Gone are the days when you could just draft a blog post or a webpage, throw some keywords in there, get a few backlinks and call it a day.
Greater volume, and greater noise
Back in 2006, there fewer than 50 million blogs on the web. Today, Wordpress users alone publish 41.7 million new blog posts each month.
If you Google “how to increase blog traffic,” you’ll come across over two hundred million results each purporting to share the secrets of driving blog traffic from internet info marketers, SaaS companies, affiliate marketers, media companies, and home hobbyists.
All of this volume can be overwhelming when you’re a reader seeking information, but it can be downright demoralizing when you’re a startup trying to bootstrap organic reach through search.
More discerning consumers (and search algorithms)
What happens when we encounter lots of noise? Our hearing becomes less sensitive, and eventually, we become deaf to many sounds vying for our attention. The same holds true for content on the web.
As Internet users become more savvy, our ability to identify low-quality clickbait, fluffy listicles, and irrelevant fodder gets faster and more precise. Sophisticated users, who are often also the most sought-after audience segment for marketers, can identify a low-quality result by its title and preview text -- no clickthrough needed.
For example, “zero-click” searches, or queries that result in no clicks from the user, have increased by 11% on mobile and 9% on desktop since 2016.
Algorithms observe and respond to user behavior. As users become simultaneously desensitized by and more discerning towards the volume of content they encounter, search algorithms respond in kind.
Even content aggregators are feeling the pinch as the traffic that in an earlier era would have been theirs now stays with Google as a Knowledge Graph result.
Social platforms all moving to pay-to-play, no more free lunch
Publishing a piece of content is only half of the equation. The other half, distribution, is getting evolving too.
But, organic reach on social has been sloping downwards for several years now (recall that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all advertising platforms, whose core business revolves around a pay-to-play model).
The cost of content
These factors all add up to a higher cost of acquisition for traffic and leads driven by content, and an overall trend towards paid marketing that’s changing how startups build their businesses.
Back in the days of cheap and free-flowing traffic, we could throw some content against the wall and hope that it would stick. If it didn’t, that was OK because there was more where that came from and usually, we still got some traffic, likes and shares for it. We could announce something on our company blog, make it sound nice, maybe see a single spike of traffic followed by a flatline (that we were OK with), and call it a day.
But today, content increasingly becoming a performance channel.
To start evaluating content against performance, the first thing you need to understand is its total cost, which includes:
- Content staff or freelancer salaries
- Non-staff costs to produce
- Costs to distribute on paid or influencer channels
In order to measure its impact, your multi-touch attribution should shed light not just on topline page views or sessions, but also on actual leads generated -- how many email addresses did a piece generate? How are those emails as a cohort performing over time through nurture and towards conversion?
Here are the metrics that I look at when measuring content efforts:
- Sessions (not page views) -- to understand your volume of unique visitors
- Time on site -- to get a sense of engagement, both site-wide and per piece
- Average pages per session -- to understand if your content is delivering value
- Email signups -- the visitor you get to keep!
By contrast, I don’t care about:
- Top-level page views -- this isn’t as honest a view as sessions
- Social shares -- this is usually a vanity metric for real businesses
The great content experiment
Because of increased competition, increased cost, and decreased distribution, all companies looking to implement a content marketing strategy have to apply the same quantitative rigor to content as they would do paid acquisition.
Each piece is an ad unit, an experiment. Likewise, each step in the content creation and distribution process must be evaluated like an experiment. Can we make this 5% more efficient? Can we increase clickthroughs or shares by 10% with small tweaks?
For startups, evaluating content against performance goals - perhaps ruthlessly - is critical to survival. If it doesn’t sell, then politely show it the door.
Susan Su is a marketing leader focused on early-stage startups. She has previously led marketing at education startup Reforge, and advised companies as a member of the growth team at 500 Startups.
You can connect with Susan on Twitter or LinkedIn.