My 5 year old son is currently learning how to write. He is spending 1 – 2 hours a day, understanding what letters and numbers are, using sight words, and lots of tracing letters and numbers getting familiar with them. After hours and hours of practise, he’s starting to draw the letters and numbers ‘freely’.
Lots of patience, practise and feedback (from both his teacher, my husband and I) is currently required for my son to become a better writer. Paying his teacher more money or giving my son pocket money won’t make him write better or faster, he still needs to have patience, practice and obtain feedback.
When we start something new, we all suck. To get my content marketing right, it can at times feel like I’m tracing the letters, let alone write freely.
I take comfort in knowing that I was once in my son’s shoes with learning to write and now writing is second nature for me. When it comes to content marketing, it’s actually no different to learning to write. To get it right, there must be lots of, patience, practice and feedback.
Digital Marketing has many moving parts. It can be tricky to put all the parts together into a working machine that is time and energy efficient. Throwing more money at a problem without knowing what the problem is, can easily waste money.
Patience comes from setting clear SMART goals with appropriate budgets, timeframes and metrics to manage expectations. Practice comes from allocating the right amount of resources and time to be able to practise, #DDD has helped me significantly with this. And, feedback comes from doing #MMA, Metrics, Analysis and Action. With the right metrics in place, I can analyze the results and with this feedback take action to optimize the content or campaign. This approach is enabling me to go from suck, to improve my content and gain qualified leads booking POWER Hours instead of coffee chats.
So how do you get your content right? It comes down to a 3 step process. Metrics, Analysis and Action.
What Is Metrics Analysis Action (MAA)?
Metrics – Start with putting in place the right metrics.
Connect all your digital accounts with the right plumbing. Google Tag Manager is key here. Google Tag Manager houses all your 3rd party tracking tags. I use Business Manager for Facebook Page Management and Facebook Ads Management and give instructions to all clients to connect their accounts effectively.
Analysis – Regularly review your insights.
There is no point having tracking in place if you’re not going to check it. What does the data tell you? I look for Standards of Excellence to see if content posted organically has the markers of above average performance. As a starting point, indicators are:
- Clicks – Strong Blue Line
- Engagement – Strong Pink Line
- Reach – Is significantly more than average.
The review of my insights helped me to identify the high performance of this video:
Ways you can take action, depending on your insights are:
Organic Ways To Edit Content
- Add captions to your videos
- Change post copy. You can edit post copy after publishing.
- Refresh content. You can repurpose video content.
Paid Ways To Edit Campaigns
- Dollar a Day test
- Change audience
- Stop Ad
- Add a new version
Action – With the insights, it’s time to make updates. Also known as iterations (small edits) to the content or campaign.
Based on the stand out performance of the video ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow, Given The Chance,’ I created a video funnel using this post to build an awareness audience.
This led to an increase in new leads by 163%. Not just any leads, the quality of the leads increased too. They were in line with my ideal customer identified in my Goals, Content and Targeting (GCT).
I have now spent a total of $691.68 on this campaign, gained 63 leads and 238% ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) for POWER Hour bookings. I’m averaging a new lead per week.
I’ve found that once you have the right structure in place, much the same as assembling an engine, without the right fuel in the engine, the engine will not work. Think of content as your fuel for your digital marketing engine.
The right formula for your fuel is just as critical as assembling the engine (getting your structure right). Get it wrong and the engine will seize, break and be costly to fix. Get it right and you will be able to cover a lot of ground efficiently, gain prospects, leads, customers and sales.
I’m systematically using MAA to review all my performing content, create funnels based on these and gain leads cost effectively.
It pays to implement MAA so you can understand where your efforts are working (or not) so you can increase your efficiency.
