If your content marketing efforts are falling short of your goals, don’t head back to the drawing board just yet. Chances are a simple tweak may, in fact, be all you need.
In a recent webinar held by Forrester Research and ideo, Ryan Skinner, a senior analyst at Forrester, offered an interesting approach to fixing underperforming content. The secret lies in measuring not only the number of views you get for the piece, but the audience’s reaction to it as well. To help illustrate his point, he presented a graphic similar to this one:
Any content that generates a high audience response—even if it has low views—would generally be considered highly effective. Conversely, content that generates a lot of downloads but very few actions likely indicates that something needs to be fixed.
If your content isn’t evoking the type of response you’d like, the problem may either lie with how you distribute it or how it’s written. For example, if a lot of people download an ebook you’ve developed, but you’re not getting much follow-up response, you may want to test at what point you’re losing reader attention. By testing various alternative headlines, calls to action, body copy, landing page copy, images and offers, you can begin to assess which resonate more strongly with your audience, and which may be falling flat. You can also experiment with different channels and different posting times, to determine where (and when) your most responsive audience congregates.
If you’re on the other end of the spectrum—receiving a lot of views and actions for a certain piece of content—consider ways to reuse it. Devise a different angle, explore an aspect of the topic in more detail or provide an updated post on the topic in a few months.
Have you ever turned underperforming content around? How did you do it?
