Recently, Joe Pulizzi wrote a great article on the importance of subscription goals for content marketing.
Joe pointed to CMI research that highlighted how less than a third of marketers consider subscriptions as a key metric. He also talked about an advertising industry report that didn’t even list subscribers as a key metric for content marketing.
And he referenced his upcoming book, Content Inc., where he will explain how countless entrepreneurs build content brands by focusing on consistently delivering amazing content to a slow-and-steady growing list of subscribers.
I’m first in line for a signed copy.
The key metric of content marketing success is subscribers
I found this to be the case when I was running content marketing at SAP.
But it didn’t happen overnight. I spent the better part of a year building the business case for content marketing and highlighting the content challenges we were facing as a company.
On Joe’s advice, we created our content marketing mission statement. We started with almost no budget and built an army of volunteer contributors who were writing consistent and high-quality articles to answer our customers’ top questions.
We struggled with how much branding the site should have. We battled over whether the site should be on domain (the company URL) or off domain. Finally, after nearly 13 months, we launched with more than 25 articles across four major categories, all written by me from campaign assets that were sitting on the shelf.
SAP’s goal was to reach, engage, and convert early-stage prospects we would never have reached with traditional advertising and promotion.
We spent a whole YEAR trying to convert our hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site into something the business could value. And for us, that was mostly leads.
The design of the site included dozens of links to product and solution pages. We promoted links to our e-store and our training courses. Users could chat with a sales rep. They could click to call our inbound sales team.
We tested dozens of approaches. None of them worked. After the first 12 months, the site had achieved more reach than we could have ever imagined. Engagement on the site was beyond our wildest dreams.
And despite hundreds of thousands of deeply engaged visitors, all consuming content on solution topics that directly related to the software solutions the company sold, we only had a few thousand clicks on product pages.
We had about two dozen “clicks to call” with our sales team. Total. After a whole year.
We did show a positive ROI through conversion of online training courses, but that was more a function of our low-cost structure. The revenue barely scratched the surface.
Redesign to focus on subscribers
After scratching our heads, we decided to redesign the site. We wanted to make it more visual, more mobile friendly, and we wanted to provide stronger offers for subscription.
We modeled our pop-up after the one right here on the CMI blog using the Pippity Popup plug-in for WordPress. And we set up an account with MailChimp, which automatically pulled our articles into a branded template for daily newsletter distribution.
The solution was simple, elegant, and relatively inexpensive. But would it produce results?
It didn’t take long. After just one month, hundreds of subscribers signed up. We emailed the subscribers with a few harder offers like event invitations, e-books, other pieces of thought leadership, and even our hard-sell “click to speak to a sales rep.”
We didn’t expect anyone to convert until we had built an audience of thousands of subscribers.
But the numbers proved us wrong. The results were small to start, but the subscribers were 10 times more likely to convert to a lead. And like at most B2B companies, leads had value we could quantify.
We were getting campaign registrations on white-paper landing pages. We were getting event registrations. We even sent our subscribers to paid search landing pages. The value of each visitor could be quantified based on the cost per click of our CPC-based paid search program.
Create an infographic to demonstrate your results
Now we were showing real results. Not just the vanity metrics our CMO was tired of seeing.
We were getting requests to present our results all over the organization, so we created an infographic template to highlight our key metrics.
For reach, we looked at visitors, page views, and traffic from unbranded (early-stage) search.
For engagement, we measured the time on site (averaging over five minutes), bounce rate, pages per visit, social shares, and traffic from (unpaid) organic and social traffic. For us, engagement was a measure of the baseline “health” of the content and the experience of the platform.
For conversion, we started by trying to measure clicks to the e-commerce platform (e-store), clicks to call/chat, and visits to solution pages, but we ended up focusing on subscriptions.
We knew that visitors didn’t convert. But subscribers did convert — by a factor of 10 to 1.
Subscriptions allow you to better optimize your site
One more thing we learned about subscriptions: It is the best lever to test optimizations.
If you want to change the design of your site, test the impact on subscriptions. If you want to invest in one type of content over another, test the impact on conversions. You want to see if the changes keep your engagement steady but increase subscribers. We found subscriptions were a great tool to figure out how to build a digital experience that is great for your reader and effective for your business.
Tips for delivering value from your content marketing with subscribers
Here is what we learned:
Set clear goals and business objectives up front. Creating a blog is not a goal. Publishing content is not a goal. Getting traffic is not a goal. Serving your customers and driving value for your business is a goal. Subscribers can help you get there.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Buyers are unlikely to go from an early-stage search to ready-to-buy right away. Resist the temptation to sell too early. Earn your audience’s trust by delivering great content consistently. Create content your buyers want and then get your readers to opt in to the content.
Focus on subscribers as the road to content marketing value. Determine the conversion path your visitors make. Segment subscribers in your reporting and measure their conversion or goal completion rate.
Test common design elements, content types, and frequency to optimize your site for conversion.
What do you think? Easy right? Please let me know what you think or ask your questions in the comments.
Want to understand and measure what is working with your content? View the Content Marketing Institute webinar, How to Be a Jedi Master of Content. The transcript and slides also are available.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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