I received an enewsletter from the terrific team at The Sales Lion, a new blog post was live on their site. But this is that weird week with just a few days before 2015 hits and I had some busyness to wrap before I could go off to ring in the new year without thinking of more things to add to my to do list so I didn’t click on it.
I did go to LinkedIn – check, one more thing off my list – and I saw an update about the same post. But today I am determined to stay on course so I resisted and didn’t click over to read it, despite the compelling promise delivered by the headline.
Next LinkedIn emailed me an alert about the new post. Yet, I still couldn’t go read it. No shiny object syndrome today, I will complete all of my to dos!
Last on my list, wrapping up a blog post. But as I started digging into it, I find I am still thinking about the post that I resisted all day.
Specifically I am thinking about how many times we are exposed to content, yet how marketing only measures the one that gets the credit for our reader clicking over to our site.
All those other exposures to the content assisted the click. Those “assists” are important. Really important. And they are difficult to measure, if not impossible, so we need to assume that they play a role in our content marketing.
I am sure there’s some appropriate sports analogy here, but believe me you don’t want one from me. I was on a football team once, basketball too, but still, I’ll spare you a bad effort to create one. (If you have one that fits about the value of assists I shall credit you and insert it here).
Even if you, like me, can’t find the sports analogy, it’s clear that there is great value in assists. And when it comes to marketing, they can be hard to measure.
So what do we do about it?
• We can devise tricky ways to measure a correlation to an assist. We can measure performance of content that had potential multiple exposures to a certain segment of our audience against those with limited potential exposure to that one segment.
• Or, we can just assume an assist in a large percentage of our marketing. If you are a content scorer, then you should factor in that the assists are hard at work for you.
But likely your content is carefully seeded in all relevant channels so you only have content that has the potential for multiple assists. And that is what I think the point is. When you are measuring your ROI, don’t overlook factoring in a possibly unmeasurable set of assists.
This is important to making sure that you don’t let data limit you. Look, I love data and if your audience data says they are not on SlideShare, I would layer in some common sense tempered with the reality of your resources before taking the final decision of whether to invest any resources in that channel. Who knows, maybe SlideShare is your best assist, even if you don’t have the resources to prove it.
I can’t believe I am advocating acting on something unmeasurable but I guess that is just what I am doing. Now I am trying to figure out what it looks like to do this and where I can capture the value of the effort. I’ll let you know if I have an aha moment, and let me know if you figure it out.
By Monica Bussolati
@bussolati
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Content Marketing tools are plentiful. And plenty confusing. So many, so much techspeak. So, to help keep our team and clients in the know we created this listing of tools grouped by category. We are finding it really helpful, you might too.
