Measuring performance is key to proving the value of content, yet only 46% of marketers use content analytics to decide their content strategy. This disconnect is one of the key findings in our new Content Matters 2023 Report—“how content teams are driving growth, measuring what works, and thinking about the future.”

Hear industry leaders unpack the report’s takeaways and offer their insights for creating more personalized, engaging content for audiences in 2023. Watch The State of Content Marketing with Aprimo CMO Ed Breault and Uberflip Co-Founder Randy Frisch. 

During this one-hour panel discussion, you’ll hear: 

• Why content teams and their budgets are still growing—despite economic uncertainty.
• What’s driving the tectonic, organizational content shift from quantity to quality.
• The increasing role personalization plays in delivering tailored content experiences that drive business results.
• How “usable content analytics” like Parse.ly is helping marketers make smarter, data-driven content decisions.

Transcript

Kayla Mehojah:

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We’ll wait just one more minute to make sure we can get a few more folks on here who might be joining us a little bit late. So bear with us for just a second. All right, so without further ado, we’ll go ahead and get started. We will also have this as an on-demand webinar later, so for those people joining a little bit late, we’ll have that available as well. But thank you for being here with us today. My name is Kayla Mehojah, I’m a content marketer. I’m with WordPress VIP. I’ve been here for about a year or so. And for those of you who don’t know, WordPress VIP is an enterprise grade content management system along with our analytics tool, Parse.ly. I am joined today by a couple of industry leaders in the content marketing world and I’d love for them to introduce themselves. Randy, let’s start with you.

Randy Frisch:

Fantastic. Great to be here with the two of you. I’m Randy Frisch. I’m one of the co-founders of a company called Uberflip. We are the best friend of a content marketer, as many people often say, because to get all that content out, you got to package it into a great experience. So we are a content experience platform used often in different go-to market motions like account-based marketing, just general demand generation, and even working closely with sales reps through sales engagement. So I’m the chief evangelist over there and excited to be chatting up with the two of you.

Kayla Mehojah:

Awesome.

Ed Breault:

Awesome. Yeah, Kayla, thank you, Randy. Really excited to have the talk. And my name is Ed Breault, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo. Aprimo is software as a service technology market leadership in two product categories, digital asset management and marketing resource management. And when you think about WordPress VIP and Uberflip, it will be the central hub for content to feed those endpoint content experiences. So then plugs into CMS, plugs into Uberflip to get the content into the experience.

Kayla Mehojah:

Awesome. Thank you so much both of you for joining us today. And we are really going to be covering some of the highlights of our latest content matters report, discussing some of those trends, offering advice along the way. But I would really like to first talk about the thing that is sort of on everyone’s mind right now, which is the economy. Missed our intro slide, but the thing about our research right now is that it is really important for content marketers, but not only content marketers, it’s also important for technology marketers, it’s important for media professionals. If anybody who touches content, I mean, it really relates to them. So we’re going to be touching on a lot of things, but like I said, first we’re going to talk about the economy a little bit.

I know it’s sort of heavy on everyone’s mind right now, but what was really interesting about this research is that we found content teams and budgets are still growing despite that economic uncertainty. And they grew last year and they are expected to grow again this year. So 58% expect those content budgets to grow this year and last year almost half of our respondents reported an increase in their budgets from last year. So it’s really interesting to see that. I think that was probably one of my most important takeaways, especially within the tech space because there’s been a lot of layoffs and things like that and budget cuts. So was this surprising to you guys? Have you noticed the same thing at your organizations? Can you guys touch on that trend and a little bit of why that was surprising or not?

Randy Frisch:

Sure. Ed, do you want to go first?

Ed Breault:

I’ll go first, absolutely. This is definitely what I’m seeing as well, certainly not surprised by the statistics here. Leadership is you get to the front in the turns. We’ve seen this previously. We’ve had a financial crisis, we’ve had a human crisis, getting through economic uncertainty is an opportunity for sure. And with technology, with content, brands are looking at what they do, what they do well and how they do those things efficiently. And I’m actually really hopeful that we’re finally at a place where regardless of economic situations, this idea of content and technology being a place to go for perseverance, we’re there.

So have been talking a lot lately about this concept of content being a core competency for organizations, for brands regardless of economic climate and content ops is the new marketing ops. So content moving more to the core of businesses to do the changes. So whether that be creating tighter customer relationships, growing organically through the customer base and then staying in touch with the market. And also trends here, we go, check out Scott Brinker, he’s got the big MarTech landscape. Content technologies are taking over that 9,000 plus landscape now. It’s just the trend that has been happening. So I continue to see or I expect to see this trend continue and continue to grow through all these terms that we’re experiencing.

Randy Frisch:

Yeah, just to build on that, Ed, I mean, first off, to answer your question, Kayla, it is such a relief to see this data because I talk to marketers who are customers, and as a marketer myself, I believe that content is so key and I’ll get to that, but it’s great that your team went and ran all this research and that this is the true sentiment and to see how many people have the support, as Ed said, of their leadership team to go and continue to invest. And I think as Ed kind of outlined, I mean, the last few years to me have really represented some maturity in content in general, almost forced maturity. And I think this recession that we are… I’m going to use the word recession that we’re in, is only going to further that maturity. And what I mean by that is if you go back, let’s go back like 10 years in a time machine, HubSpot made content relevant for growth.

This whole mindset when companies were growing at exponential rates, HubSpot said, “You can grow any business as long as you have content and you go inbound.” And that was a big movement for content. But as big as that was, I think as I said, what we’ve seen in the last few years is when there’s a shift in the market and there’s a shift in how a company needs to go to market more than ever, we need to produce the right content for those times and for what people are looking for. And there’s been no bigger shifts in the last three, four years than a combination of a pandemic and now recession because for all of us, no matter what we’re selling, our buyers have had to adapt what they’re looking for, how they’re looking to solve, and we’ve had to adapt what we’re putting in front of them and what that’s done aside from as you see here, we’re going to go and create more content.

It’s also said we have to adjust what content we put in front of buyers. There’s a really interesting study aside from this one that I leaned into heavily myself. Credit goes to Tom Butta over at Airship raised this one to me and it was a report from Bain that came out and it’s all about the economy and how to navigate the recession. And it talked about, don’t get me wrong, there’s going to be companies who are going to suffer. But the reality is, and I’m looking at the number 47% more rising stars, so companies that will do really well, and the way they do well as seen in previous trends is that they’re out putting the right content in front of the right buyer at the right time.

Now, that’s my interpretation of it, but to literally quote their words, the answer that they gave was that the key to superior customer engagement in these times is to invest in digital capabilities, to engage customers at the right place, right time, and on their terms. To me, that is what all of our companies, Ed, Kayla’s, that’s what we’re trying to help our customers do. And that’s what marketers need to do right now more than ever.

Kayla Mehojah:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important to really nail down that customer journey and personalization has a lot to do with that, which we’ll touch on in a little bit. And Ed, you talked about leadership early on in your response, and I think that’s really interesting because we’ve actually seen a huge connection between leadership buy-in and connecting your content to revenue goals. And I think that’s where a lot of disconnect has been is really strategizing that content and not just being sort of a content vending machine. And we actually saw that 72% of our respondents that have content revenue goals believe their senior leadership understands the value of content.

Comparatively, only 16% of those without content revenue goals feel that their leadership is bought into that value of content. And you can’t get those team increases, you can’t get those budget increases unless your leadership is bought in. And these goals are extremely important to tracking your content performance, tying it to ROI. But even more important than that, 82% of people say the importance of using content as a revenue driver has increased. So I mean that’s a staggering number, right? 82%, that’s basically everybody. And if your content is acting as a revenue driver, you have to be able to track it. You have to be able to tie it back to ROI and get that leadership buy-in, right? So Randy, where does this imply that content is best used?

Randy Frisch:

That’s a great question. Let’s go back to what I was hitting on before, right? Back in that time machine, what did HubSpot tell us? HubSpot told us that content’s great for generating leads, right? And it absolutely is top of funnel. Throw a form on content 10 years ago and it was a great way to fill our funnel so that we could do sales outreach and we could nurture people with emails. But if you fast-forward to where we are today, I think more than ever we’re seeing a shift from just pure, what can we do with SEO to what can we put in front of a buyer? And I think there’s been this evolution to say not only is content really valuable to generate leads, but it actually is perhaps even more important to progress someone through these different stages of the buyer journey.

Now, whether you think about that as Salesforce opportunity stages going from 10% to 60% or 60 to that eventual a 100, the role of content starts to play different roles. And as a result, we need different types of content. So to your point, we’re no longer this machine where we need a blog post every week so that someone’s coming. It’s what content do we have to fill at these different stages? Now, that’s where we start to see, in my opinion, content being elevated and maturing because it’s being tied to a lot of more revenue generation strategies that we talk about. Maybe the most popular acronym these days is ABM, account-based marketing. And the idea that I always say to people is, there’s no point in spending all of this money to figure out which accounts to go after, whether you’re using a 6sense, Demandbase, Terminus type of platform, love them all.

I’ll throw RollWorks in, someone’s going to call me from RollWorks and tell me I didn’t say RollWorks. They’re all great. So we spend all that money to say this is who I’m going to go after. Then we use channels at our disposal. We may put an ad in front of them using one of those platforms. We may use our email marketing automation, but the part that we often don’t complete, and I think this is the part that’s maturing, is make sure that that directs them to content, directs them to something that’s suited to the account we identified, the channel we determined that was right and ultimately the destination that they want to be drawn into.

Kayla Mehojah:

Yeah, I think that’s spot on, and I think that’s where a lot of people get lost. Like I said, they get into this content vending machine, they’re just pushing out on a schedule and they’re not really thinking about how that content is impacting their audience. And I don’t know about you guys, but I hate getting pushed the wrong content at the wrong time. And it’s not any fault of anybody, it’s just that I’m not the right audience perhaps for that exact piece of content. But boy, when somebody sends me the right thing at the right time or I get an ad that is exactly what I’ve been looking for, it’s like divine intervention in a way. I mean, it’s all the algorithms at work, but it feels like that company is listening to me and my needs and they’re meeting those and I’m so much more likely to buy into that product then at that time. And how can teams use this to continue to push for more resources and more buy-in from leadership?

Ed Breault:

Yeah, I’m actually pleasantly surprised by that number obviously the elevation of content to strategic priorities. What I think we’ve gotten really good at time machine. Let’s go back in Randy’s time machine 10 years ago, it was hard to measure. It was hard to get content analytics insights, content performance understood. The technologies come a long way. How do I get support for resources? Data. Data that supports revenue outcomes for the business. Why? Because where does money come from? It comes from, I call it within SaaS B2B, it’s a shared wallet. So I’m competing over other programs across the business. For any business, obviously speaking in terms that the CFO understands so that you can make these conscious data substantiative investments. So data, start there, like I said, I think we’ve gotten really good at it. And the twist on the concept of return on investment is return on effort. Why? Because when you look at, it’s more of a full equation of how much work did it take to get the outcomes for the brand, for the company that I was looking for.

If you’re able to calculate the full equation, you’re going to be able to cost justify and win over other competing priorities within an organization. That gets back to culture where we could probably have a whole other webinar on data-driven culture and the idea of on the front end of your content strategy, the front end of creating content experiences, making sure you’ve got a very well-thought-out defined measurement framework for what the content is going to drive for the business. And I know we’re going to talk about this a little later, so I’ll save some of the how to, but start with data, and from there, have a good supporting investment case for why you need more resources. Do your homework. Look at from an efficiency standpoint, cost per should be everything that we look at when we make investments, is it…

So make sure you’ve got a good financial lens put on your content strategy. You’ve got to have the measurement layer in place and you’ve got to have systems that serve up data at a consistent rate that are persistent over time so you can have confidence in the data you’re putting your name on. That’s going to go to the CFO or your CEO or investment committee. And that’s really where you’ve got to start. Technology will help you get there. Data hygiene will help you get there as well as strong, efficient content practices.

Randy Frisch:

I think you may be muted, Kayla.

Kayla Mehojah:

Yep, muted. So I could cough without anybody hearing me. Sorry about that. I’m on the tail end of a cold. So I’m glad you brought up data because that’s something that’s going to carry through our entire chat here today. But it’s also the thing that is creating the shift in strategy as well. A lot of people are moving from doing just a ton of content to focusing on that more high quality content. And what’s interesting is 61% are producing more content. We expected that. Content production has been up for the last few years, but it’s actually down from 66% in 2022. Even more staggering is that we saw 9% in 2022 are producing less content, but now that’s doubled to 18%. So a lot of people are really moving from what we like to call the content hamster wheel where you’re just kind of going, going, going, and there’s really no getting off easily.

And they’re sort of slimming down that content strategy, really focusing on their return on effort and producing less that means more. And I think part of that too is people have a lot less resources. Now, we see that, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later as well. I think marketers particularly struggle with burnout a lot as well, just because it’s a constantly evolving environment. We’re all short-staffed and overworked, right? But in a more positive light, we’ve also seen a lot of improvements in strategy and performance over the last couple of years. So Randy, can you talk about this trend a little bit? How does the shift from quantity to quality improve the content experience for our audiences?

Randy Frisch:

Sure. So maybe I’ll be a little controversial here. I think it’s great if we stop producing so much content, right? Yeah, I’m getting thumbs up. I wrote this book and at first everyone was like, “What the hell are you doing? Every content marketer will [inaudible 00:19:40] you.” But…

Kayla Mehojah:

I love it.

Randy Frisch:

… the point was not the content marketers suck. I love you all. And it wasn’t that content marketing is not important, it came off as data I had seen of how much content we create that never goes used. The number was over 70% [inaudible 00:19:56] Forrester at the time. And I think we’re still seeing that in a lot of companies. That hamster wheel that you described we’re still stuck in many cases on a content calendar mindset versus what I like to think of in the marketer seat is more of a campaign mindset. What are the different campaigns that I need to run to meet my customer at the right time and what gaps do I need to fill?

And as a result, we start to be able to fill those gaps. And I think one stat I’d love for us to track better is how much content are we actually deleting that’s no longer relevant? How much content did we go back and update to be more relevant right now? And what we really need to do is start to do that because otherwise, whether we’re focusing on this from an SEO perspective where Google’s going to index things that we maybe no longer want to surface, or if we flip over to the other side of the buyer journey and we flip over to how our sales teams are looking to find content, you’re probably going to pull out your hair if you go and watch some of the sales emails being sent out where your own reps are sending content from two years ago, that is completely off message, off brand, off whatever.

So to me, this is a great stat in that it’s reducing and as well as you say, improvements in strategy. I mean, that’s the part that to me, this is great. I’m sad that it’s burnout that’s maybe getting us to realize and take a look at our strategy. I mean, that’s unfortunate, but I encourage anyone who’s in the content marketing role to be bold enough to go in and say, we should create less content. We’ve got to be more thoughtful and we’ve got to figure out what our buyers are looking for. And that involves, as Ed will, I’m sure tell you, being in the CMO seat spending just as much time listening to your audience of what they want is also listening to your sales team. What are they asking the CMO and the marketing org for and focusing on that content as much as that calendar mindset.

Ed Breault:

Yeah. I’ll add a little bit to that as well because you just triggered a bunch of things for me, Randy. Yeah, absolutely you got to trust your troops on the ground, your front lines folks, but the content house is a mess. And like Marie Kondo says, does it spark joy? Does your content spark joy? Are you getting rid of the old? Are you pruning? Are you moving past it? And there is this vast world of unworthy content, or vast wilderness, I should say, of unworthy content. And I tracked it down to these four, I call them the four Vs of content, volume, variety, velocity, veracity. We were talking about volume. And when you go at high volumes, you create a lot of waste, a lot of byproduct, a lot of content pollution.

Variety, you’ve got lots of variations of content for the endpoints, which content needs to go and the various formats on different form factors, et cetera, of where it needs to go. These four violators are contributing to the why that we see right here. The veracity, I call it content is the ultimate truth maker. So volume, variety, velocity, veracity. So the speed, the faster you go, obviously. So slow down, be more conscientious and be more intentional with what you’re doing. Clean up your content house, get it in order, and make sure that what you put out there, because it represents your brand. Are you looking at all the stuff on your brand that’s out there? Should it just be put it in a dumpster, light it on fire, clean up your house and give it? Does it spark joy test?

Kayla Mehojah:

You said content pollution. And I just love the visual that that gives me, because I mean, it really is, even if I go visit, like let’s say for example, I’m looking at a new MarTech solution. If I go and I look at their content on their website, for example, and it’s hard for me to find what I’m looking for, I’m going to leave, right? I’m going to bounce. So being able to kind of pair down what you have and really give that clear picture and that I don’t know, that easy experience for people to find what they need, I think that is so important. And that’s kind of actually where personalization comes in, which is our next talking point. And I know it’s a bold statement, but really in my opinion, personalization is sort of a new SEO. You see a lot of teams now have their own SEO position, SEO role.

It’s become a huge part of marketing strategy. And I feel that personalization is on the rise to get to that SEO level, and here’s why. I think personalization really delivers that tailored content experience. It drives business results. And now with 82% needing content to drive revenue, it’s extremely important to have that personalization strategy. And also because we found that teams with the personalization strategy are creating less content. But on the flip side, teams that are AB testing are actually creating more content. So I think it’s interesting that personalization leads to less content, but testing leads to more, and this is something you’d obviously have to evaluate on your own team, but the hard thing is that personalization is cumbersome, but it really leads to results. And I would love for you both to touch on, maybe Ed, you can go first.

Ed Breault:

Sure.

Kayla Mehojah:

What does personalization mean to you? Do you have any advice for teams who are struggling with it even though it’s something that they should be doing?

Ed Breault:

Oh, absolutely. I think both Randy and I were really smiling on this because we love this statement. When I look at…

Randy Frisch:

It’s sexy, it’s so sexy.

Ed Breault:

It is. So I see this relationship. So when you think about SEO, and now with personalization, I look at it like a healthy marriage between a couple. It’s a long-term commitment and it’s something you can’t just get immediately. So you make a long-term commitment to earn things. You earn keywords in SEO, you rank for things in SEO, you become an authority in SEO, but that takes time, commitment, consistency to get there. And now personalization, I think it definitely needs to start with, well, how do we define personalization? Because I think it could mean many things to many folks.

Kayla Mehojah:

Right.

Ed Breault:

A lot of it can feel contrived. Some of the early forms of personalization today are creepy, and I’m offended. I’m offended when I think about it. And actually did grab a stat on personalization from Gartner. They said that 80% of marketers will abandon their personalization efforts by 2025 because of lack of return on investment. So they’ve been grinding it out, burning their people out to get there and they don’t see success. We’ve got the death of the cookie, we’ve got customer data management problems where we were trying to piece it all together and give the most dynamic, responsive, personalized experience. And then integration protection of course with regulation. And I’m not putting my data out there, I don’t trust folks. So I’ll take another contrarian view is that there is a business case to be made against personalization or at least traditional forms of it. And when we think about it, is it really who or is it the where? Those have two different forms of personalization dimensions.

And then I go back to what kind of content works. And when we look at content that is, or this idea of monetizing creativity, I always go to Disney because they’re really good at it. Are they creating a movie that’s designed to resonate with eight year olds in Austin? No, they’re actually looking to connect with kids in all countries and parents in all countries with universal experiences that are valuable. So I think the new challenge or the paradigm of personalization is how can you? Again, there’s also the will it scale question that how do you find a balance of creating awesome experiences that are meaningful, monetizing creativity for business form transactions, but doing it in a way that doesn’t put off the consumer at the same time. So universal experiences that are consistently working versus trying to find that segment of one experience that you’re just never going to find.

Randy Frisch:

It’s interesting. So first off, I fully know what you mean about those companies that you absolutely hate their attempts of personalization. You’re like, give me a break. I just lay off. I don’t trust you anymore. You basically broken my trust right away. But there are companies that I love their definition of personalization and one that always, you were giving a consumer example, to me, Spotify, Spotify nails personalization. Now, the important thing though is when I open up Spotify, they’re like, “Hey, Randy,” they know my name, kind of cool, Randy’s playlists, et cetera. But the part that’s the real personalized part is not that they threw my name in there, it’s that my expectations are going to be met with content that is truly picked for me, whether it’s stuff I listen to all the time or stuff that I want to discover quickly.

And the thing I want to really point out there, because I find it, there’s this myth that personalization means that we’re going to create so much more content. I’m glad to see here with the data that you’ve got, Kayla, that people don’t necessarily always interpret that as I got to go create content. Go back to my Spotify example that we can all relate to, and it’s not like AC/DC has written me a new track. There’s not created content for me, but it feels that way. It feels as though each song is being picked for me and that there’s this DJ of sort. And I think at times that’s the role that we need to embrace as marketers. We almost need to think of ourselves as DJs. We need to pick the best playlist of content for our buyers. Now, the problem is that that doesn’t happen.

And like Ed said, we encounter more brands that define personalization in the wrong way. So a really interesting study that we did at Uberflip a little over a year ago, we went and we asked for a definition of personalization from two groups. The first group we asked was marketers. And this was like a checklist, like define personalization by checking the most relevant option. Option number one was I personalized because I know the customer’s name. That was option number one. Option number two that they chose was I know the customer’s company, right? Is personalization, and option number three was I know their industry, which is a little bit better. You’re starting to actually maybe have some solutions. As I said, we asked the exact same question to buyers and we asked them, what does it mean when you get a personalized experience? And their number one answer was that company can solve my problems.

That was one of the checkboxes that marketers could have chosen, but it wasn’t one of the top three answers, right? Now, the next two answers were the same by buyers. They know my company and they know my industry. But I think that’s the part that we have to obsess over is how do we actually solve problems? And if we define personalization as solving problems, that’s what everyone wants. I mean, I ask this same question. I have a podcast every week and I ask this question to CMOs literally every week. It’s the same question I ask back to back questions at the end of the podcast. One question is what content gets you to click? And the answer, I’m paraphrasing, is always content that feels personalized for me.

And then the second question I ask is always define personalization for me. And they talk about taking time to understand me, to do research on me, to understand what I might be looking for, where my pains might be. And that’s where we end up at the end of the day to your point on this slide, we can actually usually create less content because there are aligned problems that our customers are trying to solve. And too often I think we try to write for every problem that’s out there in the world.

Kayla Mehojah:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of what goes into personalization that so many people struggle with is the data analysis, right? Because you have to be measuring it in order to figure out if it’s effective. But unfortunately, whoops, went too far, only 46. Oh my gosh, it’s going the way wrong way. Sorry about that. So only 46% of people use content analytics to make content strategy decisions, which is really, I mean, kind of concerning, right? Content analytics should be what you’re using to make a vast majority of your content strategy decisions. But if only half of people are really doing that, where are those decisions coming from? So let’s talk about analytics for a little bit.

Even though content analytics are important, one in four people who measure their content still don’t have a clear picture of that performance. And that is due in large part to the complexity of a lot of these content analytics tools, especially Google Analytics, which is sort of a necessary evil for a lot of teams. And part of a successful strategy here is making sure that you tie your content to those revenue goals like we talked about. And in fact, you’re six times more likely to understand the value of your content if it’s tied to revenue goals. But less than half of marketers are tracking conversions despite needing to prove that ROI and conversions are really one of the big ways to do that.

Again, back to Google Analytics, it’s tough to measure those conversions accurately or meaningfully in that tool, but this is something you need to think about, like are your tools working for you? Are those causing roadblocks that are keeping you from acting on your strategy, from acting on your personalization efforts, your testing efforts, things like that? So guys, on your own teams, how do you use analytics to make decisions? And what do you look for in a tool? How do you use that tool? Randy, do you want to go first?

Randy Frisch:

Sure. Sure. Happy to. So again, here, I think we got to focus on what does it mean to look at content performance? I think your last slide alluded to less than 50% of people even really look at that data. And I think there’s two reasons for that when I think about it. One is when we think about content performance, a lot of us just think about page views still. And I’m hoping a lot of people on this webinar are not in that group. I mean, you’re leaning in, you’re thinking forward, but going back again in that time machine we keep talking about, I mean, that was that metric. Get a million people come and read my blog post, right? There used to be amazing, all marketers used to read Kissmetrics blog and it was like, oh my God, how many people visit that thing every day?

But to me these days, that’s not the metric that I’m looking at. I don’t care if a million people actually read one of our posts or download one of our eBooks because I’m not looking for a million new customers this year. I mean, honestly, we wouldn’t be able to handle it at our company to take on a million customers. We have a very focused type of customer that we’re going after. We have an ideal customer profile or a target account as a lot of people talk about. So I think the key thing is coming back to what should you be looking into? And one of the things that people use our Uberflip analytics suite for today is not necessarily to just focus on these aggregate views or bounce rates, but to actually go into an account level view where they can actually say, okay, this account is engaging with this type of content.

What does that suggest or infer that we need to continue to do with that account both working with sales, et cetera? So that’s number one is what data are you going in there to try and understand, to understand that actual value for content? And that leads to my second thing that needs to change is who’s responsible for looking at content analytics? And first of all, I’m not going to say that content marketers shouldn’t because they absolutely should, but they shouldn’t be the only ones looking at content analytics, right? Everyone in your organization needs to look at and understand what it means for them. So our demand marketers who are often the ones running campaigns that are leading to this content need to understand if they’re inserting the right content as the carrot that you’re going to click through to.

And sales reps just the same who are sending content so often in correspondence with accounts, they need to know which assets are actually being clicked on and not just which ones, in real time, they need to know. It’s not like, let’s look at what happened this past month. They need to know that they sent out an email at two o’clock and at 2:04 PM, the account clicked on the email, not only open the email but went to asset one, asset two, asset three, because that means that that account is really engaged, and now it’s time to figure out that next step. So to me, content analytics is not this retrospective, what content did we create that we should create again, it’s what is actually moving someone through this buyer journey.

Ed Breault:

Yeah, I’m scared for that 54% that don’t measure content and bring that into their strategy. I can say Randy’s CMO, was, I know new title now, but you don’t become a CMO without walking into some buzz saws with your board, with your CEO, with your investors, with stakeholders on your team. I remember early days of moving, really looking at, of course inbound was a big strategy for us and content marketing, and here’s a test for the 54% is if you can’t measure it, why are you doing it? That’s the first one. And I use that today on myself because I know I’m going to get asked. I ask my team that all the time. If you can’t measure it, why are you doing it? You’ve got not one leg to stand on. What I found is all the metrics, whether they be vanity or consumption metrics of content, if you’re going to tie a dollar to an experience that in between pieces, really I’ll call it, there’s some art and science that goes into it in terms of understanding your metric framework, your primary KPIs, you’ve got to know those.

What are the things you’re trying to drive towards the business? Is it revenue? Is it growth of your customer base? What is the ultimate outcome? And then how do you measure how you’re getting there? So the leading indicators of that ultimate outcome, and then the diagnostic metrics, because in marketing and what we’re trying to do with content experiences, we’ve got metrics on multiple dimensions, whether they’re platforms or channels. Within those platforms and channels, there’s all three of those types of metrics. You’ve really got to have that well understood and defined. And then you can put your content objectives in the context of business objectives that CFO understands, CEO understands, stakeholders understand, KPIs diagnostics, leading indicators, and there’s a story too.

Maybe that 54% can measure it. They just don’t know how to tell the story. You’ve got to have the superpower of data narratives within what you’re trying to do because it’s not simple. It’s not a straight through process. What we do with content, it’s always on, and you’ve got consumers and users that come and go and you’re meeting them at different moments of need, what Randy was talking about. So you really got to have that middle piece figured out, and that 54%, put that on your list to do immediately. You need to measure, you need to pull that into your content strategy, or I can hear the buzz saw coming for you now and it hurts. It hurts really bad.

Kayla Mehojah:

Absolutely. Yeah. And Randy, I’m actually really glad you touched on the fact that everybody should be looking at content analytics because if you’re using content in any portion of your job, you need to be knowing or you need to know how it’s performing. And that leads into our next point here is that there are tools out there that are not Google Analytics that are easier to use for everybody. And you touched on page views, not telling the story enough, and that is so true, especially now when engagement is so important, and that is such a stronger tell of whether somebody is going to go through your funnel or not. And for example, Parse.ly users use it more than Google Analytics to track all of these different metrics here. And I think that just goes to show you how difficult it is to use Google Analytics.

So if you’re struggling there, it’s not just you, but you have to figure out a way to get past that and look at the metrics that really matter to tell that story. Because otherwise, like you said, Ed, what are you doing if you’re not using data in your strategy? So with that, and we’re running a little bit short on time here, so I want to speed through this part here, but let’s see, Ed, can you talk about a little bit, so we see here the biggest challenge for marketers is a lack of resources, right? That’s people, talent, time, budget, anything like that. When people are trying to get to using content analytics in a meaningful way, but they’re short on resources, how can they get past that to sort of use Google, or I’m sorry, use content analytics even if they may feel strapped for resources?

Ed Breault:

Yeah, a pithy response to it would be a maniacal focus on what matters. You really got to figure out in that equation what is truly meaningful and just do that really well.

Kayla Mehojah:

Absolutely. Randy, what about you?

Randy Frisch:

Yeah, I mean respectfully, the first one is BS, right? I mean, none of us have resources, and I hear that, and I mean that not disrespectfully and not that I don’t care for the burnout that people go through, but that is going to be a problem if you’re a marketing team of four or you’re a marketing team of 400. Every marketing CMO I chat with talks about how we just can’t get it all done. And that’s because with every resource you’re given, the expectations rise. And that’s where I’m going to echo what Ed said, figure out what your priorities are, figure out what you’re trying to accomplish and rally the people around focusing there. And once you do that, you’ll find, as we heard today, that people, you’re going to be able to create less content. That’s a good thing.

Create less content, create the content that matters and track that to show that it moved the needle. And at the same time, if it’s failing, own that it’s failing and go kill that content, delete it, pretend it didn’t happen in the sense that your audience doesn’t need to see it anymore and you’re going to learn from it. So those elements of resource is something that will never be solved, but I think if we look at, sadly, some of the stuff that’s a little bit lower on this list as biggest challenges being leadership, quality and engagement, those are the ones that you should be focusing on.

Kayla Mehojah:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, and it’s hard to see the forest for the trees sometimes and realize that it’s not just you that’s struggling, but the nice thing is that there are tools out there, technologies, things like that, that are worth investing in to save yourself some time and some hassle. And Uberflip and Aprimo are just two of those companies offering that sort of technology that can actually really help you be better at your job and take some of that pressure off your shoulders as well. So with that being said, we know data is the spark, right? You have to connect your data to tell the story of your content, prove the value of your content. What advice do you both have for teams who are wanting to see that success with their content strategies but aren’t quite getting there? How can they do more with less so to speak?

Randy Frisch:

Sure. I’m happy to jump in here. I think the key in my mind is figure out where your content is going to be used, and that means, as you said, Kayla, really well, getting off that hamster wheel, not just creating content for content’s sake, but that doesn’t mean just create [inaudible 00:47:11] and create really good content. It means take a step back and go and talk to some of the stakeholders in your organization to understand where content is needed and that those stakeholders are both internal and external. So talk to your customers, understand where they’re tripping up, listen to sales, where are deals slowing down and stopping progression from perhaps it’s like an awareness to consideration stage, or maybe it’s that final leg.

Who’s one of these buyers that we’re maybe not thinking about in that committee? That committee of buyers has expanded more and more every year. I mean, I remember my head turning when it went from 5.6 to 6.7 buyers, but now Gartner has stats that’s over 11 buyers that are weighing in. That’s a lot of different parties for us to create for. Again, it doesn’t mean that we can do it, so we have to listen to our team to understand, okay, well, which buyer has the most weight? Which one is slowing down your deal? And put your focus there.

Kayla Mehojah:

Absolutely. Ed, do you have anything to add to that?

Ed Breault:

Yeah, absolutely. We talked about folks who aren’t measuring, aren’t advancing initiatives. One of the things we talk about a lot at Aprimo with our customers is a concept of content 360, which is a sustainable operating model to create content experiences, that is really, I’ll call it the next level practice where organizations need to go. It’s a technology plus practices and driving the outcomes that they’re looking to get and sustainable. Bring into the components of pieces we talked about today, removing the waste out of the process as well as you’re building for the future.

We’re seeing a lot within that content 360 mindset is the technology’s composable, meaning that we’re building now with technologies that are buzzword future-proof, or we have an eye to the future so that we’re not going all in on sort of monolithic investments, but agile investments, because we know we’re going to change. We know we’re going to have back to the recession, back to the pandemic. We’re going to have struggles and challenges. We’ve got to flex. And so think about that, get grounded and start rebuilding and thinking about, have an eye for the future and a maniacal focus on what matters now.

Kayla Mehojah:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think having good bones, so to speak, of your content strategy is crucial to being able to build anything else on it, being able to track where things are coming from and everything like that. And I do want to get to a couple of questions that we have. First of all, if you haven’t downloaded the resources yet that are attached on the webinar, make sure you grab those. We’ll be sending them out in an email as well, I believe. But our first question is about customer research and buyer journey. So they say, isn’t the desire to leverage content throughout the buyer journey also pointing to the importance of investing in valid customer research so we know what they want to read or know instead of relying on what we want to say? Does that make sense?

Randy Frisch:

Pretty well put, I mean…

Ed Breault:

I would start there with anything I would ever do, which is customer and market research.

Randy Frisch:

Yeah, I agree. I mean, first of all, you can’t disagree with that question or comment. Whoever said that, pat back. That’s the mindset. I think at the same time, try and read between the lines sometimes, right? Remember, part of marketing is to be disruptive, so listen to the problems that they have and don’t always look to solve them directly, but find other ways that you can solve them. They may be asking you questions and then they prompt you to build some sort of tool to help them understand a step before that. So don’t always just look to solve the exact question. Trying to understand what the real deep question sometimes is. That’s where the fun marketing starts to come.

Ed Breault:

Yes, I know what you’re asking for, but what you really need is…

Randy Frisch:

Right.

Ed Breault:

… insert what you’re going to go do there.

Randy Frisch:

Yeah, but don’t be the car salesman that does that, but yes.

Ed Breault:

Right. Right.

Kayla Mehojah:

Nobody likes to be sold to.

Randy Frisch:

I know you say you want a minivan, but what you really want is this, beautiful.

Kayla Mehojah:

Absolutely.

Ed Breault:

[inaudible 00:52:15]. Yeah.

Kayla Mehojah:

Next question. In an 18 month B2B buying cycle involving an entire team of decision makers, which we kind of touched on, and a multitude of touch points, how do you attribute the impact any given piece of content has in the research consideration purchase funnel? So basically, how do you attribute that ROI when there’s so many different touch points along the way?

Ed Breault:

Yeah, we talk about buyer journeys, Aprimo, we like to talk about like we call it the customer journey. Back to frameworks, we’ve got a 13 stage journey that we see we’re account based, so we see them generally flow through these stages, and we have journey aligned content for those purposes. When you think about they don’t know Aprimo, they don’t know Uberflip, what I like to say is, tell me you need Aprimo or Uberflip without saying Aprimo or Uberflip. What are those moments of need statements that we need to get back to SEO be found for? So the non-branded keyword. So you’re starting out there in sort of that dark funnel world. And then as you start to get, we use a lot of intent data and data pro… We’re super data-driven. Tying that digital body language to actions that move through those 13 stages like I mentioned.

And once you get that put together, it starts to tell a story of how they moved. And then yeah, you’ve got to have extremely strong content campaign attribution in place. And then yeah, we can go and see every for $1 of new ARR, which is how we measure our business, we can go back years and see buying center touchpoints. We can see campaign integration involvement. We can see where they moved from anonymous to known stages. And then what we do with content is we streamline those processes and optimize the content streams that they flow through and analyze where did they drop out, where do we have dead ends in our experience? Back to measuring what are the gaps that I have that I’m not addressing? What are those moments of need that we don’t even have a resource for that we need to go and fill? And yeah, just a really well-defined sort of proprietary for your brand, but have a really strong journey understanding in how your content aligns and make sure you’ve got the tech and data practices and culture behind having it make sense.

Kayla Mehojah:

Yeah, I think that’s a really great point. Randy, did you have anything to add to that?

Randy Frisch:

It was a great answer.

Kayla Mehojah:

I love it.

Randy Frisch:

That’s why we created Uberflip for that type of mindset. You need everything Ed said, you need to track that engagement and feed it back into the systems that you’ve already invested in your map, your intent platforms, your salesforce.com and since it is becoming more and more important I think for that full 360 view that Ed talked about earlier. I thought Ed had a great answer there.

Ed Breault:

Yeah. I left out a key step that you triggered, Randy, which is enrichment, data enrichment back to the content pieces. So then you can look at your content through the lens of the journey and then you can improve from there. You’re on mute, Kayla.

Kayla Mehojah:

Dang it. These dang cough. I think part of where analytics tools fall short in measuring that attribution is just their conversion attribution models, right? That’s part of what Parse.ly, for example, is really investing in, is attribution. And so we have a few different attribution models, one of which is linear attribution, which actually attributes a small portion of each conversion to every single piece of content that somebody has touched or viewed or whatever. So you can literally follow that path that someone took to make that decision to give their email or whatever it is to complete that conversion action. So I think, again, back to data, it always comes down to having the right tools in place too, to be able to track those kinds of things meaningfully. And we are coming up on time, so I think I have one more question. Let’s see here. Someone says, this is the first time I’ve heard the term content ops, and I think Randy, you were the one that maybe talked about that. They said, can you expand on that?

Randy Frisch:

No, I feel like Ed’s coined that term. I’m going to let Ed define that one. That’s your baby.

Ed Breault:

Yeah, I mean, so content ops, wow. I mean, love the question, but I mean, as we said earlier, content operations is the new marketing operations. So the idea of content operations is that the people, the process, the systems, the technology, the rhythm of the machine is very content centered, and you’re taking a view that’s not just the sort of 180 outside the company, but it’s you’re looking into the organization as well. So full 360, sometimes you just have a 180 view or a 180 view, put them together, and then you’ve got a… It’s an operating model for the business to run efficiently, effectively where content is generating the primary outcomes of the organization. It’s just where we’ve evolved to now, if you’re in the game of building experiences or telling brand stories or reaching people, we do that content’s the medium and now that medium has a proper operating model in place, and that’s content operations.

Kayla Mehojah:

Absolutely. I think we actually, I skipped a couple of slides here due to time, but I think this is really made clear by one of the quotes we have in our report, which is that all marketing is content marketing, right? Any marketing you’re doing now involves content of some sort. And so it’s really evolved into just being the critical part of a marketing strategy. And I think that’s why we continue to see budgets and teams grow even in a declining economy because people are really understanding that all marketing is content marketing now, right? Thank you both so much for being here today to talk with us or talk with me about all of this, and I really appreciate your insights and I’m sure our audience members did here as well. But I just want to thank you guys again for joining us. Like I mentioned, if you guys didn’t grab the resources, make sure you grab those, and I hope you all have a great rest of your day.

Ed Breault:

Thank you.

Randy Frisch:

Thanks Kayla. Thanks to WordPress.

Kayla Mehojah:

All right, bye-bye guys.