Nineteenth-century American merchant and marketing pioneer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
The TV show Mad Men depicted an era when marketing was a money pit where the creative types made stimulating and glorious ad campaigns, but had no ability to really measure the impact on sales.
Today, the same creative types have marketing automation tools and analytics platforms that can measure the influence marketing efforts have on revenue – and the return on investment.
Unfortunately, Wanamaker’s quote still applies to a pretty wide audience of marketers and small business owners. Despite more than 60 % of marketers creating content every day, only 27% say they’re effectively tracking content metrics.
What’s worse is that only 30% of content marketers see their content marketing as effective.
If you’re running an online business, whether it’s B2B or B2C, you need to understand how your content marketing contributes to your conversions and sales. Without that information, you don’t know what to leverage or where to cut your spending in order to improve your marketing.
With all the tools available, it’s extremely easy to tie your content performance to your sales. You just have to understand the simple mechanics of how content and content promotion convert visitors into customers.
A Place For Everything, And Everything In Its Place
The most effective Ecommerce businesses build their content around the needs of their audience, and focus on how ready a visitor is to make a purchase – where that visitor is in the sales funnel. This is sometimes referred to as mapping your content to the buyer’s journey.
“The best lead-nurturing campaigns begin with content mapping, a process in which you decide what content is most appropriate for a person to receive at a given time,” writes Corey Wainwright, contributor at HubSpot.
Every piece of content serves a purpose, such as answering a question for a prospect (top-of-funnel content), reinforcing the benefits of specific solutions (middle-of-funnel content), and eliminating doubt or concerns (bottom-of-funnel content).
Each type of content is designed to provide significant value, engaging the audience and moving them through the funnel towards the bottom to a visitor-to-customer conversion.
This should be a point of focus when developing your content marketing strategy, once you’ve established your goals and your key performance indicators. As you identify the types of content you want to create, along with the topics based on audience interest, you can begin mapping that content to the different stages of the funnel.
You can then effectively track and measure the performance of your content marketing.
The Framework for Tying Content Performance to Sales
It’s not always as easy as “X blog post generated Y sales.” You want to look at the entire sales funnel. Know that not all metrics are equal in every stage of your content lifecycle and the funnel.
For example, when you first launch your content campaigns, you don’t really have the numbers to monitor sales or examine click-through rates. Instead, you want to look at traffic generation over conversions.
Watch each level of your funnel as you’re producing new content to see how content performs as the visitor gets closer to a purchase:
- Top-of-funnel is where you’ll look at traffic and interest-generation metrics
- Middle-of-funnel is where you can dig into engagement metrics
- Bottom-of-funnel is where the conversion metrics come into play
Top-of-Funnel (ToFu) Content
At the top of the funnel, you’re generating content to attract a much larger audience. The most common ToFu content consists of blog articles and basic explainer or how-to videos.
Ecommerce businesses often use this type of content to educate their audience by answering a specific question, or to cover a need or pain point that the visitor needs to address – though it does so without pushing a sale.
At this stage of the funnel, the performance metrics you typically monitor are:
- Unique visitors
- Page views
- Content shares
- Referral sources
- Subscriber/opt-ins
Middle-of-Funnel (MoFu) Content
Once ToFu content tips a visitor over and gets them interested, they progress to the middle of your sales funnel, or MoFu stage. This can be a complicated stage, not only because of the broad diversity of interested leads that aren’t fully qualified, but also because some Ecommerce customers and products revolve around a very short funnel.
In the MoFu stage, you still want to focus on providing value, educating, or entertaining the audience. You also want to start the process of positioning your brand and products as the solution to the lead’s problem or need.
Kathleen Booth, CEO of Quintain Marketing, writes, “Prospects in [MoFu] know they have a problem or need that must be solved and have moved on to determining the best solution…”
Content at this stage can take a lot of forms with companies often relying on user guides, ebooks, buyer’s guides, and instructional videos.
A great example of Ecommerce MoFu content comes from Repair Clinic. The site uses product-specific instructional videos to show a customer exactly how to use each product to make a repair to a specific appliance. This helps an already-engaged prospect compare solutions.
At this stage of the visitor’s journey, the performance metrics you should be watching for are:
- Call-to-action conversion rates
- Click-through rates
- Email engagement metrics (opens and clicks)
- Site user retention
Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu) Content
The BoFu stage is fairly straightforward, and your industry type can largely dictate the type of content you use here. For SaaS and B2B, this is the stage where free assessments, trials, and demos work nicely to begin the process of fully qualifying a lead.
For B2C Ecommerce that is based around consumer products, your content may be limited to follow-up or abandoned cart emails, urgency messaging around products, promotions, or product announcements.
“The questions your buyers have at this point in their journey tend to be more logistical – how does the product they’re interested in actually work, who should be involved in the purchase decision and what benefits can [they] expect?” writes Anne Murphy at The Kapost Blog.
At this stage, you’re monitoring your total conversions and revenue as well as how they point back to your content.
How to Tie it All Together
In your analytics platform, the best approach is to set up Ecommerce reporting that is tied to your Ecommerce solution, effectively tracking sales per visitor on your website.
Once this is established, any content you produce and share should be attributed to specific campaigns using UTM parameters. You can use the Google URL builder to easily set up a custom URL for any of the content you promote. Those same parameters can be used in email as well as social media to help you track your campaign performance.
Once you have your content mapped to specific stages of your funnel, you can dive into your analytics to see inbound traffic, unique visits, and returning visits – and ultimately, the conversions resulting from your content and specific campaigns as customers move through your funnel.
Are you tracking your content conversions? What’s your process for tying content performance to your Ecommerce sales? Share your insight in the comments:
