring in the New Year, I’ll finally fight my way through the post-holiday haze and finally finish this series with my last post on optimization.

Part 1 – Understanding the Difference

Part 2 – Planning for Your Audience

Part 3 – Establishing Your Editorial Flow

Part 4 – Getting Your Content Distributed

Optimization for Content Is Different

First and foremost, we have to understand that optimizing for content marketing is different, just as engineering content is different from creating content. Good, well-planned content marketing will have very broad ramifications for any organization if done properly, therefore judging its performance and optimizing for better results has to be viewed from a multitude of angles. Below are just a few that need to be factored into the content equation.

Endemic Optimization

Are shares going up? Are Tweets? How much is your audience sharing the content that you are producing? Has that number gone up since you’ve started on your new content marketing program? What is getting the best response from your content?

Direct Optimization

Have you increased the number of subscribers to your newsletter or RSS feed? How are your open and forward rates on your eCRM? Are people reading and sharing your emails and content more than before? Are there particular types of content that get better open rates than others or RSS feeds that have a faster growing audience than others?

Social Optimization

How has your new content marketing plan affected what’s happening on Facebook? Or Twitter? Or Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, and countless others? Your social media team was probably thrilled when they heard that they weren’t going to have to curate an entire month’s worth of posts and that you were going to be providing them with insight-fueled, engaging content. Reach out and ask them if the collective fan base is a little more active? And what do they response to best and on which platforms? Take that info and feed it back into your planning, editorial, and distribution.

Organic Optimization

Now this is what has all of the search people in the world salivating over the concept of content marketing. How is your organic search performance? Are more people coming in via organic search than before? Are they coming in for more long-tail keywords because of those awesome articles you are able to write? What content is bringing in the best visitors?

Paid Distribution

The paid, earned, and owned space are all supposed to be working in concert if you’re doing it right, so what is the overall effect you are seeing on your paid media spend? Do you have to spend less “working dollars” to push your brand marketing because you are spending a little more “non-working dollars” to pull them into your sales funnel instead? I certainly hope so

Website Optimization

How’s your site performing? Are sales up? Other KPIs too? What pages are getting the best results and leading to the highest and most profitable conversions? What about templates? Are their certain UIs that are working harder? Take that info and feed it back into the loop.

Retail Optimization

That’s right. Your content marketing does not just have to live in the digital space. Companies like REI bring their content strategy right into their stores just like they do on their website. So what’s moving products off the shelves? Did a certain in store demonstration gather a crowd? And can that in-store demo be turned into a piece of content for the website? Or vice versa?

Content Optimization

So you’ve judged the impact of your content on all your different channels, because it really can have that wide of an organizational impact. But have you looked at judging just the content itself? Are certain articles getting a better time on site? Certain headlines getting a better response? Certain authors? What about the revenue generated per pageview? Make sure you are tying back everything listed above into an appropriate ROI model, otherwise you are never going to find out what your investment in content marketing is truly worth to your organization.

It’s Finally Over

Well that’s all I have to say about content marketing. At least for the immediate future. When I decided to do a blog serial , I didn’t think it was going to span several months. But thanks to everyone who has read, shared, commented. I hope this entire series has been helpful for those who are embarking on these endeavors.

If you’re planning to get more into content marketing soon, I highly also recommend reading this article from my colleague, David Germano.

Alec Painter serves the dual roles of Associate Director of Search Marketing for Empower MediaMarketing and Content Engineer for the Empower Group's content marketing offering, Magnetic Content Studios. His passion for digital began in high school, when he began using digital tools to record and market his music through websites and social media. Since then, he has honed his digital strategy skills working with a myriad of brands, including Fortune 500 financial, CPG, retail, and entertainment industry brands.

Alec Painter

View all posts by Alec Painter
Alecs website