We’ve all heard “Content is king” for as long as we can remember but it’s never been truer than now. The last year and a half have put content at the very epicenter of marketing and today most (if not all) brands - big and small - are focusing on creating content that truly matters. In fact, according to a research done by the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of respondents said the top content-related area that their organization will continue to invest in is content creation. 

So, it’s no surprise to us that brands are no longer asking us whether they should be creating content but instead our conversations focus on how to create content that contributes to business goals while consistently delivering value to the intended audience. 

The Need for Optimization

As Robert Rose, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Consulting Group at the Content Marketing Institute, rightly pointed out - the business case for content has changed as brands focus more on streamlining content strategy and efforts, with growing emphasis on scale and optimization. Simply put, brands are realizing they’ve spent so much time, money, resources and talent on generating great content without being able to further the bottom line. Hence, content teams and leaders are now desperate for a solution that ensures all their investments and efforts convert, i.e. content drives business outcomes. 

The root cause: most brands’ content teams have been tasked with:

• Creating too much content
• Managing several distribution channels 
• Using technological tools that don’t support their needs
  

All these factors add to operational complexity and the inability to effectively measure performance. However, to ensure a positive impact on business outcomes, brands need a 360-degree view of all their content initiatives and their performance. 

What’s a ‘360-Degree View of Content’?

With a 360-degree view of content you are equipped to: 

• Consolidate content data from owned and paid channels, custom publishers, emails, and investor and employee communications 
• Enhance quantitative data with sentiment data 
• Identify the top- and bottom-performing content
• Get real-time data on the successes and failures of your content
  

How can you get a 360-degree view? By adopting a content intelligence platform. It will allow you to aggregate data across all your channels while helping you access, gather, and analyze different types of content data. This unified data collection will be at your fingertips, providing information in real time - a complete game changer! 

But why is having access to a 360-degree view of your content so important? 

A 360-Degree View is a Prerequisite to Creating Impact 

Proving the value of content is a need that comes up constantly during our engagements with customers, industry analysts, and the cross-industry content community. Which is why, at Knotch, we believe that content needs to be connected to three key business outcomes - enhance brand, increase ROI and build an audience. Connecting these outcomes to measurable KPIs can help brands successfully track the performance and impact of their content.

However, when data is scattered across teams, channels, and tools, it’s nearly impossible to derive any real insights from it. As a result, content teams end up: 

• Putting in a lot of manual effort to working on spreadsheets - consolidating and analyzing data. This steers them away from spending time on meaningful creative work that content marketers are actually meant to do.
• Relying solely on tools that aren’t built to measure content. Eg: Complete reliance on web analytics platforms, leading to the adoption of vanity metrics, which can potentially misinform your content strategy. 

Scaling Through Organization

At the end of the day, the goal of most content teams is to deliver content experiences that facilitate meaningful engagements and inspire high-value actions. Consequently, content initiatives are becoming increasingly cross-functional and sophisticated in nature. Hence, the content creation process often involves different combinations of both internal and external contributors and experts. 

While this can spur creativity and help create content faster, it can also pose the challenge of organizing data and identifying contributions that are moving the needle. After all, you don’t want to continue spending money on resources that aren’t contributing to your goals. Understanding where the success of your content is coming from can help optimize and scale efforts and minimize wasting time on regressors. 

Insights > Numbers

As brands hone in on their content efforts, it’s critical to measure content in a way that ensures you’re deriving insights and not just vanity numbers. This is because, deriving and actioning on content-specific insights can fundamentally transform your content strategy, its execution, and impact on your business. These insights could provide answers to questions such as: 

• How does your audience feel about your content and why do they feel that way? 
• How is your content performing at both aggregate and granular levels, how has it changed over time, and how is it performing against industry benchmarks? 
• What proportion of your audience scrolled through more or less than a minimum acceptable length of your content? 
• What are the most popular user journeys and which content drives the most impactful journeys? 
  

A 360-degree view of content that comes with a content intelligence platform is the first step towards deriving these insights, and therefore, vital to the success of your content marketing efforts.

Equipping your content teams with the tools they need to succeed will not only save them time but encourage them to focus on what they do best - create great content - all the while ensuring you’re investing in efforts that matter.

If you’d like to learn more about content intelligence, request a demo here.