What's the most meaningful way to monitor effectiveness? A channel-centric view of performance metrics may not lead to best quality results. 

Channel-Centric or Content-Centric?

Taking a channel-centric view (assessing the effectiveness of specific channels, such as social or email) is common for many marketers. However with a channel-centric view, success metrics (i.e. opens, likes, shares, comments) are often either vanity metrics, or are not indicative of the quality of conversions achieved.

After all, if the content shared via your channels does not resonate with the right readers, you won’t secure good-fit leads - even through top performing channels.

So instead of being channel-centric, we believe a content-centric view is a more meaningful measure of success. If you start with quality content - created with your persona in mind - and then deliver it via the right channels, activity will be better targeted, relevant and effective in delivering best traffic, leads and opportunities. Of course this doesn’t mean measuring channels is irrelevant. On the contrary, you still need to know which channels perform best - and which digital channels your buyers are active on. But you must consider channel success through a filter of content relevancy and good-fit conversion.

6 Tips to Develop a Content-Centric Process and Perspective

1. Audit your current content, firstly to see to see what topics are resonating and drawing traffic, and secondly to see what’s converting the most (and best quality) leads. Make sure that the traffic and conversions on your top content are relevant for the type of customer you want to attract. If you’re converting a lot of poor-fit business, you’ll need to review the direction of your content.

2. Maintain a ‘relevancy’ content-perspective when reviewing content metrics. There’s no use having a high conversion rate if those leads will never become MQLs, SQLs or customers.

3. Develop new, relevant content (that addresses persona challenges throughout the funnel). If you’re stuck at this stage, it may help to review the content that current good-fit opportunities are looking at. What content did they convert on initially? Can you dig deeper into the topics they’re interested in? What lead insight do you have from sales conversations - can you use this to inform new content? Here you may want to develop a content hub around each key topic, which can be beneficial to your SEO.

4. Successful content topics will likely have a limit on their effectiveness to draw organic traffic - where creating new, topic-relevant content will see decreasing returns. It’s important to identify and monitor these ‘topic ceilings’ (this can be done in Google Analytics) to ensure you’re using/optimising topics that will still see traction.

5. Produce evergreen/compounding content where possible to retain marketing effectiveness long term. Relevant content that gives evergreen, helpful advice, will consistently deliver relevant traffic. Remember, you can add to the value of good evergreen content by updating or repurposing it.

6. When sharing your content via digital channels, be sure to monitor what’s generating the greatest volume of relevant traffic back to your site, and what’s being read and shared by your relevant audience.

As mentioned above, taking a content-centric view does not mean that you disregard channel performance - you’re simply monitoring success with content relevancy and good-fit conversion front-of-mind, rather than metrics that don’t offer true insight into traffic and lead quality.