In recent times, we’ve had a lot of clients talking about their own content debut.
In the initial stages of engaging us professionally, they opened up about how their attempts to manage their content in-house had turned out to be a disaster. In fact, they were talking to us because they realized their limitations with strategizing and developing content.
They find themselves surprised. They still have a question, “How difficult can it be to create content? Anyone literate enough can do it. And we know our business in and out. So we can definitely do it.”
We thought we’d once again explain our process of content marketing in public forums. In this blog, we’ll take you through what we do and how we do it.
Whether it’s easy or difficult — we leave it to you to decide.
The Background
Every content decision at The Digital Fellow, as in any Inbound marketing approach, is based on the buyer’s persona. Our persona includes brand custodians at all levels in any given organization.
Content marketing works on the principle of identifying the pain areas, frustrations, and needs of the buyer’s persona. All the content is based on these points of connection with the persona.
At The Digital Fellow, we create different formats to address the persona's needs. The brand custodians who approach us have varying degrees of knowledge about digital transformation: some are quite well-informed while others think of boosting as digital marketing. The rest fall somewhere in between.
The different content formats we create are designed keeping in mind what they struggle with. Some formats are short and quick to consume. Others belong to the long form.
Content creation and management emerge from certain persona needs but they are also always in the process of optimization and improvement. If we created the same content throughout the year, we’d be bored too.
At The Digital Fellow, we take a look at how each of our formats has been performing. This review of our content assets helps us understand where to invest more energy and where to withdraw from.
In other words, we decide to continue certain formats and discontinue others. It doesn’t necessarily mean that some formats are inherently bad. It means that we need to try a different is inherently bad. It means that we need to try a different approach to certain pain areas so that it resonates with our buyer’s persona better.
Our intention in this blog is to reveal how we make our content-related decisions.
Let us know and share with you what we noticed recently.
Stock-taking
Overall, we have the following content formats. Each of these follows a specific template based on the pain areas we have identified among our buyer’s persona.
01. Blogs:
These are read by all kinds of top-level leaders and mid-level executives. We were delighted to know that our blogs are used by candidates appearing for interviews related to branding expertise.
02. CXO Series:
These are popular among marketing managers who have expertise in traditional marketing and are diligently striving to know more about digital marketing. Most of the questions asked in this series come from the pain areas of these learners.
03. Unequal Formulae:
This series is dedicated to clarifying certain misunderstood concepts about digital marketing. It’s meant to help readers who hear certain technical terms but apply them in the wrong contexts.
04. Daily Digital Dose:
This series is meant to be quick reference points for executives working on content. This content is crafted in bullet points format so that users can refresh their understanding and memory regarding the concepts they use every day.
This information-driven series was also prepared for the members of our WhatsApp group called Daily Digital Learning.
05. Digital Days:
This series is dedicated to using international days to learn something about digital transformation. Every day has something new to offer to learn about things that we didn’t know existed. At the same time, it’s also an opportunity to connect it with some aspects of the digital landscape.
There are a few more series but you get the drift.
Monthly Review
Every month, we look at the analytics from all the sources that publish our content on — our website and all the social networks. On the website, we look at:
- Dwell time
- Source of traffic
- User’s journey.
Then we check the numbers from every social network. We look at how each format has been doing from the point of view of engagement.
Engagement, in turn, is understood in terms of parameters like:
- Like
- Comment
- Share
- Image View
- Clicks on ‘see more
- Scrolls on carousel
Calculations
As we look at the numbers from every source, we prepare a scorecard of each content format.
We assign a rating to each content format according to its average engagement rate. Here is the formula.
Average Engagement Rate = Average Engagement / Average Reach or Impressions (as per metric available on the platform)
Average engagement and average reach or impressions, in turn, have their own formulae.
Average Reach or Impressions = Total Reach or Impressions / Number of Posts
And
Average Engagement = Total Engagement / Number of Posts
As explained above, total engagement includes any action taken by a user: like, share, comment, and so on.
Every platform has its own way of showing metrics and insights regarding the performance of every post. With further calculations, we get into the details of each content format and its relevance to every platform.
Decision-making — Quantitative Data
Numbers speak for themselves.
Whenever available, we look at the qualitative metrics like the nature of engagement. Some posts produce a lot of debate and active participation like commenting. The others are ‘shared’ without comments.
01. CXO Series:
In our latest analysis, we discovered that our CXO series has been performing better than the others. We guess that because the questions we discuss in the series are the real problems our buyer personas face. So, they find it relevant.
Verdict: We’ll continue publishing it. We’ll include more questions. If we run out of our “question bank”, we’ll directly ask the community to ask questions openly or anonymously.
02. Daily Digital Dose
Our Daily Digital Dose is not doing well. Maybe people are just consuming it by looking at it. And that’s the end of it.
Verdict: We’ll discontinue the series soon.
03. Unequal Series:
Our Unequal Series hasn’t been attracting a lot of engagement. But the catch with this series is that it was meant for a very specific purpose — talking about concepts that look very similar. It’s prepared along the lines of a very tight format of “Why? Then? Otherwise?” Not everything about digital marketing fits into this format.
In fact, we would have gotten into a dilemma if this series would have done really well. Not everything can be described in terms of a dichotomy.
Verdict: We’ll kill it gradually.
Decision-making — Qualitative Data
As mentioned above, numbers speak for themselves. But they are one part of the story.
Our analytics says that our blogs rank the second-highest, after the CXO series in terms of engagement. But when we compare the number of blogs we’ve posted with the number of CXO series posts, a different story emerges.
If we go by analytics alone, we should be pumping in as many CXO posts as we can into the social networks. In fact, they might be a little simpler than the long blogs we write.
Going by that logic, we should be reducing the number of blogs.
But that’s not what we’ll do. Our interactions with the leads and prospects happen because of the blogs. Nobody has ever told us they learned new things from the CXO posts. They invariably tell us they liked our blogs.
Verdict: We’ll try to work harder on our blogs and produce more of them.
Way Forward
Our content creation and distribution will go on as before. While we’ve decided to discontinue two series, we’ve also thought of introducing two more.
One would be a series about profiling important influencers in the domain of digital marketing.
Another would be a series on digital vocabulary in which we’ll explain what certain technical terms mean.
We’ll be formally announcing these series soon.
And next month, there will be another internal meeting with the analytics. Because we’ve shared our content creation strategy here already, we’ll be even more curious next month.
Let us know what you think — personally too. Your voice will speak louder than the graphs of the algorithms on different social networks.
