Transcription

MC:     Welcome to track B, everyone.  We’ve got three talks in the morning.  Our first talk is with Ilia Markov who is from Bulgaria, from Sofia, and he’s 100 per cent remote for his work and he’s going to talk about content marketing, I will not talk too much about that as he is obviously going to be talking about that.  Our talks are going to be half an hour long and a 5-minute Q&A at the end so if you think of any questions, jot them down and at the end we’ll come along with the microphone and ask you about what you have to say, and then there will be a little gap, and then we’ll move on to the next one.  I am sure you know the drill.  Guys, how is it going up there?  Everything hunky dory?  With that, I will say enjoy the talk.

ILIA:   Good morning, everyone.  I hope you’ve had a chance to have tea or coffee.  I am excited to talk a little bit about content marketing and how you can measure the performance of your content marketing and what you need to do first, please don’t worry about taking too many notes, these slides should already be uploaded to this URL so you can access them.  There is another link at the end of the slides if you don’t manage to catch it now.

Let’s start with this.  Why does it matter to measure your content ROI?  Why should you even care about it?  Isn’t it just great to be putting out great content, writing blog posts, producing White Papers C-books videos, whatever, you know, all that is content.  Something that you should always remember is that content marketing is not just about blogging or V-logging or producing any kind of content.  It is business strategy that can help you grow your company and your business.  With that, you have to think strategically about it, you have to measure the performance in order to know what’s going on and looking for ways to improve it and make sure it is working for you.  This maybe because I’ve always heard this attributed to Peter Drucker, who is a big American authority on management, but apparently it is not 100 per cent sure the quote is by him, but it is a great quote nevertheless.  You need to measure what you’re doing, otherwise there is no other way to manage it.

Just to let you know, we’re going to cover today, so in the first part I want to talk about how to make content part of your overall business strategy and how to align doing the report and measuring your performance with that.  In the second part I’ll talk a little bit about how to set up a report and give you an example of one customer I work with, and how I did it for them.  In the end, I want to talk a little bit about how to actually calculate the return on investment of your content marketing efforts.

Before that, to tell you a little bit more about myself, consider myself a content marketer, I work with many SaaS company, that’s my main focus, but I have worked with companies from all different spaces in the industries.  I recently started curating weekly newsletter on content marketing, so if that’s something you’re interested in I’ll let you know and you can check it out.

I love Southampton FC, if there are any football fans here in the room, I’ve been to games all over the country, actually.  That’s how dedicated I am.  I’ve travelled all over the UK to watch the saints.

Let’s get to it.

First, how make content part of your overall strategy.  It is really important to remember, you know, something that the thing that I started with, that it’s content is not just something that lives on its own.  It should be part of your — of how you organise and run your business.  It should sort of, the goals you want to achieve for your business.  Think strategically about those goals.  People often want to generate traffic to their website or their blog and that really shouldn’t be your business goal, because like your goal is not to generate traffic; your goal is to generate revenue.  So traffic can be something that you strive towards as a performance indicator, just to see how well you’re doing, but it shouldn’t be the end goal.  The goals for content can really depend on what you’re going for with your business.  So if you have someone, maybe yourself, doing sales, you know, the end goal of content can be generating leads so the person doing the sales can take the leads and, you know work towards turning them into customers.

I told you I work with a lot of SaaS companies and the main goal for them is to get people to start free trials, because that’s what generates revenue.  Customers who complete the free trial become paying customers and that’s the way revenue for SaaS companies is coming from.

When you have idea about your goals, it’s important to come up with a framework of indicators that will let you track the performance on those goals.  So, you know, you have to think strategically about what metrics show progress on your goals.  The most popular ones that I’ve seen in my practice, in my experience, it’s usually traffic, or things like shares and comments, you know, when we’re talking about traffic, lots of people keep track of organic traffic or traffic that comes from their SEO strategy or Google and other engines.  Shares and comments are always a good indicator of how people are engaged with your content.  You might be getting a lot of visits on your website, but if people are not sharing that content, they’re not commenting, that means that it’s probably doesn’t engage them as much.

Another good way to track your content are the leads you generate, and of course the conversions, and I will talk a bit more about these two, in the next part, how to set up your content report.

Let’s start with the few tools you can use to measure your content.  Google Analytics is sort of straightforward, it is growing over the years so it is now a pretty complicated tool, but everyone knows it, it is free and easy to get started and it is easy to integrate with WordPress.  Woopra is another tool which allows you a very detailed level of analytics.  It allows a free plan, so you can also integrate it with WordPress in an easy way and I’ll show you in the following slides, it is great for creating and tracking what people are doing when visiting your website.  Google Search Console is something you should be using for measuring SEOs, it is also great for analytics and all the other tools, and it is great to see how you’re doing in terms of SEO, what keywords you’re tracking, ranking for, how many clicks you’re getting and things like that.

Finally, if you want to build, in the example and that’s what I’m using, Google Sheets is another free tool, and there’s another analytics you can use on Google Sheets to pool data from Google Analytics and build an impressive report that gets all the data that you need in one place.

When we’re talking about the report, I would say the most important thing is to think about your content through a funnel.  So create a funnel, just for your content marketing, that, you know, lets you imagine how people go from “never heard of you” to “I want to pay you money.”  And just think about the stages that it takes for someone who is completely oblivious of your brand, before he or she becomes customer.

Most often, those stages that are C are, you know, first someone is just the new traffic that you get to your website, that is someone who is like unaware of your brand.  Then someone becomes a lead usually when they give you your e-mail.  Then, as you have some interactions with them, and they show some interest in what you’re providing as a service or product, they become a prospect, and then finally you turn them into customers when they start paying you for that product or service.

So, when you’re creating a funnel, going back to the KPIs I was talking about earlier, think about what is the KPI to use to tie to that particular step in the funnel.  In the case of the traffic, it could be sessions, you need visitors, how many returning visitors you have, that is something that shows engagement.

In the case of leads, it could be the e-mails you collect, because every e-mail is a lead and that could be done using goal conversions.  That’s something I’ll show you in a second.  For prospects, it can be pricing page visited, or how many trials have been started, and then finally for customers, it is how many sales you get.

For someone between a prospect and a customers, that doesn’t mean they go out of your content funnel.  They’re still in the content funnel and you’re still using content to turn that prospect or lead into a customer.  There’s a lot you can do at that stage to, you know, push that person into turning them into a customer so it doesn’t end at the point where they give you their e-mail.  The content can be used after that as well.

As I said, Woopra works great for funnels.  It is great to set up in a visual way, and it collects a lot of information about the people who come to your website so you can use that to really build a profile of what people are doing on your website, and use that data to take other action.  So if you know someone has visited your pricing page, for example, but hasn’t started a trial, and you have their e-mail, you can send them an e-mail saying: okay, why don’t you try a free trial?  Maybe you saw your prices, but they’re still like the two-week free trial, like you can do.  And it allows you to really get deep, get really deep with your customers, and to specific actions with them.

When building your report, it can start really simple, just as a custom dashboard, those screenshots look really grainy.  Build a custom dashboard in Google Analytics if that’s all you need at the moment, it allows you to collect all the most information, the most important data you need on there.  So here, for example, I have all the sessions, just the SEO traffic, because that particular client I was working for needed, they were really looking, SEO.  Then, on the right-hand si we have goal conversions so we knew how many leads we generated during that period.  So we put that on a custom dashboard in Google Analytics and we were looking at it.

If you want to build something more robust, more complex, you can use Google spreadsheets with that add on I mentioned, and do as much as you want.  Here we were pulling data from Google Analytics, putting it in a spreadsheet, and doing a lot of extra analysis with that.

Just some of the things that I think are important to consider when you’re doing your report, attribution is one of the important things because you want to know and you want to have a good idea of how you count where a particular customer is coming from, so you should know, for example, someone might have seen a blog post, and an ad on Google if you’re doing Google ads, and you want to have an idea for yourself of how you are going to attribute that, that sale.  Did it come from your content or the ad you placed on Google?  Setting up guidelines, analytics and Woopra, and of course, you know how to measure your data in a way to avoid issues with the data spikes if you get like a viral post, or something like that.

I don’t know if like you have an idea for UTM links but basically it is adding certain parameters to the link you’re using, which gives you information about where that visitor count came from.  There’s a lot of information online on how to use UTM links.  You can just research that.  Unfortunately we do not have that much time to go into that much detail, but for example, here, this example just shows several different types of banners and calls to actions that we used on a blog, and by using the UTM links on them we were able to see which one works best.  For example, here we have text links so just simple links that we placed within the blogs, and they work much better than all the other call to actions that we were using.  So banners were getting very few clicks, and so on.

Setting up goals in Google Analytics, again, it would probably be easier to do it if you go online and research, but just to show you how to do it, just go to the admin set up, and your goal, give your goal a name.  For example, in this case we had an e-mail course, so people who signed up for the course, we counted this e-mail course conversions, and we had a “Thank you” page where people ended up after they signed up for the e-mail course, and we said the URL of the “thank you” page, as the destination.  So every time someone landed on that page, because the only way they could reach that page was through signing up for the e-mail course, every time they landed on that page, it counted as a goal conversion.  And those were the goal conversions on the custom dashboard earlier.

Finally in this section, looking at thinking again strategically about how you look at data.  This is a simple comparison between two periods for that same client.  So the first one, you know, it’s the beginning of 2015, the first half of 2015, and the second period is the second half of 2015.  If you just look at that, it doesn’t look so great.  I mean, it is the quarter, the traffic is almost 26 per cent down, you know, most things went down.  But when you look at the data more closely you see that there was a sudden spike in at the end of the first period, and that’s when one blog post went viral on Hacker News, and basically they got a huge spike in data.

So for this particular client, something that we did was to start to look at traffic at three month averages, with, you know, looking back three months and taking an average of the three months, which kind of flattened out the spike a little bit.  So it gives you a better idea of how you report and how you look at data.  And it shows you that would still show as a spike in traffic, but not as big as what we saw just by looking month to month.

Okay.  And just to wrap up at the end of this, let’s discuss a little bit how to actually calculate return on investment.  It really gets down to knowing two numbers.  One is the cost of acquiring a customer, and the other one is the lifetime value of that same average customer.

To find out your CAC, or cost of acquiring a customer, here’s a simple calculation, quite simplified really.  So let’s say that in the last month you got four clients, and you spent £1,200 on producing content, 800 of that was spent on getting four posts written by freelancers, and it took you 10 hours to edit those, get them on your blog, source images and all of that.  I mention that here because it is really important to add up, you know, and to calculate everything that you put into producing content, even if it is your own time, because otherwise it is time you can spend working for clients and generating revenue for yourself.  So think about everything that goes into producing a client, even if it is your own time.

Finally you spent £100 on tools, hosting.  There really isn’t a reason to spend more than £100, and even that is probably quite high.

You spent £1,200 to gain four clients, so each client cost you around £300 to get.  Then calculating lifetime value is quite similar, it is just the average deal size you get from a customer, but it really depends on the industry that you’re operating in.

So if you’re doing something like SaaS, or product size consulting, or something like that, it is just the average rate you get from your clients.  So you take all your clients you know how much each one pays you, you take the average of that, and just then you just multiply that by the average time that you keep a customer.  So if it is three months, you just take the average monthly, multiply it by three, and so on.  If you’re doing something like freelancing and you’re building websites for clients, just looking historically, look at what is the average that a client has paid you for that service and then compare the two.

Obviously, if you’re generating less than you’re paying, that’s not a great thing.  If you’re getting more from customers that you paid to acquire them, that’s better, but if you just generating £1 above that, you know, that’s probably not so great.

A good rule of thumb I’ve seen used is getting three times the cost of acquiring a customer, because at that level, you know, you have enough to produce the product or the service, and actually make some profit for your business, as well.

Most of that stuff, so more details, and you know the screenshots actually looking as they should be, you can get at that post, that’s the client I was referring to.  That’s a link, so you can just click it if you access the slides.  And before I finish, I mentioned the newsletter that I was talking about.  So if you are interested, you know, I tried to collect only the most actionable resources on content marketing, so not like people talking in general, but actually guides and detailed tutorials on how to get stuff done, how to set up goals, write an e-book, produce a video, stuff like that.

That’s it from me.  Thank you very much for your attention.  I will be happy to answer any questions now or after we finish outside, so feel free to come speak to me, and I’m also happy to take any comments or criticism.  Feel free to use my Twitter handle as well and just Tweet me what you thought of that, and if you have any additional questions.  Thank you very much.

[Applause].

ELLIOT:  Very good.  Okay, have we got any questions?  You were tentative, weren’t you?  We’ll go here.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Hi, I’ve had an issue with the traffic spikes which have been caused by spam referrers, things like fake Google and Motherboard, and various other weird names.  Have you seen that issue, and what’s your advice?  I think you can do filters and that kind of thing?

ILIA:   Yeah, I’ve seen that.  I have not dealt with it personally, but I’ve seen it affect websites.  I guess, in the beginning, it is kind of hard to just, especially if you’re running a site that gets a good amount of traffic, it is usually hard to find out about it before it is too late, but I would say the best way to deal with it is just filtering, and I think Google Analytics allows for that.  I’m not exactly sure how it is done, but I would suggest just researching online and getting it done.

ELLIOT:  Thanks for that.  Hands up if there’s another question.  I’m sure there’s somebody brimming, needs a little confidence push.  There we go.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Like many people I’ve found online, I have a problem using Google Analytics with Woo Commerce.  It doesn’t track the same revenue.  I don’t know if you’ve ever used Woo Commerce with Analytics, or with anybody in the room has used it successfully, and if this problem is overcomable.

ILIA:   I haven’t used it personally, but I’ve had to use Google Analytics with other tools that were tracking sales internally for a company.  My suggestion would be to find out like what’s the source that you trust the most — so maybe it is Woo Commerce, I would guess — and just use that as your baseline.  So if you have to put that up data about visits from Google Analytics but compare that to your sales, like the revenue you get from Woo Commerce, and just decide on what you will be using going forward as the most accurate source of data.

FROM THE FLOOR:  I think there’s a plugin extension that helps with that, and also there’s an analytics e-Commerce setting you can track different stages of the checkout to measure those things, and if you go to MeasurementsSchool.com, there’s a video to explain how to filter that.

NEW SPEAKER:  Thank you.  I’ll grab you afterwards.

ELLIOT:  We’re very ahead of schedule, so don’t feel shy if you —

FROM THE FLOOR:  It is a little bit of a technical question, but are you concerned in any way that Google Analytics and Woopra are Javascript based hacking tools and at this point in time a lot of people are using extensions or a browser to simply block all those tools, and your report doesn’t really represent real traffic?

NEW SPEAKER:  I think that might be the same problem, it is the Javascript office that might be the problem.

ILIA:   Of course that’s an issue that should be addressed, and I’m sure that people at Google HQ and Woopra are thinking hard about it and how to overcome that.  But, you know, even with that, you’re still getting — I mean even the data you’re getting in Google Analytics, if you’re running a large site with lots of traffic, you’re still getting an example, getting the full data.  So even when you have people blocking the trackers, you’re still — the data you get from the people who don’t block the trackers, it should still give you enough information about what users are doing, and how they are — you know, what their behaviour is.

FROM THE FLOOR:  I work at a large organisation in content marketing, producing content, mainly.  My organisation won’t let me see the analytics, won’t let me have a tracking campaign of my own.  I am not allowed to give out coupon codes at events when I speak.  How can I do guerrilla tracking of my effectiveness?

ILIA:   Honestly, I don’t know.  But one of the ways is just — so one thing I do is after these events, like the reason why I ask people to Tweet me, for example, it gives me an idea of how engaged the audience was.  And I have had really good comments from people on Twitter, especially.  The other thing I do is I look at the analytics on slideshare to see how many people actually open the slides after the conference.  So there are some hacks, some shortcuts, but I don’t think you can do content marketing meaningfully if you’re not looking at analytics.  So my suggestion would be to go and talk your boss or something like that.

FROM THE FLOOR:  A little bit of an easier question here.  How did you get started, and why did you choose content marketing over something else?

ILIA:   So, I got started with content marketing because I’ve been blogging for a long time.  I was that person at the beginning, content marketing, and got it started by freelancing at first, just started with writing, and then from writing, you know, I had to learn how to write in a way that produced results.  And then, how do you set those results?  So then you get to the point where you get to decide what the results should be, so you get to the strategic level.  So it is a lot of, I would say a lot of reading, a lot of research online, reading online, subscribing to a lot of blogs that talk about that, and then doing it, starting writing, then editing, then doing the technical stuff, SEO, and all that, setting a blog, landing pages, funnels inside your analytics tool, and then getting to the strategic level where you decide how to move the pieces and how to arrange them.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Hi, do you have any experience with guest bloggers and how to leverage — or their followers?

ILIA:   They can work really well, but they have to be invested in writing for you.  And they’re mainly people who will reach out and will say, “Can we write a guest post?”  Usually if you say — like it really depends on how you set up the relationship, so what we did with that same customer, we had guidelines about guest blogging, so we asked people to write between 1,500 to 2,000 words to get it published, like really new, not published before.  Not something just rewritten from their own blog, or something like that.  That can work really well.  People who have large audiences, they will really go out of their way to promote their content because they’ve already put all the effort in producing it for you, and usually, if it is something that is long and detailed and new, they need to put a lot of effort to produce it.  So they will go out and promote it to their audience.

You can also run just a topical campaign about guest blogging, something we did with the same customer was we ran remote work monthly campaign where we asked about I think it was 20 people or so to produce guest posts on that topic of remote work, and how they do it for themselves.  You know, they were mostly remote workers and people who run remote companies.  And that had, you know, that generated in itself, we had a Twitter hashtag and people were using it when they were sharing their content, so it generated good level of popularity.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Do you see any difference in the analytics between long posts, short posts, what type of average number of words in a post do you think works really well and also posts with videos?  Do you see any difference in engagement between those and posts without?  Or what sort of things do you add, in terms of actual content, to make posts more viral?

ILIA:   Right.  There’s always a difference between long posts and, you know, especially short posts and really long posts.  There’s always a difference.  There’s also lots of research done that’s been published online that you can see that long posts perform generally better.  For most competitive keywords, what ranks on the first page of Google is usually between 1500 and 2500 words.  But it really depends.  It really depends on the niche you’re working in.  It really depends on what you’re doing, it depends on your audience and what they’re expecting.  My guess is if you’re creating something for teenagers, they probably won’t respond that well to a 2500 post.  Video might work a little bit better.  So just suggest, you know, I can think of blogs that have three or 35 posts in total, each of them is 5,000 words long, and they do really well, and then I can think of someone like Seth Golding, who writes 200-word posts and he is performing phenomenally.  So it really depends what you want to achieve.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Hi, I work with a lot of small independent high street businesses, and they’re quite often interested in blogging and getting up in the rankings.  The big challenge, I guess, is what you’ve just outlined, which is to get higher up on the rankings you need two-and-a-half thousand words, etc.  What’s your advice for small businesses?  Because if they’re busy during the day and they don’t necessarily have the time to write this length of content, so is there a hack for the small independent high street business?

ILIA:   Actually, I think content marketing works great for small businesses.  One of the reasons is that very few of them are doing it.  So it is not that noisy.  For example, if you use content marketing in digital marketing, that’s space is incredibly noisy, everyone is pumping out content, but for small businesses it is not so noisy.  The people who run the small businesses are usually experts on what they do, so they have a lot to share with their audience, and it could be a way to generate a lot of new business.  In terms of time, yes, I know people are very busy, but everyone needs to be doing some kind of marketing, and it is a way to do it in a very cheap and scalable way.

FROM THE FLOOR:  I totally get what you’re saying.  To give an example, I worked recently with a wine shop, and they have amazing, incredible expertise.  They do struggle with time, because they’re so busy.  One of the hacks they came up with was just reposting their newsletter and making sure that was —

ILIA:   Can you speak up?  I can’t hear you very well.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Sorry, one of the clients I worked with recently was a wine shop, and they’ve got incredible expertise.  They’re just busy literally, you know, staffing their shop during the day, and I guess one of the hacks they came up with was, you know, they produced a newsletter for clients and they’ve started posting that out on their blog.  I was just, I guess, looking for other useful practical tips you might have, because I think the expertise is definitely there; it is just about the okay, what can they be doing on a practical level to do it?  Because honestly, I know what you’re saying about the two and a half thousand words and the expertise, and people are not doing it, but I don’t think they have the time.

ILIA:   Yeah, I understand.  That’s a very valid question.  I would say the first thing is, once they see it works, they’ll find the time, I’m sure.  The trick is to get it to work for a little bit.  So one piece of practical advice I can give you is just get them to record a video or even like a short audio clip, and get someone to transcribe it.  I mean go to someone who speaks very good English to transcribe it.  The costs can be very low to get that done.  There are even services that you can send the clip and they send you back the transcription of that clip, get it published.  Set up that whole structure that I was talking about earlier, just to show them how it can work, how it can generate sales if they’re selling online, and do that.

The other thing, get them to record some videos and put them online.  And I don’t know if there’s anyone in this room who has not heard of Gary Vee, he is a famous American entrepreneur, but he actually started in wine.  So he was recording videos, doing reviews of wines, comparing different styles of wines, talking about, you know, what glasses to use for wine and things like that, and that’s actually worked really well for his business, and he used video content marketing exclusively, and I think his business went from just the wine business went from 5 million a year to 30 million a year, or something like that.

So just show them, you know, find easy ways to do something small, get started with something small, prove that it works.  Show them how it can work, and then I’m sure they’ll find the motivation themselves.

ELLIOT:  So show us videos of you drinking wine.  Thank you very much for all those.  It was just as useful to get all the Q&A as the talk, so thank you very much.  [Applause]

ILIA:   Thank you.

ELLIOT:  I forgot to mention at the very start, we’ve got this fantastic transcription team here, who are tapping away for us all to read as well, and [applause] — and it is also being filmed.  So in a month or so, I imagine, or maybe new few weeks, depending how keen the team are, it’ll all be on WP.TV.  So we have a little break now, and then we’ve got a really good talk coming up in this track at 10.50, where we have the VP coming over to talk to us about the plugin directory and how they can be transferred to the new WordPress directory.  So I reckon that will be a good talk.  I’ll see you at 10.50.  Make it a bit early, obviously, so we can keep it efficient.  Thank you.