2019 Content Marketing Maturity White Paper

In 2014, Mark Schaefer proposed the "content shock" theory: as major brands create more and more content, the amount of content produced will far exceed the user demand for content.

The post-95 generation, who are the main consumers, are accustomed to fragmented content. They prefer pictures, live broadcasts, and short videos, and their content consumption is more visual.

However, this does not mean that content marketing is no longer effective. On the contrary, nowadays 5% of brand content accounts for 90% of user attention.

The content maturity model can help companies create the top 5% of content and the actions needed to advance, so they can “fight monsters and upgrade” step by step, find the content presentation format that best suits consumers, and achieve content performance goals.

Phase 3: Centralized content operations (Advanced: Mapping the customer journey)

Phase 3 has completed the construction of the content army, established a content system with unified processes, and initially accumulated a certain amount of traffic.

The task of advancing to the next stage is no longer simple content production and publishing, but to complete the turning point of exponential growth of content marketing - increasing user engagement and promoting a small number of initial conversions.

1. The purchasing journey is disorganized and has no fixed route

Today, buyers are in control and the user journey is chaotic. McKinsey & Company research has also confirmed this theory, calling it "disordered consumer decision-making."

（Source: 2015 Forrester Research. Inc.）

1. Companies do not know when the user's consumption journey begins. Users will search for information on their own and make comparisons repeatedly.
2. There is no fixed path for user consumption, and it is not a linear decision.
3. Users who ultimately make a purchase usually have already learned about the brand at an early stage. Forrester's research shows that more than half of buyers have learned 70% of the information about brands and products through the Internet before purchasing offline.

2. There are still patterns in the chaotic purchasing journey

Just because the customer journey is messy doesn’t mean that a customer journey model is no longer needed.

It can be found that no matter what path users use to make purchasing decisions, users can be divided into four stages according to the size of their purchasing intentions: onlookers, considerers, doers, and dependents.

1. Onlookers: They have no intention to buy and are only interested in the practical information and solutions they need.
2. Considerers: They have certain purchasing intentions and are collecting information about related products through various channels.
3. Actors: have strong purchasing intentions, have a strong preference for one or several products, and have a strong urge to buy.
4. Dependents: Users who have already purchased products will pay again, highly recognize the products, and are the group that brings continuous income to the company.

3. Content combination strategy to reach users at different stages

Provide targeted content for users at different stages to ensure that users see the content they need.

Where you can reach users at different stages, use different content and delivery strategies to ensure that the strategies for reaching users at each stage are appropriate and effective.

Here is an example of a combined content and delivery strategy:

For users in four stages, a combination of content types is used to meet personalized needs:

• Watch for: Quizzes, diagnostic assessments; blogs that answer questions; white papers/videos on pain points.
• Consider: Video/white paper on solution; offline events.
• Action: Product-focused white papers, customer cases, and product video demonstrations.
• Dependencies: Product updates, video demonstrations of specific features, etc.

Tips: Use CTA at all stages to drive a small number of conversions

CTA (Call to action) takes advantage of the psychology of "Perceptual Set Theory" - people usually need external motivation and direction before making some major decisions. The sense of urgency of CTA caters to people's psychological needs and increases the possibility of people taking immediate action.

(Source: Unbounce, WordStream, AdRoll)

Use CTA throughout the user's entire purchasing journey, such as registering for downloads, signing up for online courses, participating in surveys, purchasing products... to drive user clicks and convert them into potential customers.

What does an effective CTA look like?

1. Short, direct, and urgent: Use imperative verbs like “download,” “submit,” or “subscribe,” and avoid ambiguous words like “try.”
2. Use first-person messaging: “Start my free trial now” gets 90% more clicks than “Start your free trial now.” The first-person narrative can reinforce the user's sense of having benefited from it.
3. Suitable content topics: A 300-word article is not suitable for a CTA that sells a 1,000-yuan training course, but is suitable for a CTA that requires registration and download.
4. Sense of added value: For example, click to get a free e-book, trial opportunity, etc.
5. Used multiple times, in obvious locations.

Write the CTA formula in 1 minute: state the problem + solution + take action.

For example: "Are you tired of boring texts? xxx is committed to providing fresh and interesting content. Click to subscribe and get the latest exclusive content immediately!"

Stage 4: Performance-oriented content operations (advanced: data-driven decision-making, content effect optimization)

In Stage 4, content productivity has reached its peak, and content has a strategic leadership position at the company level.

The content at this stage needs to be ROI-oriented, using data analysis to determine which content can produce the best results and which content still needs improvement. According to the "80/20 rule", spend your limited time on content that can maximize performance.

Using the analytical matrix model, content marketing measurement can be considered from two dimensions: effectiveness and internal operations.

But please note that the measurement indicators of content marketing should be based on business goals, and you do not need to take all the measurement indicators into consideration.

1. Measure the effectiveness of content marketing

The effectiveness indicators of content marketing include five categories: consumption indicators, engagement indicators, retention indicators, lead indicators, and sales indicators.

1) Optimize content quality based on content consumption indicators

Consumption indicators mainly consider content effects:

• How many people are engaging with your content?
• On which channels do users view content?
• How often do users consume?
• What are users’ content consumption behaviors and preferences?

Common channel consumption indicators include:

• Official website: page views and visitors. Statistics can be collected through web analytics tools.
• Materials: The consumption of downloadable materials, such as the number of white paper downloads.
• Social media: Background statistics such as “reading volume” are limited to content exposure. You can embed links in social media posts and use the number of people who click on the link as content consumption data.
• Email: open rates, click rates, etc. You can avoid providing complete content in emails and guide users to click to view the full text, thereby increasing open and click rates.

2) Use retention metrics to determine the preferences of target users

Retention metrics can show how well your content is engaging with your target audience:

• How many users come back to consume other content?
• How many people subscribe to long-term content updates?
• How long does it take for users to come back and consume other content?

Common channel retention metrics include:

Official website:

• The percentage of old visitors and new visitors, to understand which type of users the content is more attractive to, and then optimize the content focus;
• Bounce rate: The bounce rate of B2B companies needs to be maintained below 60%. Zhiqu Baichuan Marketing Automation can collect these data.

Email: Unsubscribes and new subscriptions.

If the number of unsubscribes is greater than the number of new subscriptions: add more attractive content to the email, or reconsider whether email is an appropriate channel and reduce the frequency of emails appropriately.

3) Engagement indicators to improve target users’ recognition

The higher the user's engagement, the higher the probability of conversion, including:

• Dwell time: The user’s interest in the page content, which can be measured by marketing automation platforms.
• Page depth: The number of content pages a user visits each time. The more pages a user visits, the higher the engagement rate.
• Social media comments: The background data has statistical data. The more comments, the stronger the user stickiness.

4) Measure the contribution value of content through clue indicators

Lead metrics are an important measure of content success, and are used by marketing automation systems to attribute leads to specific content:

• How many new leads did a piece of content generate?
• What content helps convert potential customers?
• How many leads are currently coming through content?
• Which stages in the conversion funnel don’t have enough content yet?

The easiest way to connect content to leads is to set up campaign tracking in your CRM and marketing automation platform.

For each piece of content, an activity series is created. When a potential user performs a marketing activity (such as opening a report or downloading materials), the marketing automation system can associate the potential customer’s data information with his or her behavior.

5) Use sales indicators to prove the value of the marketing department to sales

Commonly used content sales metrics include:

• How many leads/revenue were influenced by content?
• How many leads/revenue are generated by the content?
• What percentage of leads/revenue are influenced by content?
• What percentage of leads/revenue are generated from content?

The first-touch attribution model calculates the total value of leads generated/influenced by content — that is, leads whose first touch came from content, or potential users learned about the brand through content.

2. Optimize content production and costs

The operational indicators of content marketing include production indicators and cost indicators, which mainly measure the situation of internal content production.

1) Evaluate the team’s content production performance through production indicators

Production indicators mainly consider the team's content production level:

• How does the content team set goals and determine publication schedules?
• How long does it take for the content team to go from idea to publication?
• How much content is published in a specific time period?

Common production indicators include:

• Publishing time: Measures the speed at which content is produced. You can do this by recording the time you conceived the idea and the time you published it on your content editorial calendar, then taking the difference between the two dates.
• Content production: Measuring the amount of content published in a certain period of time can measure the productivity of different authors.
• Content backlog: the ratio of content publishing frequency to user access frequency.

• If the content backlog is > 1, it means that the speed of content generation is faster than the speed of content consumption by users, so the content production volume can be reduced and the cost can be optimized;
• If the content backlog is less than 1, it means that users are eager to obtain more content, so the content production needs to be increased;
• If the content backlog = 1, it means that the current speed of content production just matches user demand.

2) Optimize cost indicators and improve the input-output ratio of content

Cost indicators mainly measure the input costs of content production:

• How much does it cost to invest in content marketing?
• What is the cost of each piece of content/creative (including paid promotion on social media, KOL marketing promotion, native advertising, etc.)?

Tips: Optimize content ROI and prove the value of content marketing

Combining the above 7 content marketing indicators, the final value is reflected in the return on investment of the content.

This formula can calculate the ROI of a single piece of content or a single author, or it can calculate the ROI of all content.

• ROI>1, indicating that the current content has a good cost-effectiveness.
• ROI<1, the quality of content production needs to be improved.

Every business’s content marketing strategy is different, but regardless of the size, industry, or internal structure of the business, the stages it goes through as it matures are similar.

The content marketing maturity model proposed by Social Talent and Zhiqu Baichuan aims to help marketers objectively evaluate current content marketing performance and fill gaps in content marketing strategies.

There are four stages of content marketing maturity:

• Stage 1: No content → Advanced: Building a content team
• Stage 2: Have a centralized content team → Advanced: Develop a content plan and strategy
• Phase 3: Centralized content operations → Advanced: Mapping the customer journey
• Stage 4: Performance-oriented content operations → Advanced: Content performance optimization

— END —

Related reading:

1. The most effective content marketing promotion skills and methods!

2. How to create content marketing that will go viral?

Author: Zhiqu Baichuan

Source: Zhiqu Baichuan