Isaiah Walker will be speaking on Content Promotion at the Engage Conference, which will take place March 9, 2017 in Portland. For more information, or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’m an Oregon native, and have spent my adult life in the Portland area. Since graduating college I’ve been lucky enough to work in Marketing…which is what I studied, and still have passion for. I’ve been lucky enough to work in Product Marketing, Sales Development, Vertical Management and Program Management. Currently my role is Principal of Demand Generation at Puppet where I lead a team responsible for all campaigns, programs & events.
2) How can one determine the ROI of a piece of created content?
ROI on content can be squishy…and it really depends on what ROI means to you. Monitoring clicks, opens, shares, etc. can always be a quick indicator, but success there depends on the audience/database you targeted. Knowing your market averages for key metrics can be used as a baseline, but using that too depends on the maturity of your marketing activities, brand awareness, product, etc. Early metrics around CPL can give you ROI from a budget amount, and if you just measure ROI from budget perspective you’ll want longer term reporting on how well your content contributed to sales aligned leads or even closed business.
Well now that I totally muddied the water there, bottom line I’d say you should try to get to a place where you can report on normalized CPL on all activities, as well as reporting that shows what pieces of content are influencing leads sent over to the Sales team. From there, tracking how well your content is being opened by your own database, and shared socially can give you some of that harder anecdotal ROI.
3) How can one project whether a content topic will resonate with the targeted audience?
I’d say it’s all about your homework on this one. Making sure you truly understand your audience and what they care about is key with content success. Working with internal stakeholders on the personas you should be targeting, and what they care about should drive content topics. It’s also common to get ideas around this in industry news and/or broadly read industry surveys, etc. Once you’ve fully vetted audience and content topics, monitoring social media shares could be a quick indicator as to how well topics are being received.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.