Assigning Value to Content

Last month, Matt Dickman on Techno//Marketer kicked off a great conversation on the need to treat content as commerce. In the post, he outlined a few key steps to succeeding with content-driven sites:

1. Create a clear interface for your users.
2. Rank your site’s content in the order it is valuable to the business and weigh that with the value to the consumer.
3. Visualize your traffic to see where it is going and shift it to the content you value.
4. Track and adopt over time.

What intrigued me here was the ensuing discussion on how to actually assign value to that content. Matt argues that the values can be arbitrary (with some level of executive agreement/approval) as long as the process is helping to more effectively manage the site. Others argued that there was little value in made-up figures. The only consensus seemed to be that this would be a very good, but very difficult exercise. In other words: a nonstarter.

This is unfortunate because placing value on content is something that can and must be done, and it need not be arbitrary. The goal of content marketing and social media marketing is to shift the majority of lead generation from outbound, interruption-based sales calls to inbound, permission-based activities. Only great content with clear value will allow you to successfully make this transition.

In the traditional marketing model we forecast, budget, and meticulously calculate our cost-per-lead in order to convey to senior management marketing’s contribution to top line revenue. What this process has given us is a wealth of known data to pull from so as to attempt to quantify (within a certain range) the value of our online content assets.

Here is an approach that we have used in a few cases with clients from the technology sector when trying to evaluate the ROI of online content for increasing/accelerating sales. What we do is map the content assets to the different intended stakeholders (CxO, business line manager, technical lead, end user) and the different stages of the selling cycle (Research, Consider, Evaluate, Select) and then try to approximate the bottom line impact of each content asset throughout its lifecycle. We base this value on the data we already have: cost-per-lead, cost-of-sales, and customer support costs.

A few examples:

Of course this is to be treated just as a base point, the exact details depending on particular industry & company specifics. Also, in some cases it’s worth expanding outside the selling cycle to include the impact of content to the customer lifecycle overall and/or factoring in the cost of creating and producing the content assets in order to produce a fuller picture.

No one would argue that we are faced with a new paradigm where content and messaging are no longer fully contained or controlled by marketing. However, saying that this makes it just too difficult to measure the value of content that is driving critical inbound leads is just doing marketers a disservice.

Technorati Tags:: Content Marketing, content ROI, content value

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 5:02 am by Alex and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

   

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